Gaming PC specialist Asus Republic of Gamers (ROG) has a new brand ambassador, and Manchester’s unashamedly grown-up Grandad Gaming is adamant that games aren’t just for kids.
The face of ROG’s new Twitter clip for the brand reveals that he started gaming back in 1981 on the long-forgotten Intellivision console, Mattel’s main competitor to the market-leading Atari from launch in 1979 through to its discontinuation in 1990.
Grandad Gaming’s digital journey continued through the 1980s with spells on the Commodore 64 and Super Nintendo, although GG concedes that with the advent of acid house towards the end of the decade he became temporarily ‘distracted’ from his gaming mission: “For the next 20 years-ish I partied and raved and gaming never got a look in,” he admits.
It was a brush with illness that eventually brought the older, possibly wiser, gamer back to the video game fold: “I ended up in hospital with a nasty flesh eating bug called Necrotising fasciitis, and couldn’t work or go out. It was then that I purchased an Xbox and discovered a love for gaming again. Before that I was of the mindset that games were for kids. The people I’ve met through gaming, and especially on Twitch, puts that theory to bed,” he explains.
Crackdown and Red Dead Redemption were among his first favourites on his return to the virtual world, although for the last six years or so Grandad says that his main title of choice has been online first-person shooter Destiny 2.
Grandad began streaming to Twitch TV, where his GrandadGaming channel currently has around 9k subscribers and achieved coveted Twitch Partner status in March 2022.
Grandad Gaming expands on the story: “I have a grandson so I thought the moniker Grandad Gaming would be perfect, plus I play like a Grandad,” he explains. “A few months after achieving Partner Status, one of the best known brands in the gaming space ASUS ROG launched a search for their next ambassador. We were challenged to make a 30-second video about why we should be the next ambassador, and I was chosen to be one of the ambassadors. This entails repping the ASUS ROG brand on my socials, attending events and so on. It was a great honour to be chosen and hopefully leads to a long and successful partnership. The streaming is still going well over a year since achieving partner and I have finally started putting work in on YouTube to try and build a channel.”
You can find out more about Grandad Gaming, and follow his digital adventures, on Twitter, Twitch TV and YouTube with the GrandadGaming handle, as well as on TikTok as @TTVGrandadGaming.