People occasionally ask if we’re using AI to pump out articles about retro games, and the answer is no, not in the way you’re probably worried about. Every article on Balding Gamer comes from actual people who’ve spent decades playing these games, collecting these systems, and having way too many opinions about 16-bit sound chips.

The ideas, experiences, and arguments are entirely ours. Samuel writing about his SNES collection and why Chrono Trigger holds up better than Final Fantasy VI. John explaining why the Amiga version of a game was superior to the console ports and being slightly bitter that Americans don’t appreciate European gaming history. Joe defending Sega’s honor for the ten thousandth time and refusing to admit the Saturn launch was a disaster. Timothy giving honest assessments of “classic” games he played for the first time as an adult and discovering some of them are overrated. That’s all us, based on games we actually own and play.

That said, we’re not professional writers. Samuel’s an accountant. John manages IT infrastructure. Joe teaches high school history. Timothy runs construction crews. We write about video games because we’re into video games, not because we studied journalism or have degrees in writing. So yeah, we use AI tools occasionally to help clean up our drafts and make them more readable.

Think of it like spell-check on steroids. We write the actual content — the memories, the opinions, the specific details about games we’ve played — and sometimes we’ll use tools to help with grammar or to tighten up sentences that ramble too much. We’re middle-aged guys who learned to write before the internet existed, typing skills developed on actual typewriters in some cases. Our first drafts can be rough.

The process looks like this: one of us writes a full draft about a game or system we actually know about, based on our real experience with it. Then we might run it through Grammarly or similar tools to catch typos and awkward phrasing. Sometimes we’ll use AI to help restructure sentences that don’t flow well. But the substance — the actual information, the personal stories, the arguments about why certain games mattered — that’s completely human.

Every article gets reviewed by at least one other person from the team before it goes live. If something doesn’t sound authentic, if the details seem off, if it reads like generic content that could be about any game, it gets sent back for revision. We’re protective of keeping the voice genuine because that’s the whole point of this site.

About the images: some of them are AI-generated, and we’re upfront about that. Here’s why that’s necessary:

First, we can’t photograph every game, system, and setup we write about. Samuel’s got a solid collection but he doesn’t own every SNES game ever made. John’s Amiga collection is extensive but not comprehensive. Joe’s Sega archive is impressive but has gaps. Timothy’s still catching up on decades of gaming history. Sometimes we write about games we remember but don’t currently own, or about regional variations we never had access to.

Second, copyright issues. We can’t just grab screenshots from other people’s gameplay videos or photos from other collectors without permission. We could take our own screenshots, but honestly, hooking up a 30-year-old console to a capture device is more hassle than it’s worth for a simple illustration.

Third, practicality. We all have day jobs. We’re not full-time content creators with unlimited time to photograph and capture footage of everything we write about.

So when we need a visual to illustrate a point and we can’t easily photograph it ourselves, we’ll sometimes generate an AI image that represents the concept. We try to make these look reasonable and not obviously AI-generated with weird artifacts. They’re illustrative aids, not attempts to deceive anyone about what’s real.

You’ll never find AI-written articles here that are just generic content about games we’ve never played. We’re not using AI to generate lists of “Top 10 SNES Games” based on scraping other websites. Everything we publish comes from genuine experience — Samuel’s childhood memories of renting games from Blockbuster, John’s specific knowledge of PAL versus NTSC differences that affected UK gaming, Joe’s firsthand experience of the console wars and Sega’s various business disasters, Timothy’s fresh perspective on classic games he’s discovering without nostalgia.

We’re figuring out how to use new tools without compromising what makes this site valuable — actual human experience and perspective from people who were there (or in Timothy’s case, is experiencing it now without childhood memories attached). Our promise is simple: every article starts with someone’s real knowledge and experience with retro gaming. The AI tools are just helping us present that more clearly.

So if you’re wondering whether a Balding Gamer article was written by AI, the answer is no — it was written by middle-aged guys who’ve been gaming for decades, who own these systems and games, who remember this era firsthand, and who occasionally use digital tools to help clean up our writing because we’re better at playing games than we are at writing about them.