Back then the Atari 2600 was king, it being the first really popular game console. They sold 25 million machines when suddenly, inexplicably, most people stopped playing games.

Nobody was more surprised than Atari, who in 1983 spent millions bringing their biggest title to market, a game based on the movie ET (at the time it the highest-grossing film in history). So they had the most popular film, in a game for the most popular system. What could go wrong? They stamped out seven million copies of the game, and then were shocked to find that about six million of them sat untouched on store shelves. Legend has it that the unsold games wound up buried in a landfill and that to this day, no plants will grow over that spot.

With the 2600, players realized that Hot Dog Maze was just Pac-Man with different colors. Soon the cool thing among video game fans was to sit around not playing video games. The industry collapsed.

Then the Next Big Thing came along, the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986. It was a radical departure from the blocky 2600, to the point that the experience was novel once again. Games had actual worlds to travel in, and you could save your games from one day to the next. Playing these games didn't just look different; they felt different. Space Invaders was a series of symbols on a screen you manipulated for a score, Legend of Zelda was an actual universe you could escape to.

And yet, even with the enormous number of games (Metroid delayed my discovering girls for a for a good 18 months), the gaming experience itself still couldn't keep our interest for more than a few years. Attention waned again, but this time new, fancier systems arrived just in time, offering a new and novel experience thanks to prettier graphics and character animation. And yet those systems (the Sega Genesis and later the SNES), as great as they were, eventually were retired to closets and attics and the sandy carpets of the Pakistani black market.

Which brings us to today. We've now advanced from realistic 3D to slightly prettier 3D and... even slightlier prettier 3D with slightly better reflection effects and slightly better animated water ripples and - oh, look! This game has the most realistic fog yet!

See the problem?

The first time you play a level, the monster around the first corner is a surprise. After that, it's homework. It's memorizing, via pure repetition, bad guy placement and ammunition deposits and card keys. "Okay, kill the mutant behind the crate. Duck behind the dual doors. Wait for guard to walk out. Kill him, take his key. There's two Hellgoats in this next hall. Pick up the rockets..."

Is it any wonder that once we see the new, glossier FPS games that so few of us go back and play the old ones? What do the old ones have to offer once the experience has been memorized? And what do the new ones have to offer but new arrangements of hallways and glossier monsters and new stiffly-acted cut scenes that we'll watch exactly once before skipping past them?

5. Who cares about single player? It's multiplayer that makes these games worth playing. The reward is getting good at the game and thrashing your opponents, you foppish wide-brimmed asshat.

That's true... for a small, hard-core minority of gamers.

How many people do you personally know who play console games online? I'm not talking about the people you met online. I'm asking how many of your actual real-life game-having friends actually go online with their little headset thing like in the commercials?

Right now about 10% of current-gen gamers are online. That's all. Analysts say that by the end of the next-gen games lifespan, in 2011, less than 25% of the consoles will be used online..

And yet, whole classes of games (specifically first-person shooters and fighting games) are more and more set up so that the single-player mode is nothing but a tutorial for the multiplayer. And I understand why; the industry sees a future where I pay $60 for a game and then pay another $20 a month to play it for the next two years. Look at the money Blizzard is making off World of Warcraft. Five million subscribers, at $15 a month.

The difference is that you can play WoW for days without ever interacting with another human; that's what the solo quests are for. It's online, but not necessarily multiplayer. You see, lots of us play video games as a way to alleviate the stress of dealing with people. If I have a bad day at the office and then go home and play Halo 2 online, I might run into the same type of ##### I just left at work. Petty feuds and cliques.

Or even worse, I may get to where I have to practice a game, working to make my skills sharper and sharper so I can rub victory in the face of annoying teenagers I'll never meet, feeling the pressure to log more and more hours in the game so I don't embarrass myself in matches. I don't want to do that. I want to relax. I want to play.

7. But all they have to do is find new markets. You already said they're making games for older gamers, and new gamers are being born every day.

There are two sides to that coin, though. Yes, there's a new generation of gaming kids out there. But the thing is, the original video game generation is growing old. I know, because I'm one of them, an Original Gamer. I owned Pong as a toddler, an Atari 2600 in grade school and an NES in 1987. I've logged hours on the Sega Genesis, the Atari Jaguar, the NEC Turbographx 16, the SNES, a Sega Saturn, a 3D0, a Sony Playstation, a Casio Fungiver 5000, a 4-bit Toyota Gamemobile... you get the idea.

But I'm 30 now, worried with mortgages and job stress and coffin shopping. My peers all have their own children, the household toy budget spent on the offspring, not the adults.

I know some of us still play games at 30, studies say about 25% of gamers are now over 35. But can you play games at 40 or 50 without looking like an intellectually-stunted manchild, there in your sweater vest, the control pad tangled in your long, gray, drool-soaked beard as the creeping hand of death stalks your every thought?

We Original Gamers, the hard core, bought every machine that came on the market for two decades. But for a whole lot of us OG's, the game consoles we own now will be the last we'll ever buy. There are millions of us, and it's just a matter of time.

And I mean it's literally a matter of time. I'll pop in a DVD because a movie only requires two hours from my busy schedule of work and home repairs and chasing kids off my lawn. Getting to the end of a video game, however, requires hours upon hours of play. Not because the story is hours long, mind you, but because getting through each scene requires practice and repetition and repetition and repetition, all in the hopes of seeing that exploding Death Star cutscene at the end.

A 10 year-old can come home from school in the afternoon and devote the rest of the day to the task of memorizing the exact sequence of finger twitches that will get him past the dark forces of the Empire. A college kid can do the same, often while high. Most employed and married adults cannot. If I'm right about this, the gaming industry is about to face its first real exodus of existing customers, a hard-core group they've relied upon for decades to snap up every new box on the shelf. We're leaving, because while we have grown up, gaming, in many ways, has not.

I know some of you Nintendo fans were screaming at your monitor in the last section, saying the $199 (or $249) Nintendo Wii is the low-cost answer to the affordability problem. The problem is Nintendo is still so neglectful of older gamers that it borders on hostility. Everything they showed at E3 starred a cartoon character, and the games that didn't (Madden and Red Steel) appear to be very bad games. Plus, I say the older you are, the less inclined you'll be to flail around the room with their new controller.