What draws you to retro gaming online communities?

[StarEntropy]

It's nice to see everyone enjoying the site.

How do you guys feel about sharing or see other people's collection/game room, or other people's reviews?

Also, do you think the Racketboy forums is safe and convenient way to buy/sell/trade? How does it compare to local video game stores or auction sites (such as ebay)?

[pjvdg]

For me it's find a place to talk to people with the same passion. My love for retro-gaming might be related to enjoying the games I liked as a kid but it's more than that. It's the boxart, the difficulty and feel to these games.

[Flake]

My reason is simple: People around here are nice. I couldn't even begin to count the number of people on this site I'd be okay having a beer with if it weren't for that geography problem.

No one here has ever given me a hard time or talked down to me if I asked a question that might have been obvious to anyone else. As a result, I've learned a lot about my favorite hobby that I might not have ever had a chance to discover.

[dgamemuster]

Trix are for kids. Welcome to the site.

[Opa Opa]

My reason is simple: People around here are nice. I couldn't even begin to count the number of people on this site I'd be okay having a beer with if it weren't for that geography problem.

We could all sit down at a table on Monster Hunter Tri.

[MrPopo]

I don't think I was drawn here specifically because I was looking for a retro gaming community. I had visited the site several times after graduating college as I suddenly found myself with enough money to catch up on a lot of games I had missed (it was one console per generation when growing up). I also had heard that Shining Force III's translation had been coming along really nicely, so I needed to find out how to play a burned copy, which led me here. I've been retrogaming ever since I started gaming; just because something new came out didn't mean the old stuff was awesome.

But as for finding the actual forums, I think that was more to find a new online home. In high school and college I was part of a forum community for a small Blizzard fansite. The community was at that size where there was always active discussion but it was mostly made up of regulars. We'd do things like giant forum RPGs (which were essentially collaborative storytelling) and it was a nice group of people. Midway through college though a good chunk of the regulars split off to a second site created by one of them, as the admin of the original site was terrible. The second site never achieved any kind of following, so it was basically a group of 15 people who posted, and there might be days in between posts. So I needed a new online community to join, and a few of the posts on the Racketboy main page linked to the forum. I did some poking around and decided to join.

[SpaceBooger]

After graduating college and entering the world of mortgages, car payment, and every other bill possible I couldn't afford to by a new console after I spent my first ever teaching paycheck on a Dreamcast. There was a point in college where I was buying every new Genesis/SNES, then Saturn, and PS1 games so my backlog was quite large, and this didn't include the games for my NES. With a backlog that large and no extra money, I started playing games that either I never finished or loved enough to replay. With a new instilled interest in the older consoles I this site and stayed because the people here helped me (and still help me) get the most out of my older systems by recommending games and making modifications to my systems.

Since then I have realized that being part of a community that really respects what is being discussed and discussing things that are older and not too "trendy," creates better discussions. By having good discussions you build relationships and I feel everyone on this board has their own niche in our little ecosystem that lies outside of the gaming "norm."

[Pichu]

I'm practically the only one at my school who gives an active damn about retro games, so I wanted to find a place that I could be with other people who have this hobby.
Here's the places I have tried before falling permanently here:

GameFAQs Classic Board and Retro console Boards-Good, but too slow
Digital Press-It's okay, not as smooth with me as here, and right now it's down

So yeah, I'm liking the community here at Racket, and it's a damn good site.

[J T]

I first came to Racketboy because of the "Hidden Gems" articles. I had already collected many of the big titles and wanted to know about things a little bit more on the fringe and those articles came up. For awhile, I only came here for those articles and never ventured into the forums. After some time though, I found that the crew of regulars here were really knowledgeable about video games and had a lot of interesting opinions. I've been playing since the early 80's. I've grown up as videogames have grown up. I know a lot about games and enjoy talking to people with a similar vocabulary in the history of games. This community seemed a nice place for me because so many of the forum members know the whole history of gaming. I can drop a reference from Tutankhamun to Mother to Katamari Damacy and people here are going to know what I'm talking about. I also like the retro aspect because I play both new and old games. In a lot of game forums people only want to talk about recently released or upcoming games. They seem almost turned off by discussion of older games, so if I go back and finish River City Ransom for the first time and want to talk about it, they either won't know what I'm talking about or won't care. In a retro site, it's a different story. On a site like Racketboy you will get comments back from people that either remember the game nostalgically or are currently playing the game, or they decide to play the game again because you mentioned it. I like to talk about games almost as much as I like to play them, so this is a great place for me.

[dsheinem]

The lack of appreciation for retro games and the immature demographic found on mainstream gaming boards have both been stated frequently, and those reasons makes sense to me.

It might be hard to get this answer....but I'd be even more interested to know what has driven people away from online retro communities. I'd really be curious to hear from people who have reasons as to why they rarely if ever post here anymore, but I'd also like to hear from others who may have left sites that share the same interests we do here...