Age 34 here. A child of the '80s, a teenager of the '90s.
I experienced home videogaming before, during, and after the great crash of 1983. I started with an Odyssey 2. Then a ColecoVision. Never had an Atari, but had friends who did.
I grew up within walking distance of a mall. With an honest-to-goodness '80s arcade attached to it. I spent many happy hours there, in the company of my father. I was the 5-year-old, standing on a box to reach the controls, who could beat Black Tiger and Space Harrier. My father and I beat Golden Axe together more times than I can count.
Then came Nintendo. What a revelation. I still remember the Christmas when I received that grey box, reading the Super Mario Bros. manual and thinking "what is this, what is this game that will now be in my home, what, just what." And I still remember the first time I saw a Nintendo commercial. It was for Legend of Zelda, and was in retrospect very weird - it had a lot of shots of a vaguely just-escaped-from-the-nuthouse guy in all black on a black screen, going "Zelda? Zelda? Zelda?" over and over. With videos of gameplay that I had no understanding of (because I'd never seen a pseudo-top-down perspective before). But it was so fascinating. And when the game arrived - a game made of GOLD - it did not disappoint.
Through the years, I graduated from NES to Game Boy to SNES. Then came the N64/PS divide, and I took the PS route to follow two of my favorite brands: Castlevania and Final Fantasy. Playing SotN and FFVII on the PS felt like rediscovering the joy and amazingness of gaming all over again.
On the complementary track was computer gaming. My first computer was a Commodore 64. It's in my old basement. It still works. After all these years. I still have a literal shoebox of floppy (ACTUALLY floppy) discs for it. So many memories. The Gold Box SSI games. The Ultima games. Might and Magic. Bard's Tale. The Master of Magic (which music I still play on Youtube when I need to facilitate some deep thinking - all hail the musical mastery of Rob Hubbard). So much greatness.
Through it all, my dad was alongside me, playing the same games. Oftentimes playing them to greater completion than I did. He beat Dragon Warrior II, a game I had written off as impossible thanks to its punishing difficulty, and a feat that I still maintain as a moment of greatness in gaming. He played countless hours of Final Fantasy Tactics. And Gladius. The Shin Megami Tensei games. We shared that love of gaming for many, many years.
My dad passed away of illness in September 2009. He was 60 years young. It should not have been his time. But it was his time, and out of everyone around us, he finally accepted it. Which helped me accept it too.
I keep all his saved games.
He never got to play Dominion, but he would have been an expert at it.
...this got away from me a bit.