What Happens When Your Kid Plays Basically Every Video Game Ever Made?
When Andy Baio's son was born, he decided to perform an experiment: What would happen if his son learned to play video games by starting with Pac Man?
Everything you need to know about Andy Baio, the former CTO at Kickstarter and a member of Portland, OR’s tech royalty, can be gleaned from this sentence in the opening of his post on Medium: “If you have a kid, why not run experiments on them? It’s like running experiments on a little clone of yourself! And it’s almost always probably legal.”
RELATED: The Best Video Games for Kids Under the Age of 10
The experiment in this instance has to do with Baio’s obsession with video games. When his son Eliot was 4-years-old, Baio bought him the original Pac Man. Starting there, they worked through the Atari 2600 classics before moving to Nintendo NES, then the Nintendo 64 and so on. By the time he was 10, Eliot was already up to the present day, and he’s developed two interesting traits: First, he has a surprisingly sophisticated appreciation for game theory. Second, he’s ridiculously good – so good that the creator of an infamous game called Spelunky believes he’s the youngest person to ever complete the game in it’s dreaded “Hell” mode.
Maybe, for his next experiment, Baio can try to design a game his son can’t beat him at.
This article was originally published on
