Game-loving Grandma

MANTUA, Ohio — Grandma Hardcore collects angel figurines, makes a mean chicken paprikash and grabs a seat at the bingo hall when she’s got extra money.

That covers the “old” and the “grandma.” The “hardcore”?

Follow the sounds of a thumping bass, past a doll collection and a pair of bronzed baby shoes, to a skinny room with faux-wood paneling and an acoustic tile ceiling.

There, a 70-year-old woman, feet up in a brown vinyl recliner, works over a video-game controller like pie dough and occasionally curses like a trucker at her 34-inch television.

This otherwise-shy woman with bad knees, weak hearing and a gap-tooth smile is a harder-core gamer than players one-fourth her age.

Old Grandma Hardcore plays about 10 hours a day.

The story of Barbara St. Hilaire — her real name — has bemused video gamers and news media the world over, though no one’s more puzzled by the fuss than “OGH.”

“I don’t believe it because I don’t deserve it. It’s just me,” she said, taking a break from a round of “Hexic HD” on the Xbox 360 at her family’s century-old home in Mantua.

No one’s hotter in Mantua, a town of about 1,000 people about 30 miles southeast of Cleveland, than the granny with game.

How hot?

MTV hot. Grandma is a “senior game correspondent,” rating video games for the new online program “The G-Hole” on MTV Overdrive, a broadband video channel.

She’s ESPN The Magazine hot. She just returned from a New York photo shoot for the sports journal, where she was featured as a rising video-gaming star. Most rising stars aren’t yet 20.

So hot that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo send her free games and game systems to try out because players around the globe value her frank opinion.

Old Grandma Hardcore is an extreme, for sure, but the gaming market is clearly aging. The first video-game systems came out in the mid-1970s, so the 10-year-olds who played with them are just hitting 40.

While the number of senior gamers is unknown, “we are finding that as people that played games in their childhood grow up, they continue to do so as adults,” said David Cole of DFC Intelligence, which tracks the $29 billion video- and PC-game industry.

St. Hilaire began playing as an adult. She started with “Pong,” then graduated to “Space Invaders” and “Pac-man” at the bowling-alley arcade between her bowling team’s games.

While she also enjoys a good book, ceramics and oil painting, gaming is her favorite. Games, she said, are relaxing and stimulating. She’s certain that playing helps keep her mind sharp, and games with sexy, violent story lines don’t upset her because she believes television is worse.

She owns six game systems — three versions of Xbox, a Sony PlayStation 2 and Nintendo’s GameCube and DS. She insists she doesn’t have a favorite system, but her favorite game, among the dozens stacked in a cabinet, is PlayStation’s “Final Fantasy VII.”

And she quietly went about playing — until June, when her 23-year-old grandson, Timothy St. Hilaire, began chronicling her life on a blog.

He described how she often grabs the game controller after breakfast, usually after dinner and sometimes all night when she can’t sleep.

He posts what games she’s playing and notes her reaction in loosely quoted prose: “Let me tell you, Growlanser Generations may not have the graphics of FFX-2, but as far as gameplay and just … you know, fun goes, Growlanser Generations blows Final Fantasy X-2 … out of the water,” reads one Old Grandma Hardcore blogged review. “… Oh! In Growlanser III, try to get the transport magic as soon as possible; you’ll thank me later.”

Popular video-gaming Web sites linked to the blog as an oddity. Gamers across the globe were intrigued.

Grandma, who was born in Cleveland and has been divorced about 30 years, knew nothing about the blog until skeptical readers demanded proof that she existed. So Timothy shot and posted pictures and video of Old Grandma Hardcore at the game control, laughing, swearing in frustration, just being herself.

That’s what adoring fans seem to connect with, too. Hundreds of e-mails arrive for her daily at the blog, oghc.blogspot.com.