How did you get into gaming?

[Lone MacReady]

Parents got me this purple brick called a gameboy color in 2000, it had a square cartridge inside that said Pokemon with a blue turtle on the front. The rest was history.

 

[Spit bucket]

Went over to a friends house one day and he had a ps1. Just a few shitty games but it was something totally brand new. Asked my folks for a game console and they got me a ps2.

 

[Helvítis Túristi]

Parents bought sega genesis and one of the cartridges had multiple games on it. It was sort of a sega collection. Had columns, streets of rage, golden axe, ecco the dolphin, and maybe one more.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

My mom handed me a Nintendo controller when I was 2 years old. My grandparents from my dad's side also had an Atari2600 with Pacman, and Hangman. They also had Q*Bert on the NES.

I moved over to the Sega Genesis around the time they started bundling it with Sonic 1. That, Lemmings, and Toejam & Earl were my first games for that system and I fell in love with the Genesis ever since. In our house, my sister became the Mario/Nintendo person and I was the Sonic/Sega person.

 

[OrionBalls]

There was an arcade in the roller rink that had Tempest and Ms Pac-Man. I didn't like skating or cardboard pizza, so the quarters went in the machines. Eventually dad got a computer, and life became all about Betrayal at Krondor and LOTR.
E- Eventually grew out of it, though. The newest gaming system we have is a Game Cube.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

My mother actually got me into gaming; she had a PS1 and used to play Small Soldiers on it. Eventually I started playing on it as well and it went from there. Good times.

 

[Bloodbjorn]

I got a hand-me-down NES in the mid-80s from my aunt that I would play on a black & white monitor. Super Mario Bros was most likely my first game. I miss going to the local video rental store and getting shitty Simpsons games.

 

[Reverend]

CalecoVision at a friends house playing Q*Bert. I've never seen something so beautiful in my life as a child, so began my journey for the megaest of pixels.

 

[The Last Stand]

Went over to a friends house one day and he had a ps1. Just a few shitty games but it was something totally brand new. Asked my folks for a game console and they got me a ps2.

PS2 was very popular at the start of the millennium. Your parents knew that they were doing. Favorite PS2 game?

Parents got me this purple brick called a gameboy color in 2000, it had a square cartridge inside that said Pokemon with a blue turtle on the front. The rest was history.

Fun fact: the Game Boy Color was meant as a revision of the original Game Boy. Nintendo needed more time to do a successor.

it all started with

Lego Batman: The Videogame​

My 360 came with that game.

 

[Agarathium1066]

A family member had a NES and Mario World which was the start of playing console games. Eventually we had a PC that could run one of the many permutations of Oregon Trail. Played both quite a bit, eventually we got a PC that was good enough to run other games. Those with some educational (perceived) value were allowed because I enjoy history as a subject. A few that come to mind are the Caesar series, Pharaoh, Age of Empires, I believe a Civil War strategy game I can't quite recall the name of.

Eventually it became a fond hobby.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Started at about 3 or 4 by messing with an unplugged Genesis controller while my sister played Sonic and Hang On. Figured out it was unplugged, so I decided to try the games for myself one day. First game I played was the first Sonic. Eventually got her PS1 and NES, then a Gameboy Color.

PC gaming also started quite young. Started with Jumpstart games. Loved clicking the mouse, so I played whatever clicky game could run on my computer. Eventually discovered Zoo Tycoon and was hooked on business management games. Also had Rollercoaster Tycoon, but didn't like it as much.

 

[Übertroon]

My dad bought Age of Empires II when it released and I was fascinated by the campaign. The first Frederick Barbarossa mission is still seared into my mind to this day.

 

[The Last Stand]

Has PC gaming evolved from the 90s? Is it the same as it is now?

How would many of you describe it?

Started at about 3 or 4 by messing with an unplugged Genesis controller while my sister played Sonic and Hang On

So the legends ARE true.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Didn't really play on PC in the 90's. My family got a computer in about 1999. Since it was just easy to run edutainment games for me until Zoo Tycoon, I wouldn't be able to say much about it. Had no problems on the Windows 98 computer until I got Zoo Tycoon 2. Had to get a low end Nvidia GPU put in it and Windows XP.

Played the crap out of that Mahjong game, too. Serious PC gaming only started when I got into abandonware and killing laptops with Morrowind in high school. You'd be surprised how deadly Morrowind is to crappy laptops.

 

[Gig Bucking Fun]

I became gay

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

Older siblings had a PS1 and their own Game Boys. My earliest memories are of them playing Spyro and Gen 1 Pokemon. I grew attached to the games and ended up being more invested in gaming than both of them.

 

[The Last Stand]

My brother had a PS1. We hooked it in the family room when he would visit. That's my earliest memory of video games.

 

[Shield Breaker]

Watching my dad and sister play NES.

 

[Molester Stallone]

My brother and I were give a NES for Christmas in 1988 I believe it was. That pretty much started my love/hate relationship with the vidja.

 

[Jerri's Kid]

CalecoVision at a friends house playing Q*Bert. I've never seen something so beautiful in my life as a child, so began my journey for the megaest of pixels.

We had a ColecoVision until some asshole robbed our house. Zaxxon, Tapper and Frenzy were so much fun and they were decent arcade ports.

Has PC gaming evolved from the 90s? Is it the same as it is now?

How would many of you describe it?

I started PC gaming in the late 80s. A lot of things have changed in both good and bad ways. In the 80s and 90s, you didn't have as many games to choose from but at the same time a whole bunch of popular genres had yet to be discovered so a title like Doom blew people away. There also weren't millions and millions of dollars at stake so devs had more freedom to experiment, which is why you had the 90s "golden age" of PC gaming.

However, this also meant that there were plenty of really horrible games that went straight into the dollar bin. The modern PC gaming environment may not have as many mind blowing titles per year, but it's also easier to avoid total garbage because we have all sorts of resources like streams, reviews and refund policies to make more informed decisions. Most "bad" games are simply mediocre to me, so my view of the industry isn't as cynical as a lot of the posts on /v/.

The hardware and software involved with PC gaming also had different issues. In the 80s and early 90s, games had to be released with fewer bugs since hardly anyone had access to the Internet ( I didn't until 1993 and then it was only dialup). It was nice not having a product riddled with day one bugs, but sometimes a game would still not work and then you'd have to deal with getting your physical media replaced. For instance, my first copy of The Longest Journey had a disc read error that was Funcom's fault so you had to send them proof of purchase to get a working replacement copy. Today, I may occasionally encounter a broken game, but I can usually find an official or fan-made patch that fixes it or at least read some reviews that warn me ahead of time.

Figuring out how to get your hardware to run the game properly was another problem. Sometimes I wanted to throw my Sound Blaster card out the window for this reason. Also, multiplayer wasn't really a thing unless you went to a 90s LAN party, and not everyone knew how to configure it correctly so it would sometimes take hours of tweaking to get it to work.

Lastly, upgrading your PC to play the latest games was more expensive in the 80s and 90s, but I was also a kid then and didn't have as much money. I missed out on some major titles like Wing Commander 3 for this reason. Today, you can build a PC that will run pretty much everything on at least medium settings for a reasonable price. Even with the COVID shortages, it's not as difficult to buy and build a PC that does what you want.

Day one DLC cash grabs, lootbox gambling schemes, pre-orders, unfinished early access games and unnecessary politics, however, are modern PC gaming problems that I won't miss if they go away.

I hope this answers your question.