Well, I'm 36 on June 9th, so I guess I qualify.
First game was a text base game on a hospital mainframe where my dad worked. My first home computer was a KayPro II, so I know all about playing Donkey Kong on 9 inch green monitors! I never did do too much arcade stuff, but Battlezone was the first one I looked for when I went into an arcade. I have played pretty much all the TBS games on the PC.
I always favored TBS games, but Civilization really cemented it. I played it forty hours a week for about two years while answering telephone support calls. I had the program I supported (ACT! for DOS) memorized and could walk people through the program command by command, screen by screen and line by line without seeing the program - I just used the virtual one in my head. So I played Civ hard core...I remember spending forty minutes editing exotic templates (think all special codes and almost no words and giving directions like look down four lines and in five characters and you will see X) with a guy one time and he finally asked something I didn't know from memory. I accidentally let slip that I needed to load up the program to check that one, instead of just stalling for a few seconds while I loaded it. He was the most impressed caller I had in the three years, total, I did tech support! He couldn't believe I hadn't had the program up the whole time.
Right now my wife and I are due to have a baby on the 27th. She generally sleeps more than me anyway, and, with the baby, she's sleeping around ten hours. Since I'm a five or six hour a night guy, that gets me some decent game time. She also has a thing for antique focused TV shows (Antique Roadshow, Cash in the Attic, etc.), so that gets me some more time that I don't feel guilty about. I think she's happy that books and this game are my two main draws; She doesn't have to worry about me being out and about at any of the other bad things out there.
