Did adults in the 90's mostly play PC games or am I getting a skewed viewpoint from old videogame magazines?

[Deleted member 1659]

So I was looking through some old gaming magazines from the turn of the century and I noticed that the advertisements and writing style are all either aimed at kids - GamePro or teens/young adults - EGM, Game Players. But I was also reading through old issues of my grandfather's copies of Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer from the late 90's and noticed the writing style is a lot more dense and the design of the pages and magazines are much more adult friendly. The photos of the writers and columnists all show them as dressed in work clothes with some having grey hair and stuff. PC Games of that era were also very different - like the one copy of CGW I had had a cover story for upcoming flight simulators. In another issue, the big headline is the first review of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri which is a Civilization in space type of game.

I can only assume based this singular experience of reading old magazines that adults in the 90's gravitated towards PC games. Then there seems to be this shift in the late 90's where it skews more towards younger adults with games like Quake and Command and Conquer.

Am I wrong in this? For those who were adults at the time, maybe you can shed some light for me.

For the purposes of this thread: Adult is someone who has a full time career type job or was working towards a professional degree (Law, MBA, PhD, Medical etc.) at the time.

 

[JesseEwiak]

Adult "Gamers" largely played PC games.

Millions of Mom's and Dad's who would otherwise not play video games at all, fell into Mario Brothers or Zelda.

In addition, PC games were out of reach of non-adults until the mid-90's.

 

[Deleted member 10629]

PCs used to be owned mainly by people who used them for work. So it is natural that games were aimed towards them.

 

[Why would you do that?]

My mother played both PC games like Wolfenstein and console games like Zelda.

 

[Deleted member 1635]

I mean, they cost thousands of dollars. It wasn't really until the mid-to-late 90s that more affordable mass market PCs became available.

 

[Hayama Akito]

Depends on your country, in mine adults were at the Arcade.

Also yeah, pre-Windows 95 PC was a very expensive, command line based, most nerdy era.

 

[Chettlar]

For me it was definitely the case that many times adults already had computers, especially early on for more tech-y games. So games that could be installed on them were an easy sell. Getting the kids their own game box to play on the TV so they didn't take your computer was also an easy sell. I think companies knew this and advertised accordingly.

I mean even for me, as a kid, I got started on games by using old office computers to play Oregon Trail and kinda went from there.

 

[Deleted member 1659]

Adult "Gamers" largely played PC games.

Millions of Mom's and Dad's who would otherwise not play video games at all, fell into Mario Brothers or Zelda.

In addition, PC games were out of reach of non-adults until the mid-90's.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, I'm looking at a September 1993 copy of CGW right now. The cover story is the world premier of Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0. Also on the cover, 150 wargames surveyed. I'm assuming these games were unique to the PC at the time and never had console ports. It's not a knock against the games themselves but the way they're marketed and written about, I can't imagine it being for kids.

 

[Sprat]

Amiga from what I remember and before that c64.

This is excluded to my family and friends of the family in the local area. I didn't do much hanging around with adults when I was a kid

 

[TRS8088]

I was 18 in 1995 and all my nostalgia is PC gaming related, so maybe? I also didn't read many console mags. There was one PC-based magazine that used to write multi-page re-telling stories of their experiences playing games like Wing Commander and Test Drive III and other games that I would find absolutely fascinating. They were written like a story of the life of a character in the games. I can't for the life of me find that mag in the game magazine archive but I would love to know what it was. It was not CGW.

 

[Chiramii]

Depends on your country, in mine adults were at the Arcade.

Also yeah, pre-Windows 95 PC was a very expensive, command line based, most nerdy era.

Click to shrink...

Nothing like firing up DOS to play some Commander Keen or Jazz Jackrabbit after school!

 

[Stiler]

Back in those days the consoles were the "toys" for younger people whereas pc's were seen as more of a luxury item/for work and geared toward older people. That's not to say that younger people didn't have access to them, they did, but the average was skewed more toward adults on the pc gaming side.

 

[juxjuxjux]

An entire decade is a long time to put people into discrete categories. I'm sure there's folks out there that stuck to PC or console, but just like today, there were so many great games that came out on everything that people who had the capability were likely playing stuff on a bunch of different platforms. 1998 will forever be a magnificent year for games for that very reason.

 

[Deleted member 28962]

I know the OP is talking about IBM compatible PCs, but there were also console-like affordable PCs in the '80s to early '90s like the Commodore 64. I was blown away when I was a kid and went to my cousin's house and saw he had a Commodore 64 complete with printer.

In the early '90s my dad had a PC, but I only played one game on it because of how hard it was for me to setup everything to get games running. I didn't get an actual gaming PC until 1998.

Also yes, console magazines were cringe back then. I mostly stuck to NextGen magazine which covered both consoles and PCs and had better writing and actual journalism.

 

[modoversus]

So I was looking through some old gaming magazines from the turn of the century and I noticed that the advertisements and writing style are all either aimed at kids - GamePro or teens/young adults - EGM, Game Players. But I was also reading through old issues of my grandfather's copies of Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer from the late 90's and noticed the writing style is a lot more dense and the design of the pages and magazines are much more adult friendly. The photos of the writers and columnists all show them as dressed in work clothes with some having grey hair and stuff. PC Games of that era were also very different - like the one copy of CGW I had had a cover story for upcoming flight simulators. In another issue, the big headline is the first review of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri which is a Civilization in space type of game.

I can only assume based this singular experience of reading old magazines that adults in the 90's gravitated towards PC games. Then there seems to be this shift in the late 90's where it skews more towards younger adults with games like Quake and Command and Conquer.

Am I wrong in this? For those who were adults at the time, maybe you can shed some light for me.

For the purposes of this thread: Adult is someone who has a full time career type job or was working towards a professional degree (Law, MBA, PhD, Medical etc.) at the time.

Click to shrink...

Videogames and Computer Entertainment was like that too. That's why I liked that magazine so much back then. Created by adults, with well written content and a sharp design. I bought my first magazine before having a computer, so all their PC coverage was very intriguing, mostly strategy games, flight simulators and point and click adventure games, and most looked so much better than what was possible on the game consoles of the time. Eventually the magazine did not sell well, and the focus group of kids hated the pictures of the adult staff ("don't want game tips from gandpa" was a quote I have read somewhere), so it was split in two, a magazine for PC games and a maginze for console games with design to compete with Gamepro and EGM with more in your face humor and funny photoshops of the staff.

 

[Deleted member 1659]

I know the OP is talking about IBM compatible PCs, but there were also console-like affordable PCs in the '80s to early '90s like the Commodore 64. I was blown away when I was a kid and went to my cousin's house and saw he had a Commodore 64 complete with printer.

Also yes, console magazines were cringe back then. I mostly stuck to NextGen magazine which covered both consoles and PCs and had better writing and actual journalism.

Click to shrink...

Oh, I'm cool with discussing alternative PCs as well. I just assumed C64/Amiga/Apple II all fell under the umbrella of "computer" games.

 

[Stiler]

An entire decade is a long time to put people into discrete categories. I'm sure there's folks out there that stuck to PC or console, but just like today, there were so many great games that came out on everything that people who had the capability were likely playing stuff on a bunch of different platforms. 1998 will forever be a magnificent year for games for that very reason.

Click to shrink...

Man, that is my favorite year of gaming, Half Life, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2, Legend of Zelda: OOT, MGS, Thief, Myth 2, etc. It was a stacked year with, in retrospect, some of the best classic games.

 

[Jobbs]

When I was a kid I didn't know any adults who played video games except for my uncle -- Who played PC games like Wing Commander.

Incidentally, largely, it felt like there was a disconnect between kids and adults, and video games was a language adults just didn't speak or understand. If you handed an adult the controller to an NES or SNES game they'd probably hold it like it was an alien artifact and then say something about the TV making their eyes sore or that "this will ruin your vision" or will rot your brain or whatever. It sounds cliche, but that's what adults actually said in the 90s

 

[modoversus]

I just remembered that a friend used to bring computer game magazines from Europe during the late 80s and early 90s. Those did show kids on the ads, playing with their non-IBM PC computers, like the Commodore stuff or Atari, playing arcade like games. I always asumed that those type of computers were mostly for kids, but now I know they were for productivity as well.

 

[Fredrik]

Pretty much, simulators and strategy games, or nothing at all. Game consoles were aimed at kids and maybe young teenagers before 1995. I used to be ashamed about my gaming hobby, if people asked me what I did on my spare time I used to make something up, like fishing or hiking or whatever. Whenever someone found out I was gaming they would say "Aren't you getting a bit too old for that??".
After Playstation it all changed though. Thank you Sony!!

 

[Deleted member 17210]

PC gaming has traditionally skewed older than console gaming but there were plenty of non-PC gaming young adults in the '90s. I turned 20 in 1995 and many other university students were playing Genesis/SNES and later Playstation in addition to PC. Middle aged people at the time were less likely to be gamers. There's a big gap between the Boomers and Gen X; the latter grew up with video games.

 

[Deleted member 23046]

80´s and 90s were te golden age of micro-computing at home. It was costly but affordable for the middle-class.

 

[Penny Royal]

ITT several people are equating 'PC' with 'X86 device running Windows'

Adults in the 90s might have been playing on a Commodore Amiga or Atari ST, as well as older 8-bit PCs like the C64 as well as a Wintel device.

 

[5taquitos]

old issues of my grandfather's copies of Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer

Click to shrink...

 

[Zolbrod]

I knew very few adults who played video games back in the 90s, but a large percentage of even those that didn't were SUPER into Tetris.
Mostly on GB, but definitely on PC too.

Edit: And of course lots of people played Solitaire and Minesweeper etc.

 

[Zekes]

I didn't really know any adult women who played games but some adult men I knew played PC games, mainly shooters. Stuff like Unreal Tournament. My neighbour played some Nerf game I distinctly remember

 

[RedSwirl]

The barrier to entry to PC gaming was simply higher back then, and that era colors people's perceptions of the barrier to entry for PC gaming even today. I wouldn't say "all" or "most" adults played PC games back then -- it wasn't really mainstream, but there was a sense that PC gaming generally skewed to older audiences compared to console games, especially before around the mid or late 90's. Chances were, to be into PC gamin back then you had to already be someone with a profession or hobby that trended toward ownership of a relatively good desktop. The only kids back then who were really into PC gaming had relatives or close friends who fit that description.

A main difference though is back then, I don't think PC gaming had anything as mainstream or accessible as LoL, minecraft, or Roblox. Doom made some waves in the early 90's but I don't think anything else in that period on PC gained real mainstream attention. After that the only big one I can think of from around then was The Sims in 2000.

 

[gnomed]

Click to shrink...

LOL, reminder those kids that were born when the movie came out are old enough to drink now.

 

[ridaxan]

My dad and his friends predominantly played on PC. As a result I grew up gaming on PC and only started gaming on consoles in the early 2000's.

 

[Bastables]

So I was looking through some old gaming magazines from the turn of the century and I noticed that the advertisements and writing style are all either aimed at kids - GamePro or teens/young adults - EGM, Game Players. But I was also reading through old issues of my grandfather's copies of Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer from the late 90's and noticed the writing style is a lot more dense and the design of the pages and magazines are much more adult friendly. The photos of the writers and columnists all show them as dressed in work clothes with some having grey hair and stuff. PC Games of that era were also very different - like the one copy of CGW I had had a cover story for upcoming flight simulators. In another issue, the big headline is the first review of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri which is a Civilization in space type of game.

I can only assume based this singular experience of reading old magazines that adults in the 90's gravitated towards PC games. Then there seems to be this shift in the late 90's where it skews more towards younger adults with games like Quake and Command and Conquer.

Am I wrong in this? For those who were adults at the time, maybe you can shed some light for me.

For the purposes of this thread: Adult is someone who has a full time career type job or was working towards a professional degree (Law, MBA, PhD, Medical etc.) at the time.

Click to shrink...

That's pariticular time and place thing with CGW/US thing though, in the UK/Aus/NZ market magazines looking at Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST tended to be more aimed at "kids" young adults.

 

[345]

i feel like the PS1 was the only console to do a serious job of attracting adults in any great number in the 90s.

A main difference though is back then, I don't think PC gaming had anything as mainstream or accessible as LoL, minecraft, or Roblox. Doom made some waves in the early 90's but I don't think anything else in that period on PC gained real mainstream attention. After that the only big one I can think of from around then was The Sims in 2000.

Click to shrink...

simcity was itself pretty huge.

also creatures 2 was ubiquitous. supermarkets used to sell it at the register. (no idea why)

 

[lazygecko]

It's easy to tell that this was the demographic they had in mind when reading these magazines. I remember stuff like X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter ads being written with a cubicle worker in mind.

The home computer market for games was certainly much more diverse in the types of audiences it catered to during the 1980s and early 90s since it had grown mostly as a separate entity from the console market, where by the mid 80s it had adopted the toy-style marketing template strictly for young boys. This started changing toward the end of the 90s when the industry as a whole was getting more homogenized and that 13-30 male demographic became the global industry standard.

 

[Fredrik]

Click to shrink...

Lol XD
Remember the year 2000 insanity when we had to make sure our computers at work would keep on working? That was 19.8 years ago...

 

[Jarhab]

I think PC gamers were predominantly adults in the 90's, though I started when I was about 9 on my trusty 286.

 

[Deleted member 28962]

i feel like the PS1 was the only console to do a serious job of attracting adults in any great number in the 90s.

Click to shrink...

And girls. PS1 and GBC were when I started seeing more and more girls gaming.

 

[Reinhard]

I was in high school and college in the 90s and few older teenagers/young adults played video games ouside of arcade fighters until the Playstation came along, that pretty much changed everything. Nintendo (NES+SNES) was considered mostly for elementary/middle school kids and something you grew out of. Older teens/college age might have played PC but even that seemed rare until the FPS shooter dawned with Doom/Quake. Although Gameboy+Tetris seemed popular with everyone back then.

 

[Zappy]

I was a teen in the UK in the 90s.

In my class at secondary school everyone who gamed did so on either a PC more commonly an Amiga. Nobody admitted at least to owning a console of any kind.

Gaming was mainly PC driven here back then. At least where I lived.

I had a PC and not an Amiga and grew up playing games like populous, power monger, wolfenstein, lemmings, Wing commander (my personal favourite) among others.

 

[345]

And girls. PS1 and GBC were when I started seeing more and more girls gaming.

Click to shrink...

yeah, also true in my experience. my sisters and mother were all really into the PS1 and GBC but haven't owned a console since.

 

[Deleted member 1659]

Click to shrink...

Glad someone here caught that subtle joke. My grandfather was actually long dead by the 90's. I was just browsing the old PDFs of the magazines on the internet. I'm 32 years old.

 

[weekev]

Yeah, I'm looking at a September 1993 copy of CGW right now. The cover story is the world premier of Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0. Also on the cover, 150 wargames surveyed. I'm assuming these games were unique to the PC at the time and never had console ports. It's not a knock against the games themselves but the way they're marketed and written about, I can't imagine it being for kids.

Click to shrink...

Flight Simulator was an absolute beast. That and SIM City owned PC for a good few years.

 

[Crayon]

Games were kids toys. The office is private.

 

[Fredrik]

ITT several people are equating 'PC' with 'X86 device running Windows'

Adults in the 90s might have been playing on a Commodore Amiga or Atari ST, as well as older 8-bit PCs like the C64 as well as a Wintel device.

Click to shrink...

At least in Sweden that was mostly in the 80s to early 90s. I'm a Commodore guy and I remember being so jelaous at Wingcommander and the VGA versions of Sierra adventures on PC.

 

[maneauleau]

I don't know in the US but in Europe in the 80's lot of kids started playing games with computers (Amstrad, Comodore , Spectrum etc. and then later Amiga, Atari). We all asked for a computer for Christmas and they were expensive but our parents all bought one because computers at that time were really new and booming and it was thought that it could help with studying and with being smarter. At that time I never used the computer for studying ... only for playing and then after the logical move was the PC.

In Europe at that time it was the consoles that were the outliers. And I feel like they only really took off at least in popularity with SNES and Megadrive. NES and Master System were popular but definitely not mainstream

 

[skeezx]

anecdotally speaking as a 90s kid, does seem PC skewed to the ~25 and older crowd until the later 90s. wasn't a stark divide or anything but it was there

my introduction to DOOM was, bizarrely, through my uncle... who probably couldn't make it past the first goomba in Super Mario Bros. like imagine the most "non gamer" person you know, that was him

 

[Waaghals]

I didn't really know any adult women who played games but some adult men I knew played PC games, mainly shooters. Stuff like Unreal Tournament. My neighbour played some Nerf game I distinctly remember

Click to shrink...

Nerf Arena Blast!

essentially a sanitized unreal tournament.

 

[Deleted member 1659]

So here's a question: What happened to those olders gamers and the flight sim/space sim genre? Did those people die or stop gaming? Did the increasing production values in video games make sims more and more expensive to produce?

 

[Spence]

Amiga and Atari was big before the PC boom, I think PC gaming started growing with the advent of 486. Myself growing up it was C64 > Amiga > PC, couple of friends had a NES but Amiga was so much more.

 

[Kyuuji]

Nothing like firing up DOS to play some Commander Keen or Jazz Jackrabbit after school!

Click to shrink...

 

[skeezx]

So here's a question: What happened to those olders gamers and the flight sim/space sim genre? Did those people die or stop gaming? Did the increasing production values in video games make sims more and more expensive to produce?

Click to shrink...

my 76 year old boss talks about those games all the time. he seems to think they're just a curio from the 90s like AOL or something

guess it's no different from grandmas and soccer moms playing wii sports or whatever, at some point they just put it down and go on with their lives

 

[BAW]

PC gaming in the 90s was a drastically different and wild time. If the 80s can be compared to the first steps of human civilization when it comes to gaming, the 90s was something like the Wild West.

Apart from the genres prominent today, there were LOADS of:

point-n-click adventure games
strategy games
god games
hybrid strategy/god/building games
business/management/tycoon games
mech/tank/battle games
chess/board/card/puzzle games
flight simulators
other simulation games (ANY kind of simulation)
western RPGs

Clunkiness was the rule rather than the exception and especially for that last category you had to go through something like 2 tomes of rules before you had any idea of what the hell you were doing. And that was provided your PC did not give you the blue screen of death every 10 minutes, you had hours to spend to get your sound card working and you had the knowledge to do a proper memory configuration before starting a DOS game.

An old person (like yours truly) talking about PC gaming in the 90s is like listening to a veteran recount his experiences in Nam.

So yeah, no wonder the young ones stuck to consoles, not only were they much cheaper, their games were also way more accessible and designed to be instantly fun.