As a long-time Gentoo user, I can tell you that it’s perfectlly capable of producing both a useful gaming rig and a useful server, provided you have some idea of what you want to end up with.

Proprietary nvidia drivers should be straightforward enough: emerge nvidia-drivers and blacklist the nouveau module (or compile a custom kernel that doesn’t contain it). You’ll probably want to read what the Gentoo wiki has to say about Steam.

Good luck.

If using OpenRC is all it tales to be on the dark side, then I’ve been there since before it was cool.

It has better specs than the 2008 laptop I retired last year (I was running Gentoo on that, but I don’t entirely recommend that unless you’re experienced with Gentoo and know what kind of setup to go with). Anyway, SNES emulation is less demanding than running a modern web browser, so your little beastie should be fine for that.

Eudev wasn’t spun up and then maintained for several years for no reason (it spun down again as the pressure dropped off). And you still can’t get the udev source from upstream as a separate tarball—you have to download the entire systemd tarball, even if you don’t want any of the rest of the contents.