How can possibly Quake be too old then? It's from 1996 [1], which would make them 14y old at the time which is a perfect age to play Quake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(video_game)

But it's possible they did not get online until much later.

My dad did get us dial-up internet in 1995, but he was a uni professor doing stuff with computers for a long while (we've had a Novell Netware network at home in 1993).

But basically nobody I knew was getting online too, and BBSes were still a thing for older beards.

I didn't get online until 95-96 I think, I'm just 2 years older and for example I completely missed the BBS thing because living in a small town phone costs were prohibitive but by the time dial-up became a thing there were the first nightly flat-rates (like from 8PM to 8AM at an affordable price) so we went online almost daily. But online gaming wasn't possible anyway, I remember throwing some LAN-party with my closest friends to multi-play Quake but that's it. But I didn't feel I was too old for Quake at all