[commandlinefan]

It's not just old people. When I was a kid, the Commodore 64 was the absolute state of the art in consumer computer hardware. What I was able to produce in C64 Basic after a few months of trying was, at least to a first order of approximation, comparable to the sorts of things that were considered professional software back then: the machine just couldn't do that much, so writing a simple game with an amorphous blob that was controlled by the joystick and shot at other amorphous blobs was not _that_ far off from the sorts of games you could buy; I felt like I was doing "real" programming. Compare that to the situation today. Modern games have gigabytes of 3D rendered playfields. Even iphone games like jungle run are in 3D. But what a beginner can produce after a few months of practice still probably looks like something that might have been state-of-the-art on a C64 back in 1986 (in fact, may be harder, because the development tools are so fragmented these days). What felt like a real accomplishment to me when I was 12 feels like failure to my kids - once they realize what a hurdle they have to climb, they wonder if their efforts might be better spent elsewhere.

[jpindar]

Have you tried creating a game in a modern engine such as Unity3d? If you try going through a few tutorials, and browse through the asset store, you might be surprised.

While the gameplay in your first game may still be simple, it can look great because the engine does most of the work. It absolutely won't look like something from a C64 (unless you want it to).

[mrbombastic]

This absolutely. As someone who started later (in college) I was unbelievably dismayed at the amount of effort it took to output something that was nowhere near comparable to the software I used daily and took for granted.