Do you have any parents or older family into video games?

[RanmyakuIchi's iconRanmyakuIchi]

Does anyone have older family relatives into games, or who maybe influenced your taste? My Dad was big into the NES, SNES, and GEN/MD when I was a kid, and big into Beat Em Ups. He can still 1CC Final Fight arcade on command at 62.

 

[ciro64]

My mom has a college friend who used to speedrun Banjo Kazooie. Not the type that would go looking on internet for strats or submiting runs on leaderboards but still.

Also my dad was the one who introduced me to gaming, he used to have a NES, SNES and a Genesis at some point and by the time I was a minimally functioning child we had a N64 at home. I used to watch him play when I was little, and to this day I make fun of him for having to resort to Game Shark to beat Gruntilda.

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

Both my parents are gamers, and they introduced me to gaming when i was a toddler.

 

[Cu-Neo]

My brother used to introduce me to things like Fallout, The elder scrolls and GTA but now I am the only one in my family tree that always plays something to a "deep" level and search info about what I am playing. The rest of my family sees gaming as something for 10 years old kids.

 

[KirboDeku]

Both of my parents were born well before videogames were a thing. My father got my family a Wii though when I was a kid, still have it. He would sometimes try to play with me and my brother, there is a stage he made in Brawl I remember.

 

[MasterEn]

no, not really. my mom likes tetris. my aunt liked animal crossing and pokemon and yoshi. my sister likes harvest moon, gears of war, kirby, pokemon and a bit of mario and zelda. none of them would probably have ever played a video game if i didn't play them.

 

[MingyantaR]

Thank god I do, my dad loved going to arcades a lot, we had a ps1, ps2, and xbox 360 when I was a kid, I still can't beat him in games like kof or street fighter, one of my most cherised memories is when I came home from school and he gifted me god of war 2, we played until midnight that day.

 

[jon2]

My mom was a Galaga addict while one of my aunts is a Lode Runner and Bomberman addict.

Both of them were the ones to show my young mind what "gaming all night" meant back then

 

[ExeExe]

My older sister was the one that introduced me to the hobby, all the way back to when I was three years old, trying out tetris on the grey brick gameboy. While I went on to become way more hardcore than her, she still kept being a gamer... all the way until financial difficulties hit us all when Covid came, and she chose to sell all her consoles in order to get funds to keep buying weed. The act made her so depressed that she's fallen out of gaming ever since, even though she could get back into it now.

She's sworn off the weed forever for almost a year though, so I'm going to buy one of those retro handheld consoles, get proper SD cards and a custom OS all set up, load it up with all her old favourites, even get her some cute grips for the analogues cause she's still a womanchild, and give it to her on her birthday. Hopefully it will get her back on track.

Then likely get one for me too, cause I've been eyeing that scene for a long while, and I already got a curated library of retro games anyway.

My mother also used to play arcade games with my dad back when they were dating, and the reason my sister got both a nes and a snes in the first place, was exactly because my mother wanted to use them to keep on playing space invaders. Nowadays, she mostly sticks to phone games, but she supports my gaming endavours to this day.

 

[jakecr]

Oh I wish, my parents are from the era where being a gamer was a bad word and to them it meant wasting your life or being a loser or something. I can't blame them since when videogames started to become mainstream they were already adults and thus to them it was kiddy stuff.

I can't imagine how different it must be for kids and young adults today with Gen-X or Millennial parents that grew up with videogames and arcades or just grew up in an era where videogames are mainstream and not something you would get bullied for lol.

Even at an old age I still want my mom to become a gamer and enjoy and accept videogames, I've introduced her to some simple casual puzzle games and she actually likes them! now I just need to find some other casual games and genres she might like but it's kinda hard because I'm not into casual games at all ?

 

[RanmyakuIchi's iconRanmyakuIchi]

Oh I wish, my parents are from the era where being a gamer was a bad word and to them it meant wasting your life or being a loser or something. I can't blame them since when videogames started to become mainstream they were already adults and thus to them it was kiddy stuff.

I can't imagine how different it must be for kids and young adults today with Gen-X or Millennial parents that grew up with videogames and arcades or just grew up in an era where videogames are mainstream and not something you would get bullied for lol.

Even at an old age I still want my mom to become a gamer and enjoy and accept videogames, I've introduced her to some simple casual puzzle games and she actually likes them! now I just need to find some other casual games and genres she might like but it's kinda hard because I'm not into casual games at all ?

Yeah, my Dad was already in his late 30s when he got me into gaming back in the 90s, but he had all sorts of stories from how his own parents and siblings gave him shit for liking games. His Mom would jump his crap for hooking up an Atari 2600 to the family TV cause a lot of people back then thought game consoles would break your TV.

 

[jakecr]

Yeah, my Dad was already in his late 30s when he got me into gaming back in the 90s, but he had all sorts of stories from how his own parents and siblings gave him shit for liking games. His Mom would jump his crap for hooking up an Atari 2600 to the family TV cause a lot of people back then thought game consoles would break your TV.

Oof that sounds very familiar, I distinctly remember my dad being angry at me for hooking up a friend's NES to his TV thinking it was going to damage it or something especially since it was RF so it used the same connector as the antenna and he didn't like that I disconnected it for the NES, it's kinda endearing now how technologically "innocent" some people were back then, I hated how my dad was as a kid (especially because my friend had cool hip parents that allowed him to play videogames and own consoles) but now as an adult living in this technology-filled era it all seems so distant and silly and nostalgic and I actually understand why they were that way, especially now that I see all of those iPad and Fortnite kids.

 

[Prism_Red]

Oh hell yeah definitely, I owed it all to my uncle and cousin.
Uncle is more like mentor to me, practically showed how to play RPG and survival horror since I was 3. He would ask where do I want to go, what action to do, which item/spell/skill to use, and tells me why it work or doesn't work. Yeah to a 3 year old.

My second cousin used to live across the street, he only had NES and Genesis, he like beat 'em ups so that's the kind of games we usually play. For about 2 years, every week we often try to finish TMNT on NES, slowly working out the map and learning how to cheese the bosses, I'm proud to say we finally beat the game, wore it like a badge of honor to this day. If anyone ask me what's one of my proudest achievement in life, one of 'em would be to beat the notoriously hard TMNT on NES when I was 5.

It may sound like nothing but they both mold the way how I approach games in general.

 

[ZombieFish]

My dad introduced me to Secret Agent and Commander Keen on his old IBM, but it was only a novelty to him and he never played after that. My uncle who works in tech though, he introduced me to Quake 2 and Duke Nukem, and always wanted to try out the next big thing. Proper nerd. He was suuuuper into the Doom reboot.

 

[MegaHiro91]

No. I envy anyone who has gamer parents, or uncles or aunts or cousins or whatever.

As a kid only me and my brother (and later our sister) played videogames. My dad was always nonchalant about it, having never touched a controller to my knowledge.
My mom - apart from when I got my PS1 where she would play Spyro the Dragon with me, as I couldn't understand the dragons since the game was in English - has since then actively rejected the medium, going as far as to try and pry me away from it until I turned 18, at which point she gave up but swore she wouldn't give me any more games for birthdays or christmas.

To be fair, I DID let videogames ruin my life - seeing as that was what kept me distracted from schoolwork all throughout middle school - and it's like she has has an inate distain for it since with a few exceptions. I did get her to actively watch me as I played through Beyond Two Souls, likely because it was so much like a TV series she could distance herself from the fact it was a game, and on a few other instances.
But she is also the one who, when I played Chrono Trigger as a kid on my modded PS1, would peak into the livingroom and ask me to turn the volume down, because the repetitious 16-bit soundtrack gave her a headache, which quickly killed my mood to even keep playing.

I did manage to get my cousin's daughters to play Nintendo when they were kids, though now that they are both adults they have steered 100% away from it. My other cousin's oldest son (11) is currently an avid gamer with his PS5 if that counts for anything.

But as for my closest family, it is just me and my siblings. Heck, my mom's new husband actively hates technology, unless it is power tools. But he hates many things anyway, and is always loud about it...

PS. I do have one of her exes to thank for showing me Syberia. I was around 15, and thought it was weird seeing an adult play PC games, since I was used to "videogames being a child thing".

 

[bjork]

My dad probably plays as much as I do, if not more. He hasn't upgraded to a PS5 yet but has had every other playstation, and is currently chewing through PS4 stuff. Recently he finished Mafia and is working on Mad Max now. His favorite game is Rising Zan on PS1.
My mom was perhaps the best light gun player I've ever seen, I watched her beat Virtua Cop like it was nothing.

 

[VampireLord1024VampireLord1024's icon]

My cousin who's a couple years older than me plays video games, but he does easily get mad at them sometimes and usually cusses at the games lol.

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

Elder siblings yes but more of a casual really

They play story oriented games but aren't the sort of person to get invested into a video game story usually seeing games not as a form of art...they do play harvest moon more than me or yu-gi and few other games like sniper elite we both beaten mafia but they usually would google the solution while I like to solve puzzles myself.

Oh and they played bully but I haven't

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Not anymore.

My dad played Nintendo, SEGA and PC games.

 

[Tonberry]

My aunt introduced me to video games. If I remember correctly, her favorites are Zelda and Resident Evil but my main gaming memory of her is 3 year old me ”playing” (she controlled it) Megaman 1 on her NES.

 

[DunkeyKong]

My dad is a huge Metal Gear Solid fan, no wonder I like stealth games so much. Then there's my…4 uncle's? I'm not sure about the 3 but they did play some games, the other one though is still active in buying and playing games (They did mentioned that they've been playing since the 5th gen and the first Gameboy era, maybe even older)

Here's his collection (the recent one)

 

[RedNin3]

Pops was into it when I was young and we had a PS1.
Booze and drugs became more fun over time sadly.

 

[Taukyrie]

My older brother was the one who got me into games, and I have a kind of cute story behind it actually.

While I did occasionally play with him, I didn't really fully start playing until the one day when I was in 4th grade, we went to a restaurant, I drew him a picture based on one of the games he was playing a lot at the time, being Smash Bros Brawl. When we came home after dinner, he showed me how to play the game and that was where it all started for me.

 

[thanonyx]

I only have 2 relatives that still play video games.

My aunt on my Mom's side and a cousin on my Dad's side.

 

[Viviana Santos]

My father and one of my uncles are big gaming fans.