All those extra lives you don't have to earn. 50 yr old gamers forgot, and know more about 🎮 than any 20 yr old will hope to know when they turn 50.

Do any 20 yr old gamers know how to get extra men on Super Mario Bros for the NES?

Yes and we even still have some BBS you can dial up. All that is not the same experience at all though. There was a certain energy or wonder all around, everything seemed to be possible and your wildest dreams came true on a yearly basis. (until it finally all stumbled on VR) Computer games were used in game shows on TV. Teachers at school basically told the kids to show them what a PC was all about, bring your games, animations or other creations. The transition from written essays to word perfect, better printers yearly, first time printing graphics in text. Handing in schoolwork became a marvel at what was possible each time with new tech.

Then in university the internet slowly became alive. MUD, IRC, birth of IMDB, the internet oracle, playing Tron with 20 people in the Mac room. Ascii art, making your own software to make stereograms, first programmable robotics in the form of Lego mindstorms. Imagine bringing that to work today, yet that's what we did. I actually had done some research for it at university, basically had playing with Lego on my resume.

It was much much more than just the games with nostalgia glasses. Everything seems to be possible, if not this year, then next year. I'm amazed at all the skepticism VR gets nowadays, completely different mindset, pretty much the opposite to how it was in 80's and 90's.

Btw free was more of a joke cause of the rampant piracy which didn't seem to hamper all the innovation at all. I, ahem, didn't pay for games until I was 18 :/ My parents bought some MSX games when I was around 10, yet the rest was all copied. My dad used to bring PC games back from work, pretty ironic as he worked as a software developer himself (business solutions though). Which did mean we always had the latest PC at home. 'Sharing' games simply seemed the norm.

But sure, you can get all the great old games working again nowadays, emulated, remade, or played on vintage hardware with vintage displays. However we never looked back back then, always forward. New stuff was always better.

Thing with retro gaming is that it's a Nintendo only phenominum.  Kids who grew up with Gamecubes are running out to buy SNES and GC games they missed out on.  I suspect most of that has to do with characters appearing in Smash (For instance, it's cheaper to buy Megaman X Collection PS2 brand new and a cheap used PS2 than it is to buy the Gamecube version of Megaman X Collection used).  For comparison, I rarely see expensive Genesis games.  

 TL;DR

LOL, just messin with ya.  Thanks for sharing.

Good to know :).

...but because there are so many games are coming out, the number of games these 20 year old gamers are missing out on in the future is increasing exponentially

A 51 year old would have been around 12, not 6, when the Atari VCS was released, and even then, they weren't prevalent until the early 80s... Again, a 51 year old wasn't brought up on video gaming, they missed the boat...

Maybe they can appreciate it better as they spend the whole first 12 years of their live bored with nothing to do!
At work plenty people are older than me (I'm 42) and avid gamers. 90 definitely missed the boat though, my grandfather never understood the point of video games. He did get email working but that was about it. When I was playing Everquest in 2000 there were plenty people claiming to be in their 50's. And why not, enough time for mmorpg (and slow enough :p)

Perhaps now we're at the start of the VR revolution and kids growing up now will be right at home with it while us oldies get motion sick and need to take the thing off every 5 minutes to check for any burglers or fires :p

Oops! was roughly using by own age to determine the age and ignored to add the difference.  Anyhow to say that it was not as prevalent until the early 80's is a decent argument. Nonetheless there would have been some early adopters who were heavily into the 2600 during the mid/late 70's I would imagine.

But it's not a vocal minority or games like COD and Halo and Madden wouldn't be #1 in sales every time and causing every other genre to be turned into mindless arcade vs shooters with Michael Bay direction.

These sorts of casual eye candy glamor games with no substance low risk AAA prioritized games are clearly the mainstream due to the response of the current generation and it has adversely affected genre diversity and creativity that older gamers fondly remember.

Who wants to spend 5 years making a game a paying writers and orchestras when you can just add a few more gun skins and a map to the flavor of the month shooter and it will still sell millions to an audience that cares for nothing but online competition and the number next to their e-penis?

Market behavior and the rise of companies like Activision and EA clearly show that today's generation of gamers is NOT being generalized by a vocal minority, they are the mainstream majority, and it's terrible.

We will likely never see things like Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Conquer's Bad Fur Day, etc ever again because of it

At least I can leave Link the Past and Ocarina of Time off this list because Nintendo has so far managed to resist folding to this audience and has stuck to their niche.

I was riding this assumption with the OP "50 year old gamers" argument although a 50 year old would have been closer to 10 in 1977; still young enough to have been considered having grown up with video games, but not "learned how to use a controller as I was learning to walk" young.

I'd even dial that 1977 year back a bit because there were home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey in the mid-70s, loosely coinciding with the onset of arcade games. 

The thing is, in the 70s, video games were more of a new fangled fad that sank by the early 80s thanks to Atari management and business decisions. 

I would argue that the first true gaming children's generation was the 2nd gen who grew up with the NES in the mid 80s. Nintendo's licensing and more importantly "quality seal" meant that there were actual standards for games on their platform, understanding full well where Atari went astray. 

This is coming from someone who was in high school during the end of the NES generation, right along the time the 3rd gen opened with the TG-16 and the Genesis, so I started gaming during the first generation as a small child with a Magnavox Odyssey 2000 and later an Atari 2600. The Odyssey was little more than a fancy, expensive gadget, but the Atari 2600 introduced the concept of sharing video game carts and gaming at home with friends as well as receiving video games as birthday and Christmas gifts. 

But I was a part of the consumer base that lead to the video game crash of 1983. I stopped requesting games for the Atari 2600 after Pac-Man and E.T. and there was a decent lull where I wasn't playing console games until after the NES debuted and I didn't actually own one until around 1987. At that point, it became a major hobby rather than just a new toy game.

So the NES generation was really when console video games hit their stride as more of a mainstream activity rather than a curiosity or a trend.

You can think of yourself as being a pioneer (generally, pioneers would be the ones who created the industry and the content rather than those who simply consumed it) for having started gaming in the early to mid 70s, but the reality is, the industry was far thinner than it was until the post NES/Nintendo generation.