Balding Gamer isn’t a professional gaming site run by industry insiders or full-time journalists. It’s four middle-aged guys who’ve been playing video games way too long and decided to write about the stuff we actually remember from back when gaming magazines cost $4.99 and you had to blow on cartridges to make them work.

None of us work in the gaming industry. We’re not getting review copies or going to conventions or networking with developers. We’re just regular people who’ve been gaming since the 80s, never stopped, and have way too many opinions about 16-bit era sound chips and console war arguments that happened thirty years ago.

Samuel is 47, works as an accountant in Minneapolis, and got an Atari 2600 for Christmas in 1982 when he was five. That NES in 1986 changed everything — he spent entire weekends at video rental stores convincing his parents to rent another game so he and his friends could share and play everything available. Went from Nintendo kid to SNES devotee to having multiple systems because he couldn’t pick sides in the console wars. Got into PC gaming in high school with a hand-me-down 386, played Doom when it came out and basically had his mind blown. Met his wife in his late twenties, had two teenagers who think his old games have “bad graphics,” and started collecting retro games seriously about fifteen years ago when he realized his childhood was being sold at garage sales for nothing. Now he’s got a dedicated game room in the basement with multiple CRTs, original hardware for everything from NES to Saturn, a couple hundred games actually played not just displayed. His wife jokes he’s reliving his childhood, which is probably true, but it’s more than nostalgia — those 80s and 90s games represented peak design in a lot of ways, developers working within incredible constraints and having to be creative. Samuel writes as someone who was there for the whole evolution, remembers the magazine previews and playground arguments, has strong opinions about why certain games mattered beyond just being old.

John is 49, lives in Manchester, works as an IT manager, and his gaming history is completely different because he grew up in the UK. Got a Sinclair ZX Spectrum for his tenth birthday in 1984, which meant cassette tapes that took fifteen minutes to load and a completely different gaming culture than American kids had. The Commodore 64 and especially the Amiga 500 he got in 1988 — that machine was his pride and joy, proper gaming computer that was lightyears ahead of consoles at the time. UK gaming in the 80s and 90s meant different systems, different games, different cultural touchstones. He had a Mega Drive (that’s what the Genesis was called everywhere except North America, and yes he still can’t get used to calling it Genesis) but never had a SNES growing up, couldn’t afford both console ecosystems. Got into PC gaming properly in the mid-90s when he could build his own machine. Married with two university-age kids now, started collecting retro gear seriously about ten years ago when he realized his old Amiga stuff was dying from disk rot. John writes specifically about UK and European gaming history that gets overlooked in American-dominated gaming content — games like Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, all the Amiga classics that were massive in Europe but Americans barely know existed.

Then there’s Joe, 45, high school history teacher in Phoenix, and he’s been a Sega fanboy since 1985 when he got a Master System for his eighth birthday. His parents bought it because it was on sale at Toys R Us, didn’t know there was a difference between Sega and Nintendo, and accidentally made him a Sega kid in a Nintendo world. Spent his entire childhood defending the Master System to kids who’d never seen one, got a Genesis on launch day in 1989, lived through the console wars as an actual combatant not someone who read about them later. The arguments were real — he and his best friend stopped talking for a week when the friend got a SNES for Christmas ’91. Got every Sega system including the mistakes like the 32X and Sega CD, imported Japanese Saturn games because the US library was tragic, got a Dreamcast at launch and watched Sega leave the hardware business in 2001, which he’s still not over. That felt personal after fifteen years of loyalty. Married with teenage kids who don’t understand why he has so many old Sega consoles in the basement. Joe writes specifically about Sega’s legacy because they won’t do it themselves — they’ve been allergic to properly honoring their own history, so fans have to preserve it.

Timothy is 52, construction foreman in Denver, and he’s different from everyone else because he didn’t get into gaming until his late thirties. Grew up in rural Wyoming without money for video games — his family had four kids to feed, video games were luxury items for other people’s kids. Did a stint in the Army, got into construction, worked his way from laborer to foreman. His daughter got into retro gaming in college around 2010, kept trying to explain what made old games special, finally convinced him to try Super Metroid. He ended up playing for three hours straight, completely lost in it, had never experienced anything like that because he’d never given games a proper chance. Started buying consoles and catching up on forty years of gaming history he’d missed. The thing about coming to these games as an adult is he appreciates them without nostalgia — he can evaluate them objectively based on whether they actually hold up, whether the design is solid. Some games considered all-time greats turned out to be overrated. Others he’d never heard of became favorites. Timothy writes from the perspective of experiencing retro games fresh as a middle-aged adult, which is valuable in a scene dominated by people chasing their childhoods.

That’s Balding Gamer — an American Gen X Nintendo/SNES guy, a UK Amiga/Mega Drive guy, a Sega war veteran, and a late bloomer who discovered all of this as an adult. We’re not gaming journalists or industry professionals. We’re an accountant, an IT manager, a history teacher, and a construction foreman who never stopped playing video games and have accumulated way too much knowledge about 16-bit sound chips and 90s gaming culture.

We don’t have insider access or review copies. We’re not building relationships with PR departments or covering current releases. We just write about the games and systems we actually played, owned, collected, and remember from when they were new (or in Timothy’s case, discovered later but approached honestly).

What connects us is age, mostly. We’re all in our mid-to-late forties, all dealing with the reality of being middle-aged gamers whose kids think old games look terrible. We’ve all got basements or spare rooms full of retro hardware. We’ve all spent money on this hobby that our spouses tolerate with varying levels of patience. We’ve all become those guys who correct people about gaming history because we were actually there.

Balding Gamer exists because we wanted a place to write about classic gaming from the perspective of people who lived through it, not people who discovered it through YouTube retrospectives. Samuel remembers renting SNES games from Blockbuster. John remembers buying Amiga Power magazine and reading reviews of games he’d never afford. Joe remembers the Sega versus Nintendo playground arguments that got genuinely heated. Timothy remembers discovering all of this decades late and approaching it without rose-tinted glasses.

We’re not trying to be comprehensive or encyclopedic. We write about what we know, what we played, what we collected, what matters to us personally. Sometimes we disagree — Samuel and Joe have very different opinions about whether the SNES or Genesis was superior (they were both great at different things, but try telling Joe that). John gets annoyed when Americans don’t understand PAL versus NTSC differences or why European gaming culture mattered. Timothy thinks some “classics” are overrated and isn’t afraid to say it, which annoys everyone else.

So no, we’re not professionals. We’re hobbyists and collectors with day jobs, families, and too many old consoles taking up space. We write about games that shaped us (or in Timothy’s case, games he discovered late but appreciated anyway), argue about which system had the better sound chip, share memories of 90s gaming culture, and try to document this stuff before everyone who remembers it firsthand dies off or forgets.

Welcome to Balding Gamer. Pour yourself whatever middle-aged people drink these days (coffee for us, mostly), maybe go check if that eBay auction for that game you don’t need but definitely want is still going, and stick around.