A twit on Twitter wrote that playing a “first person shooter game past 30 ain’t a pleasant experience.” That was in reference to FortNite, which is a third-person shooter and not a first-person shooter. I responded that I’m 52-years-old, still using my Quake II mouse pad from 1997 to play video games and to get off my virtual lawn. That was one of my most popular tweets ever. Let’s talk about my 25-year-old Quake II mouse pad on my desk.
Quake II
When Quake II came out in November 1997, I bought the game and the mouse pad at the same time. My roommates and I spent many nights playing Quake II. I later bought a 3Dfx Voodoo Rush 2D/3D video card that became a game changer for everyone.
Before the Voodoo Rush, I had the standard video cards: CGA, EGA, VGA, and Super VGA. The early cards varied from 16 colors at low resolution to 256 colors at high resolution. The Super VGA video card had 16 million colors at 800×600 or higher resolution.
The Voodoo Rush was a Super VGA video card. But it also supported Microsoft DirectX and OpenGL for hardware accelerated 3D graphics. Quake II on an OpenGL video card had colored lighting and faster frame rates.
When my roommates saw that, they rushed out (pun intended) to buy 3Dfx Voodoo 2 cards for their own PCs. That got me into building custom PCs for the last 25 years.
Quake II Mouse Pad
The Quake II mouse pad is still in good condition despite being 25 years old this year. The bottom corners rounded down and the middle flattened out from where I rest my wrist. The upper right corner had chipped away underneath and the top fabric peeled back.
Too Old To Play Video Games
Am I too old to play video games?
- I played my first video games when I was six years old when my father put a quarter into an Atari Pong arcade machine in 1976.
- I had the early pong and combat tank TV console games in the late 1970s.
- I had an Atari 2600, Commodore VIC-20, and Commodore 64 in the 1980s.
- I played Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat arcade games when I was at college in the early 1990s.
- I was a video game tester for 30 titles and a lead tester for ten titles at Atari (Infogrames) in my late 20s and early 30s.
- I played Quake 2 for 13 years, Age of Mythology for 10 years, and FortNite for the last two years.
- I’m writing a chess program in Python as a learning exercise.
Video games have been a major part of my life for over 50 years.
The best way to beat old age is to keep the brain active and learning new things. Playing or programming video games are a great way to do that. For all the young whipper snappers who think I’m too old to play video games, get off my virtual my lawn.