I'm in my 40s. Video game fandom isn't new, but "gamer" as a purchased consumer label is relatively new.

Before social engineering and modern marketing manufactured the "gamer" label, video games were something people did. People could be Nintendo fans or Sega fans and sometimes get into some really heated and toxic Genesis vs SNES console war disputes. There were absurdly overhyped marketing vehicles attached to garbage games (Rise of the Robots was a legendary 90s example of that), and there were all the ingredients needed for "gamer" culture except for the label itself. In time, those ingredients mixed and the remarkably reactionary capital-G Gamer culture we came to know today came into being, baked to a chuddy sizzle when G*merGate became a thing.

I know that someone's pretty young as a chud when they claim that the 90s were some sort of ethical games journalism lost era. BULL. SHIT. That was the era where game magazines were by and large paid advertisements (not much changed there) where in-house products can and were given glowing reviews if they were tied to the corporation publishing the magazine. It was also the era of multi-page ads that showed a naked woman's body in segments and don't even tell you what the game is about, or even show screenshots on most pages ("Forsaken" was its name if you're curious). Sure, if they were alive at the time they'd jerk off to that and probably buy the game because beeewbs, but it wasn't ethical games journalism, whatever that was supposed to be.

Go back far enough and there were MORE women than men in arcades, back before marketing ghouls determined that male arcade visitors were more likely to spend lots of money if feeeemales weren't around socializing and otherwise distracting them. It was a decision made, an artificial one, to use advertising and social engineering tricks to gradually evict women from early video game fandom. E T H I C A L.