I am an old-school PC gamer, but I kind of thought I was mostly beyond games at this point of my life. Sure, I embraced League of Legends and would go through brief stints where I would play that game obsessively, but I didn’t maintain the kind of addictive love that led me to become a computer dork back in the 1990s.

Those were the days where I upgraded to a 486 computer before finally getting a Packard Bell Pentium-laced machine with one gigahertz processor. It was pre-CD burner so when I was pirating games off of bulletin boards and via illicit AOL email forwards, I’d spend hours unpacking games onto floppy discs so that I could go through a multi-disc installation process. This process would also take hours. I remember one Christmas eve as a teenager, I stayed up all night in the basement (I was sleeping there so a relative could have my bed.), downloading the final few files I needed to install Carmageddon.

Carmageddon was an early demolition derby-style car racing game. As I enjoyed my time away from school that Christmas break, I would spend hours clutching the Gravis joystick trying to get high scores while my eyes grew bloodshot and tired. Those are the days I think about when I think of my days of video game obsession. They were firmly in the rearview mirror for a long time.

But now that my kids are gaming age and Fortnite has become the dominant game for kids their age, I decided to jump back into the fold once again. Throughout the pandemic, I wanted to find ways to do things with them. On top of that, my 10-year-old talked a lot of shit about how I probably wouldn’t be good at Fortnite anyway. He didn’t even know he was talking smack as much as he legitimately believed that his old man had no game. As much as your kids can piss you off even though you love them to an unconditional degree, he pissed me right off.

I had played hours of Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Duke Nukem before Fortnite was even a dream for its developers. I logged hours playing special Capture the Flag varieties in these deathmatch environments. I had memorized dozens of maps in the 3D world of Descent where gravity didn’t even matter. The idea that Fortnite was going to be just too much for my aging brain couldn’t possibly be true.

So, I started secretly playing on my computer in my new home office. Being a former computer geek, I always buy gaming quality desktop PCs for myself. Even if I wasn’t gaming that much anymore, I edit videos, graphics and produce podcasts for this website from time to time. I had the PC to run Fortnite at some of its highest specs, but I quickly discovered something. Some of the technology had passed me by. I had never invested in a precise gaming mouse, and when I finally did, I realized that it makes a huge difference. My scattershot aiming became far more accurate as I mixed it up with anonymous tweens in Fortnite’s maps.

And when I was ready, I outed myself to my kids as someone who can play Fortnite. We started joining up in trios to play matches a couple of times a night after dinner. Connected via headsets from around the house, we spent quality time together trying to be the last team standing. We’d try and save each other if the opposition downed us. We’d carry each other’s reboot cards to the nearest reboot van. My eldest son would use his building expertise from Minecraft to build structures to protect the entire team. I admit that I just can’t get used to building quickly. That’s one aspect of the game that still feels like I’m in an alien world. The boys got embarrassed by my newb outfits and skins, so they gifted me a John Wick avatar and one that allows me to dress like a Cleveland Browns football player. It’s pretty sweet, actually, not that I care about what I look like in the game. In the end, they know me well and bought me stuff with their own money in a thoughtful way. How awesome is that?

And just like that, I’m a PC gamer once again. I still mostly only play with my kids, so it’s not exactly the same. I don’t spend hours and hours on end ignoring my wife for some online gaming after my wife goes to bed. But since it helps me hang out with my kids during a pandemic, I’ve embraced my former self as a PC gamer.

Fortnite is so cool. The weapons are great. The seasons break up the monotony. The creative game modes make everything feel fresh. I still don’t care about what my character is dressed like, and I don’t care to make my avatar dance in pre-game clusters, but that stuff is just a distraction anyway. For this lame old dad, the Fortnite embrace has been wonderful because it’s given me an unconventional way to spend time with my kids.