Making games
at 70: too late?

The full narration of the video.

Seventy years old, starting from zero, learning to make games. Is it too late? Meet a grandmother in Japan. She touched a computer for the first time at nearly sixty. At eighty-one, she released her very first phone game.

It's a simple game: put twelve dolls on a four-step stand, and get them in the right spots to win. Why build it? Because she couldn't find a single game that older people enjoyed. She wasn't a genius either. A young tutor taught her step by step over video calls, and she asked again and again.

But can a seventy-year-old brain still take in something new? In one experiment, people over sixty spent over fifteen hours a week learning a new craft: digital photography, or quilting. Three months later, their memory had improved. The groups that just socialized or watched movies didn't change like that.

The key: it has to be new, a bit hard, and done every day. Making a game ticks every box. To be honest, though, learning does get slower with age. You may need to watch the same step a few more times. Slow is not the same as can't. Now, about Unreal Engine. Many big-name games are built with it; it's a pro's heavy-duty tool. Version 5.8 came out just this summer.

Opening it is like walking into a big restaurant kitchen: dozens of stoves, a whole wall of spices, all set up for you. On day one, you don't cook a royal banquet. You fry one egg. Here, frying an egg means this: press the space bar, and a little character jumps.

You don't type a single line of code. It has a tool called Blueprints: little boxes on the screen, joined by wires. One box says "space bar pressed," and it's wired to a box that says "jump." Just like two lines in a recipe: oil first, then the egg. One thing to sort out first: this kitchen needs a strong computer. Epic recommends thirty-two gigabytes of memory, so an old laptop at home probably won't cope.

So no, it's not too late. Don't aim for a big game. Aim for your first little character that jumps. What's the latest-in-life new skill you ever picked up, and how old were you?