How did you get into gaming?

I played lots of MAME when I was a kid, mostly fighting games, tho the first game that really got me into a more hardcore gaming was Unreal tournament
Silliness of the term "hardcore" aside, it's interesting how emulation tends to be a gateway for nominal console players into PC stuff.
forced at gunpoint, but i wont bore you with details....
cool thanks for the solid
 
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No, I am not this kid. What had happened was I was struggling with 4th grade and was irritated ALL the time with my teacher, so my Dad made a deal with me; if I behaved that entire year, he'd buy an N64 with StarFox. So I held my temper and got it. I still have it, but it's sitting in some drawer AFAIK.
 
Faxanadu, being an NES game, didn't really have save slots. You saved your progress with passwords (called "mantras" in game) and they were typically long, convoluted strings of characters. The catch was that if you could figure out which characters signified what you could basically "edit" your "save game" by tampering with a given mantra until you got results. I did that a couple times once I figured out certain things. A number of games had this kind of system on the NES, since the space on the cartridge was rarely enough to allocate space for saves.
Passwords was a necessity for many games coming from the Famicom Disk System where games could be saved to the disk. On cartridges it would need re-writable memory and a battery, that shit cost money. So Nintendo had an idea. Zelda used a gold box because it could save the game to cart while games like Metroid and Kid Icarus had a silver box which meant password saves, black box games had neither saves or passwords. That scheme was NOT well communicated so they abandoned it. And Konami put all their games in silver boxes anyway.
 
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As a young child I lived in the ghetto surrounded by blacks and mexicans thus I wasnt allowed to leave my fenced in yard as a kid. Thus my parants plied me with nes snes and so on.
 
My cousin's got a Nintendo 64 and at first I resented it because they never wanted to play outside any more but I eventually started playing and got hooked then asked for one for xmas
 
A long, long-ass time ago. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong arcade machines when I was like five. When I was seven, we got an IBM Aptiva with a Pentium II running Windows 95 and a 17" Sony Trinitron to go with it, as well as copies of the Sonic 3 & Knuckles PC port and Need For Speed II SE.


That was back before Electronic Arts was evil. It was a happier time.

We stuffed a Diamond Monster 3D II card in that Aptiva. God, the graphics were so amazing in 3dfx Glide mode with the Voodoo2. Look at the specularity effects on those cars.


3560-front.jpg

State of the fucking art.
 
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How does one not? Games were always everywhere.

I suppose a big influence were the vidya review TV shows that played during saturday morning cartoons. I don't really remember a time I was alive and old enough to form memories when I didn't play video games to some degree.
 
I suppose a big influence were the vidya review TV shows that played during saturday morning cartoons. I don't really remember a time I was alive and old enough to form memories when I didn't play video games to some degree.
Early 90s, 2000s? I bet Sonic was one of them.

My cousin's got a Nintendo 64 and at first I resented it because they never wanted to play outside any more but I eventually started playing and got hooked then asked for one for xmas
Do you remember the game?
 
Early 90s, 2000s? I bet Sonic was one of them.
Late 90s. Sonic was actually never big where I lived, my country was predominantly PC and Playstation.

The biggest national TV station (imagine the equivalent to NBC or CBS in America) had a game review show that aired every Saturday morning for an hour, but there was also a smaller cable TV network that had dedicated shows for both PC gaming and console games each with one episode a week, with repeated viewings throughout the week. And freaking ESPORTS with commentated Counter-Strike and Quake 3 games (on TV! in 2001!).

I had a magazine subscription to both the local Playstation magazine and the PC gaming magazine (which eventually merged) almost from the time I learned to read. Like I said, it was simply too big of a part of culture to avoid. Asking "how did you get into gaming" would be like asking "how did you get into television"? It would've been a much bigger commitment to avoid it than to be dragged into it.
 
I was 4. Mom bought me a Super Nintendo for my birthday. Yoshi's Island was my first game for it. Been gaming since.

Edit: Actually, I sometimes attribute it to my grandpa buying me a Gameboy Pocket with Donkey Kong Land III. To be honest, I don't remember which came to me first.
 
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I was a very small kid and enjoyed playing Mario Bros. I used to call it "the little man game."

I was later wowed by Sonic the Hedgehog's graphics and jumped ship to Sega. Despite being a loyal customer for years, eventually the lack of quality first-party games and JRPGs wore me down.

Oddly, I don't have the same appetite for Nintendo that I did as a child. I respect Nintendo's business prowess even if their first-party games just aren't for me. I played the shit out of 2D Mario and Zelda and that's quite enough for me.
 
I remember playing Duke Nukem and Commander Keen on my Dad's computer, but I didn't really get into gaming until my Dad came home with an N64 and a copy of Donkey Kong 64.
 
My siblings plopped an old gameboy with Pokemon Blue in front of me when I was barely a babby

Twenty years later I'm a bitter autist who hates gen 8, can list every pokemon in order along with when they evolve and levels they learn moves at, and I can recite the Vaporeon compatibility copypasta off the top of my head.

Autism is a hell of a fuckin thing (:_(
 
My brother bought a PS1 when they released, and I sometimes got to play Formula 1 95 and FIFA 2000 on it. And I'd sneak in some GTA 1 in the rear occasions I was home alone or awake before anybody else.
Then he moved out, and brought the PS1 with him. So I pretty much stopped gaming until I got the PS2 and Ape Escape.
Around the time the PS3 came out I kinda stopped gaming again, and stayed away until I bought a PS4 the year after it came out.

That reignited my love for gaming to the point that I've now dug up my old consoles, and bought a gaming PC that could probably get me a somewhat decent car.
Ah well.
 
My first console was a Sega Genesis, i got it in the early-mid 2000's and had the Jurassic park game on it. I didn't play it all too much but that was my introduction to gaming, what really got me into gaming was when my Dad bought me a ps2 with a copy of the original Sly Cooper game and a copy of Lego Star Wars. Still have fond memories of those games.
 
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