Back in the late 90s my husband played. I played a bit. He played a lot. He's a programmer. i was an engineer.
He also wrote the Vectors client. Well, partial client, to help do the bits he found frustrating in the main client. I learned C+ so I could create tables summarizing my empire.
Then kids came. Stay-home mom for 13 years and counting. Absolutely worth it, but I've forgotten pretty much everything I learned about engineering.
In 2009 we tried to resurrect VGAP from the floppies to play with our son (even found a floppy drive). We got it going, and son enjoyed it, but it stalled.
In December 2011 we discovered planets.nu. From the forums, it looks like our timing was perfect -- the spreadsheet view and APIs were just released. My son's enjoying it, my husband is writing utilities again, and I'm writing an economy simulator to answer once and for all when it's worth pulsing the taxes and when to just leave them. (So far the answer is "It depends.")