How did you celebrate your 30th birthday?

I want to know for... reasons.

Mainly by wallowing in crippling depression and existential dread. Does that count as celebrating?

Oh, and I also made this list of my 100 favourite games of all time.

Looking at my emails from the day, apparently I:

Ate lunch at a nice mediterranean restaurant with my mom and a friend. Bought a discounted version of Pixeljunk Monsters. Wooo, so crazy!

Went to work, came home, had some beers, ate some tamales my aunt made me, played games. Next day was Christmas and my brother and sister brought me some cake. Idk, i don't really make a big deal out of my birthday

Visited my family a few days before and then spent it alone in the dark. Then 2 days later I was in an accident that ended up totally my car. Was good times.

The morning of I spent depressed.

The day I spent with family for lunch.

The night I spent with friends.

The next day I realised nothing had really changed.

Will reassess in ten years when I turn 40.

Play games, eat and sleep. It was a Sunday like any other Sunday for me.

Just turned 30 back in June. My wife threw me a surprise party with friends and family. Something I'll never forget. 30 isn't so bad!

Honestly don't remember. Probably didn't celebrate it at all.

I was just thinking about my 30th.

I was pretty happy about it. I had known for a few years already I had successfully made my adjustments, and that I was in for the whole ride. 30 years of age was sometimes implied to be some kind of generational age related negative.

But it wasn't for me.

@beachthunder: Did you find yourself going kinda mad making that list? I tried to make one last year and halfway through, I realized how impossible of a task it was. Trying to order and rank a list that large magnifies how pointless it is. I did it anyway though...

I'll turn 30 soon but I probably won't do anything special. After 21 I found birthdays to be kinda sad, not happy.

Well I have almost a year until I turn 30. So my plan is to go to Disneyland. I've always wanted to go there and I think that's the best time.

Alone.

Haven't made it there yet, but I imagine that when I do, I'll probably just treat it as a regular day with the exception that at some point I'll think "oh, yeah, I'm thirty now, that doesn't really feel much different from 29".

What? I've been 27 for 7 years...

It was a little madness-inducing, but I'm also a pretty patient/persistent person. I mainly prioritised how the game made me feel over how 'objectively' good that game might have been. I also decided not to double up on similar games from the same franchise - for example, I don't have Dead Space 2 on my list, but I have DS1 - if I were to include it, it would definitely be on the list, but I prefer 1 over 2. I didn't want to clutter things up too much, and it removed a lot of splitting-hairs type decisions.

Also, I 100% agree about birthdays after 21. At this point, it's pretty much just a reminder of how increasingly close you are to the grave.

I shall tell you in a couple of months. I think we (my family and i) are going to go away for a couple nights somewhere in Europe.

I'm only 27, but it'll most likely be a normal day for me other than a very small 'celebration' with cake and a song sung to me by my family. My brother might come over too. I don't really care about celebrating my birthday, especially as I get older. My family likes to celebrate it still in some way, but I don't like when all of the family take the time out of their lives to come over because I don't think they need to for me (so it hasn't happened in several years). My brothers turn 30 this year though.

Went to karaoke with my family the night before. On the day of my birthday I threw a huge party and invited all of my friends and coworkers. Biggest party I have thrown since college. We had a keg and blasted some music and probably really bothered my neighbors. We even turned my garage into a flip cup area. Basically everyone I like was in my house at the same time which was the best. In general I absolutely love my birthday and try to do something fun every year. It's the most important day of the year for me, because without it I wouldn't exist! Spent the next day nursing an old-man hangover and playing some PS4.

Girlfriend at the time, wife now, threw me a surprise party.

I spent it contemplating the next step in life, like i always do lol.

I don’t think I did. I would have had a two year old and less than one month old kid at the time.

...maybe we got some indian takeout?

I think the last time I had a proper birthday celebration was at 10. If memory serves, I had a half a dozen friends over to play NES, eat pizza, play football, and watch Die Hard for the first time.

I also stopped with New Years Eve by 16 or so. The only times I’ve “celebrated” New Years Eve since then have been at nightclubs checking out bands on 12/31/XX.

Don’t get me wrong, I love getting up to some nonsense, and have plenty of physical (and a few emotional) scars to show for it. I just don’t do it on a schedule.

It is this year!

I am going to eat a dobbel bacon cheeseburger. With onion rings, chips/ fries, and nachos on the side. And drink a million beers; more like 4. And perhaps some whisky.

I went to see a movie with a couple of friends. Came home and we played Mario Party(4-5-6-7) for 11 hours. It was a good day.

We still do this once a month 9 years later but the game is usually Fortune Street these days.

@liquiddragon: Anniversaries have become the new birthday to me.

I’ll be 40 soon, but I really don’t care. I don’t know my age off the top of my head. I’m 38, I think...

I know that this year will be 16 years of marriage, though. It’s something I have agency over, work on, nurture, and get rewarded from.

Burthdays just mean more time working out for less benefit, and the occasional American Psycho moment wondering why I don’t have a better office.

On a good day it’s more counting down until the kids are older and I maybe have the freedom to take a few months unpaid vacation to hike the Appalachian or something like that (with or without them).

Still got another 7 years to go before I'm there, but hopefully it'll be a time of happiness, celebration and not-baldness.

Birthdays have kinda stopped being a thing I pay much attention to so honestly it was probably me sitting at home and then being reminded it was my birthday via my mom texting me.

I live a very exciting life.

Nothing too exciting. Went to work, wen't home, ate with family, tested out League of Legends, played Fez, practiced programming and then went to sleep.

And I remember that I've also ate a Watermelon. Good stuff!

For some reason, lots of people congratulated me which is fun but when it gets too time consuming it became exhausting quick. I would've certainly prefered if its just a day like every other. Eating at a restaurant with the family was nice, thats stuff I will always appreciate. However, this is nothing too special either, we sometimes do that thing even without a really special reason so that makes Birthdays feel more like a excuse to go eat with your family which makes the whole thing odd as it feels forced.

@tothenines: Heads up duder, at least you've probably had the least stressful of all the birthdays in this thread.

@nutter: I called them Burthdays when I was a kid, thanks for the nostalgia.

Anyway, as a kid, these sort of things were really special. I remember hosting a competition at every birthday where we played certain C64 and Amiga games and it felt a little like a digital American Gladiators and all my friends found the idea so good they kinda copied that in one way or the other. Prices were like a kilo worth of sweets and candy. Suddenly all my friends held competitions with prices like that. It was really fun being the first to do a thing and then everyone else does it, like playing Micro Machines on a friends PC in a competitive matter.

Those really were the days.

Didn't bother, who cares. I have one friend who cried all day, I was the inverse of that.

Existential dread, restaurant dinner, and video games.

My 32nd is this year, and with the amount of gray hairs I've been noticing, it looks like I'll get to double down on the existential dread. Woohoo!

Seriously, though, uneventful birthdays are a-okay by me. I'd rather chill at home with a drink and a controller than go through the to-do of making anybody come up with an excuse to not meet up.

(I don't mean that to be a Debbie Downer, it's not like I don't have close friends that would absolutely make plans with me, it's just that they're all spread around the globe these days and no longer local, and trying to make new friends as a socially anxious single 30-something who works from home is a schlep and a half)

Took 20 friends to hibachi (which was a nightmare to coordinate), then we watched stuff and played games at my house. Almost as good as my 21st, when we bought Mike's Hard Lemonade legally and played Guitar Hero!

@beachthunder: Right, I think you can only go by how you remember the games making you feel and how you feel about them now. The tricky part is that you feel things differently as a child, as an adolescent, as an adult. For example, hype has not been a thing for me in many many years but I still get excited about games and enjoy them on more levels, kinda like a connoisseur. I'm also a terribly nostalgic person so I often found myself taking inflation into account. Skimming through the list now, I see so many easy adjustments or replacements, it's totally just a list from the gut made on a given day.

I definitely want to play some on your list! I WILL playthrough System Shock 2 this year, just gotta figure out what the best way is (I mean what mods if any). Bowser's Inside Story is another one. Ohh, maybe the NOLFs.

p.s.: You have both Dead Space and DS2 on there, 25 and 33 respectively but I agree DS1 is better.

@nutter: That's a nice replacement. "I don’t know my age off the top of my head. I’m 38, I think..." lol I do kinda have to figure out my exact age sometimes now that I don't think about birthdays as much.

Went on holiday to Canada and proposed to my now Wife

This. It was a long time ago, the end of the 90's.

Your asking that question a year early for me.

Went to Berlin with a couple of friends and got drunk in some awesome bars

Had lunch with my parents, then dinner with a bunch of friends, and finished it out at the local watering hole. No fuss, no stress, and it was really just another birthday.

I haven't gotten there yet but I hope I spend it happy.

I'll be 30 this year too. Don't really feel like anything has changed so it'll just be a regular day for me. Some games, maybe a movie.

A couple of friends baked me a cake.

I went skydiving and had a throwback 90's themed birthday party at a bowling alley. It was awesome.

Just had work and went for a few beers afterwards. Nothing crazy or too exciting.

Just turned 30 last week, funny. My ol lady took me to chuckee cheese, ate fish tacos(rubios) cause it was a tuesday. Picked up my free sub from Firehouse subs. Drank with friends and grilled carne asada from the mexican market. Legit and unexpected. Oh yeah my girl got me a NZXT Hue+. Super legit.

I always book my birthday off so I went for a nice lunch. Then spent most of the day playing my PS4.

Probably worked on my PhD dissertation, which I defended a couple weeks later.

It's weird.. I felt virtually nothing about turning 30, but I actually feel quite a bit of anxiety about turning 40 later this year.

Nostalgia's definitely a helluva drug.

Gog has a good guide for running SS2 on modern hardware. Bowser's Inside Story is incredible; genuinely, one of the funniest games I've played. Hopefully some day NOLF 1 and 2 will be available via Gog/Steam; it's a huge bummer that the rights to the franchise are in such a weird tangled mess =/

Ha, whoops. I guess I should have checked that. Well, err, a replacement example is Crysis Warhead. The original Crysis is fantastic, but I thought Warhead was slightly better (primarily because of the better main character).

not very special for me. I just felt like an older guy in my 20s. Reality is hitting me hard though now at 32