This week, as the title states, I will be talking about the importance of networking and how it will help you grow as a gamer. What I mean by networking is getting to know other retro gamers and sharing your experiences through various mediums. Networking with other retro gamers has helped me immensely over the years, I have learned so much from other retro gamers such as new games I had never heard of, new consoles, where to buy, collecting tips that helped me along the way and most importantly, I have gotten to know some amazing people and made some amazing friends.
When I started out playing and collecting retro video games, my knowledge on the subject was very limited. As soon as I started to talk to other gamers, I was introduced to an entire new world of gaming that I never knew existed before that. When I was younger I had a Nintendo Nes, Snes, Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1, these were the consoles of my childhood and I didn’t know any different. I can can vaguely remember the likes of the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600 but I had never gotten a chance to play much of them. I had never even heard of a TurboGrafx-16, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn and so many others from earlier on in gaming.
My fir gaming, so I created @Retro_Gamer_Ireland. From here I started posting pictures of my collection, which consisted of a Snes, about 3 or 4 games and that was it until I remembered I had an N64 and some Game Boys tucked away in the attic space of my mothers house. So as I started posting and collecting more games, I got talking to other gamers and started to discover so many new games and consoles that I had never heard of. It was absolutely mind blowing to find out that there were so many games and consoles that had flown under my radar as a kid, I couldn’t believe it. This really fueled my interest in retro gaming as it may have been old news to a lot of people but it was all new to me. Even now, after years of collecting and researching, there are still so many games out there that I have yet to discover and maybe even some consoles as well.
There are so many platforms to use for networking with other gamers from Blogs, Social Media, Boards , Forums and that’s just online, go to gaming stores or events in your area and this too will help you meet some people in person and maybe pick up some new gaming goodies while you are at it.
As my favorite medium to use is Instagram, I will leave a few links below to some of my favorite people on there and maybe they can help you discover something new as well.