Bump This Thread In 2054

[VectorGamer]

A fortune teller told me in the mid 80s that I would live to be 86 years old. So, I should still be alive in 2054 to come back and bump this thread.

 

What do you envision the world of classic gaming to be 40 years from now?

 

Will Funspot still be holding their annual arcade tournament?

 

Will their still be a Classic Gaming Expo?

 

Will AtariAge live on? Does Albert have a plan in place in the event he's walking down the sidewalk one day and is trampled to death by an elephant?

 

Do you see yourself still playing Atari, ColecoVision, NES et al into your 70s and 80s?

 

Will the the homebrew scene for the ColecoVision, Atari and Vectrex die off or will there be another generation of programmers for these systems? Will homebrewing die off entirely or will it be strong for what we know now as the modern generation of consoles?

 

There are many questions that could be asked and we won't know until we live through it. By 2054 maybe they'll call people that play Atari, NES and ColecoVision "antique gamers." Some have predicted by the end of the decade that Funspot will no longer be hosting their annual arcade tournament due to declining interest. Then you have to wonder if there will be any interest in future generations to repair arcade games and consoles or will it be strictly emulation.

 

Time's yours...

 

 

[fiddlepaddle]

Let's see...

 

That's exactly 99 years after the invention of the flux capacitor, which requires you reach 88 for activation, leaving 11 generations.

 

So we'll have a choice of playing either the PS15 or the Xbox 12.

 

Oh, the Atari Flashback 15 will be announced containing an even larger subset of 2600 games.

[NinjaWarrior]

Don't remind me of getting old

 

I will still play

[karokoenig]

What would interest me most is if any original hardware will still work on that day. I mean the real one, not any repro systems.

[+Random Terrain]

Nuclear war will start in 2015, so we'll either be dead or without the Internet.

[+Ransom]

It's certainly possible the original hardware will work (with replacement of capacitors, etc. as needed). There are plenty of tube radios from the 20s that work fine these days, for example, and I think microcomputers will be easier to keep running.

[CatPix]

Maybe.

 

I remember reading that tube form the early 20's, the CSF - Télégraphie Militaire (so, Military-grade tubes) had a life expectancy of little more than 100 hours. By the late 20's early 30's, it was way better.

 

We obviously have no data for the durability of chips getting 70 years old... but we see here and there console getting faulty TIA, faulty RAM, faulty sound chip.

It's hard to predict what will happen.

 

No homebrew games were made for the channel F. Up until 2009. Who could have expected that? Especially since it was programmed by an European, where the Channel F is a very unknow and hard to find game system, circulating mostly from attics to retrogamers and from retrogamers to retrogamers.

 

Maybe reproducing chips will be cheap enough to allow for real console chips to be reproduced for cheap and make it worth buying a replacement.

Maybe people will enjoy fan-made FPGA based machines gathering the best and most popular technologies of any generation of console.

 

I do think however that retrogaming is going to change. Already we have all seen (I think) younger generations getting interested only up to 16 bits, and saying that NES and SMS are "too primitive and blocky".

It's going to get reduced to a specialized market much like stamps and other things. Prices might even keep low as the retrogaming get less fashion and fade away.

 

I'm not going to try and predict much more. I have read enough sci-fi from the 50/60's to know how badly wrong you can get when trying to predict the future, even on a short range term (Not having personnal helicopter and mass transit rockets to the Moon and Mars yet? Come on engineers, it was predicted for 1980! What were you doing? Personnal computers? Internet? Psh. It was not bound to happen before 2050 at least).

Edited June 18, 2014 by CatPix

[8th lutz]

Let's see...

 

That's exactly 99 years after the invention of the flux capacitor, which requires you reach 88 for activation, leaving 11 generations.

 

So we'll have a choice of playing either the PS15 or the Xbox 12.

 

Oh, the Atari Flashback 15 will be announced containing an even larger subset of 2600 games.

 

You forgot to mention that games for the PS15 or the Xbox 12 would be download only.