Vroegah was ik altijd een outcast, rare gast die comics las, vage science fiction films keek en vooral veel met zijn computer in de weer was. Dat maakte me in de jaren 80 en 90 een soort van sociale outcast of te wel ik was een echte stereo type nerd. Maar tijdens zijn veranderd en nerd zijn is nu mainstream en hipper dan ooit.

Maar de huidige generatie geeks en nerds vergeten één ding dat het vroegah allemaal anders was, en daarom heeft John Cheese van de website Cracked.com nu deze top vijf gemaakt met dingen die deze generatie gewoon moet weten, dingen zoals:

#3. PC Gaming Was for Weird, Secluded Hobbyists

What It's Like Now

There are no non-gamers left. Your grandma plays Angry Birds. Making fun of someone for playing games is like making fun of someone for listening to music. At best we can mock people for the type of game they like. Fans of shooters make fun of Warcraft players. Warcraft players make fun of LARPers.

But It Wasn't Always Like That

A while back, I mocked how TV shows were still portraying gamers as lonely basement dwellers as recently as a few years ago, despite everyday life proving that there aren't enough basements in the world for that to be true anymore. Well, the reason those writers thought that is because they were in their 40s and grew up in a time when it was true. Go rent a copy of the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie WarGames to see what I mean. Notice how PC gaming is treated like fucking witchcraft. The main character can perform his acts of gaming wizardry thanks to a room-sized setup that completely dominates his life. And from there, he uses his gaming to accidentally trigger World War III.

At the time that movie was made, not even 5 percent of homes had a PC at all -- they were gadgets for hobbyists, like people who own those motorized spin-fuck chairs now. When I graduated high school, it was still only about 20 percent. And of those people, only a fraction played games.

Consoles were more common, but even they were expensive. And I mean "rob your goddamn grandmother to buy one" expensive. Even back in 1977, the Atari 2600 was launched at $200. Which, when adjusted for the economic changes and inflation, would be half a million dollars in today's money (I don't know much about money -- but it would be a lot is what I'm saying).

It's about $720. -Ed.

So in the eyes of our peers, we were spending ridiculous amounts of money for this frivolous, useless, mind-numbing machine so that we could waste time instead of doing dick things with boob creatures. And for that, you were considered a social outcast freak who deserved to be punished with constant ridicule and knuckles.

But that was nothing compared to the PC gamers. They were hardcore -- I'm not talking about Doom here, I'm talking about the era before that, when adventure games like Space Quest dominated, full of puzzles that just assumed you had a Ph.D. in something (because they knew that if you owned your own computer, you probably fucking did).

Oh, and they also assumed you were male, because you probably were. And the more you played, the less time you were spending with girls. Society fucking hated that.

Now, it's just really hard to ridicule someone for their hobbies when you know that 80 million people own a copy of Wii Sports.