[vundercind]

The modern equivalent doesn't look the same at all if you want equivalent motivation.

We all dicked around with "shitty" computers and learned all the stupid trivia you had to memorize to use them, back then, because that's all there was and you could make your own bad text adventure or crack some commercial game or whatever and your friends might think it's cool, because that was state of the art, or close to it, and anyway you had to get about half-way to being able to program a computer just to be able to run games or play around in a text or image editor. The extrinsic motivation for hacking on some modern C64 clone or what have you is far lower than it was then.

Minecraft modding is probably the closest modern equivalent.

[filoleg]

I agree with your take, just wanted to add Roblox to that list containing Minecraft modding as well.

Kids create almost full blown games in Roblox these days. Most of what they create is ofc extremely basic and is of poor quality, but they are kids. And the outliers can get pretty insane, in a good way.

[jdwithit]

Yeah I think this is a good point. Around ~8th grade I got pretty far into making a Final Fantasy 6-inspired JRPG in QBASIC with some friends. Obviously it was not remotely professional quality. But the delta between it and a "real" game wasn't THAT insane. There's only so much you can pack into little 8 or 16 bit sprites. It's very easy to write a 2D tile based engine, there was a lot of info on the Internet about it even then back in the late 90s. I didn't need to know college level math to do basic 2D rendering and effects. If making a somewhat presentable game in the 90s interested you, it was all pretty attainable with study and work.

Nowadays, for my own kids, the equivalent would be trying to write... Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom from scratch? Which is like asking them to solve cold fusion based on a middle school understanding of science. It's laughable. Making "old grandpa games" doesn't motivate them. Which is a bummer, because hacking on that crappy QBASIC RPG definitely set me on the path to a lifelong interest and career in tech. (Unfortunately it was never finished, because my HDD died, and the backup I periodically dumped to a floppy was unreadable, so several years of effort were lost. Great early lesson about backups not meaning shit unless you regularly test that you can restore them...).