And maybe girls around you didn't play videogames, but they certainly did where I was, about as much, but maybe a little less. you're assumptions here are simply wrong.
No it's not. "Pop culture" (or "mainstream"-ness) must reach even "a member of the elite class", to be pop culture. The point at which something becomes "pop culture", is precisely the point at which it becomes equally likely that you've heard of it, no matter which demographics you're a part of. If there's even one demographic (like busy rich old white men) that can still be completely isolated from a thing's "reach", then that thing is not pop culture yet.
If all 20-year-olds know about something, but all 40-year-olds do not know about that thing, then that thing is not "pop culture" (or "mainstream", either-or.)
On the other hand, if 10% of ten-year-old boys and eighty-year-old women and plumbers and astrophysicists and farmers and investment bankers have all heard of the thing, then it is "pop culture."
Try that criterion out. It really does work:
• Beanie Babies? Pop culture.
• Pogs? Not really pop culture. They were a fad, but they died out before they reached universal intelligibility.
• The movie Titanic? Pop culture.
• The movie The Matrix? Not quite pop culture. My grandma hasn't seen it. Yours probably hasn't either.
• Pokemon in general? Not pop culture.
• Pikachu in particular? Pop culture. (Thus the recent movie.)
• Snoopy? Pop culture. Americana, even. ("Americana" being a word meaning "pop culture, but pretty much only in America, so we've latched onto it as a thing that reminds us of America.")
• Hello Kitty? Pop culture elsewhere, but not-so-much in America, despite what certain stylists like to think.
It is by this same criteria that I claim that "video games up to 2003" were not—as an abstract gestalt—part of pop culture, and that "video games starting in 2004"—as an abstract gestalt—were part of pop culture. They went from being "Hello Kitty" to being "Snoopy"; from being "The Matrix" to being "Titanic"; from being "Pogs" to being "Beanie Babies."
My point with that statement was more about the image than the reality. Go back to 2002, and ask a legislator—or any childless 40-year-old—"who plays video games." That's the answer they'd give. Yuppies. Children of yuppies. (Then the XBOX hit and it became "college-student yuppies and urban youth." No market shift happened in reality; it was just advertising causing a change in perceived image of gaming as a hobby.)
> households
I really think "households" is a bad way to measure anything about gaming, because the particular way that gaming wasn't mainstream in the 1970s-2000s (besides older people just never having experienced it) was that it was incredibly male-coded.
In 2003, a girl sitting around playing GBA games was still considered to be doing something "tomboyish." It wasn't until the release of the Nintendo DS in 2004 that there was any large-scale availability of games specifically targeted at female demographics. All the home consoles were advertised at boys, and mostly had games for boys (that being the explicit localization strategy of the American branches of Nintendo and Sega through the 90s; it began changing by the early 2000s partly due to the influence of Sony, partly the diminishment of Sega, and partly the reining-in of NoA by Nintendo Japan.)
PC games were more gender-neutral (because PCs weren't advertised at kids to begin with, but in homes as a side-effect of parental usage), but AAA releases targeted at girls were still few and far between. There was... The Sims? That's all I can think of. When I ask the women I know about the games they played in that era—of their own volition, rather than because someone handed them a controller—the only other one they tend to name is Myst. Oh, and DDR, but DDR seemingly wasn't really "a video game" in their minds, in the sense that made them think of themselves as "the type of person who plays video games."