Have you ever given up playing video games?

[StanJr]

you seem to have time to post on the interweb, senior sky....

 

Yes, I have experienced a dry spell, but not really voluntarily. When I left home and started college all I had was my NES and no time to play it. I remember beating Dragon Warrior for the first time ever that summer. Then the partying started, a school got intense. I ended up taking about two years off from gaming. Then I got a hot girlfriend who was into games, and she had an N64, so I started to pick it back up, and bought a PSone, and its been nutty from there! Weee.

[moycon]

Probably not.... Not intentionally anyways.

I have gone without playing the console games for sure, usually because I was hooked on a PC game (Diablo2,Guild Wars) and I'm always loading up those damn web games like Bejewled 2 or Zuma. So I doubt I ever just quit altogether.

[liquid_sky]

Yes, but I am also on the clock whilst I do it.

[Malc74]

I stopped playing games for a while after I left university and moved away from home. It's weird, but I didn't really think about it all that much at the time, although I'm pretty sure I'd have serious withdrawal symptoms if I had to do it now. It was probably about 18 months before I finally bought a laptop and got back into PC gaming and emulation. Actual collecting in earnest only started after I emigrated to Canada and finally settled down.

[davepesc]

I play almost every day, but I've also gone weeks without touching a game.

 

"Giving up" to me means a conscious decision not to play, even though you may want to and I don't think I've ever done that. (Unless you count those nights I force myself to go to sleep bacause I'm on my third day of four-hours sleep!)

[jpfalcon2003]

May take a break from time to time, but always go back. I have too many systems to keep me busy with and tons of games.

[Rogmeister]

I went from Pong to the 2600 to the 5200 to the 7800. After awhile with that one, I just got interested in other things and I put it away...for about 5 years. Then a friend of mine told me Big Lots had games for it for $1 each. I bought several and then started reading up and decided to get one of the newer machines...settling on a Super Nintendo. And I've never stopped gaming since for more than a few months at a time.

[Math You]

I gave up playing games after selling my ST computer many years ago. I then got back into it after buying a PC and playing on some of the Atari and Commodore emulators.

 

I have to admit, that when I first played some of the Atari 2600 games, I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about, though I found myself coming back to them and eventually bought a 2600 console.

 

I only play on it for an hour or two a week as the 'never ending' gameplay on some games (Yar's Revenge?) can get repetitive, but who cares when you're only paying £2 or £3 for a used game on eBay

Edited March 6, 2007 by MRB

[LYNXGUY]

I gave up playing games after selling my ST computer 12 years ago. I then got back into it after buying a PC and playing on some of the Atari emulators.

 

I also bought an ATARI 800 from EBAY and I am having a ball.

[kb9snl]

I'd love to play more, but then I got married,bought a house, and we had a baby....I ended up doing things like selling my NES collection to pay the downpayment on the house....but the Atari 2600 collection remains (mostly) untouched by the eBay selling bug I've gotten....

[Kurt_Woloch]

The closest thing to "giving it up" I can remember was in 1991. Up to then, I constantly tried to get new games and play them, from handhelds in 1980 to the Amiga 500. But in 1991, I was in an Amiga club. I joined there because I thought of it as a place for Amiga users to get together. Sadly, there were fights between the club leaders because each one had different goals in mind. When I first went there, it was about 6 months after I got out of school, and I was still regularly meeting up privately with other Amiga users I knew from school. But that changed with the club. Some of them visited the club too once or twice, but I sort of gave up the relationship in favor of the club. In the club we had access to nearly all the new software that came out, but pretty much of that was crap too. I remember playing "Burger Man", a badly done clone of "BurgerTime" for a pretty long time until I got to a point where it was impossible to make another level, though I don't really remember. So basically, I had "it all" twice a week for 3 1/2 hours at least. Usually I was the one to stay there the longest because I volunteered of looking after the club a little. But eventually I got sick of the club when the "ultimate" leader declared "There are no rules. If I need money, I take it off the club budget". You see, he ultimately was in there only for the money and tried to sell as many Amiga hardware pieces and also illegal copies of software, which he sold by as a "subscription" (like 40 disks a month for $60 - there were multiple plans). In order to do that, he really wanted to prevent the users that came there from exchanging adresses and meeting elsewhere, and he also said that in his mind, every club member visiting the club should order something (a piece of hardware or some illegal copies of software). Well, in October 1991 I met up with a member of a band I wanted to play in, but unfortunately the rehearsals were on the same day of week as one of the club opening days, so I decided to leave the club. After leaving the club, I had become rather fed up of all the Amiga games I've seen there, and also it got much harder to get new games (other than buying them) because my bonds to my private Amiga friends weren't very strong anymore. Out of this reason, I only played very rarely anymore. The gaming lived up somewhat in 1998, when the Internet came along and I discovered MAME. Also several people were throwing out their old 5 1/4" disks for the PC and the C-64, and I picked up some of them which left me with a heap of new games to discover. And with the Internet, that heap wasn't determined to diminish. Still, after I was through with all the disks, gaming was reduced to about 90 hours a year because I was busy with other things, like programming a Karaoke CD+G authoring system. Only last year I got into gaming again heavily when I found out that Karaoke wasn't that much fun anymore.

[twatkins]

I have quit playing for several streches over time. Usually because I realize how much time I feel I "Wasted" playing them. I usually go back to playing when I realize that im gonna "waste" the time anyway but i usually try to limit how much I play.

 

My latest bout has been because of EQ (computer based MMORPG if you have been under a rock) after I started playing 3 accounts at the same time for 8 hours a day...

 

now i just play a little here and there and the classics are perfect for this.

[classicgamingguy]

I usually play each and every single day, either the PC gaming machine I have or the Atari 2600 I have set up near the PC. All I have to do is flip the chair a little and I'm at my other gaming machine. But seriously, I am not playing as much as I used to. I'm way too busy. Here's my busy story, and about the new "arrival" that's coming in two weeks.

 

When my wife was at a conference in Seattle, I had plenty of time to do "nothing" as it were, so the video games got a good workout. One night, she called me after flying in to North Carolina as a stopover at her sister's house. She informed me that a neighbor of her sister's has a horse for free...and that his name is Indian Spirit, or Indy for short.

 

Flash forward a few weeks since then, my time has been soley occupied by Indy arriving in the middle of May. We are converting part of our 1-acre property for him, and bracing ourselves with the expected expenses to follow. I lie a little about that, we're already expending quite a bit of money on him before he's even arrived (again, expected).

 

Attempting to build a stable for him, raking the lawn over and over, moving things around, waiting for a corral to arrive, buying hay and pellets, stable bedding, combs, tack, harness, buckets, pitchforks, and everything else "horse related" is taking my gaming time to near nil at the moment. However, I still manage to do a few sessions of gaming time either late at night or early morning with a cup of joe. The Atari 2600 is PERFECT for short gaming sessions, unlike Titans Quest which can be a major time consumer.

 

Now before everyone thinks it was a rash decision to get a horse, my wife and I have been talking about it since we bought our little house over three years ago. We have seriously considered it for a few years, and now is the opportune time to get a lifelong companion (since they can live over 30 years). Gaming will still be a part of my life, but not as much as it once was.

 

-Steve