How do you close/exit a game?

[Mistasparkaru]

Silly question i know.

Most seem to pause with the esc key but i ended up powering off and on to exit a game.

[neko68k]

Most you can't. Sometimes something like Shift+Break works.

[kendrick]

I don't have anything interesting to contribute to this thread. But personally, after observing nearly fifty years of home computing, it's fascinating to me to observe that single-tasking devices are now considered unusual or even notable.

Most 8-bit computers didn't have the luxury of both an operating system and an application running at the same time, and few had the facility to run multiple applications concurrently. If you had a Commodore 64 or an Apple IIe or one of the earliest of IBM compatibles, there was no way to quit the game and come back to a prompt. We considered it perfectly normal and perfectly acceptable to have to reboot every time in order to come back to a state where we could start other software. That's not something I miss, because that was also the era when it took a half hour to load something from tape, and when your disk drive error state was just a single blinking light.

[leonk]

We live in a new world .. where our attention span is the length of a tweet.

30 years ago, when people played a game, they played it for a few hours and then done for the day.  They wouldn't be jumping around between games the way they do today on a smartphone.