How did you get into gaming?

[Liquid Marlon]

Mario Hash Cookie (not even that much of exaggeration btw)

 

[White Devil]

My oldest sister and her boyfriend (later to be husband) had a NES in the early 90s when I was a kid. I can still remember the first time I sat down to play Castlevania and Super Mario 3. After that, I just started gaming more and more and a few years later for one of my birthdays, my dad got me the Killer Instinct edition of the Super Nintendo. I still have the Killer Kuts soundtrack CD it came with.

 

[Captain Syrup]

I still have the Killer Kuts soundtrack CD it came with.

 

[White Devil]

Legit the best track on there.

 

[NoonmanR]

From a very early age, so early i dont have memories of it.

 

[Blue Screen of Death]

Older brother played video games, so I was kinda just born into it.
Earliest memories I have of gaming are playing shit on the Nintendo 64. The original Smash Bros and Diddy Kong Racing being two favorites of mine as a kid.

 

[Scale Smerch]

Very early on, got hit with a combination of Gameboy Color (Pokemon Red and Yellow), the original Gameboy courtesy of my mom (Tetris, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and Dr. Mario in particular), and then the N64 for one Christmas with Diddy Kong Racing, Battle Tanx, and Banjo Kazooie. After that I fell into the PS2 hole and JRPGs and have since never looked back.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Simple. My father had a SNES and i start playing at the age of 5.
Never took a day (except in vacations) without play someshit.

 

[White Devil]

Very early on, got hit with a combination of Gameboy Color (Pokemon Red and Yellow), the original Gameboy courtesy of my mom (Tetris, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and Dr. Mario in particular), and then the N64 for one Christmas with Diddy Kong Racing, Battle Tanx, and Banjo Kazooie. After that I fell into the PS2 hole and JRPGs and have since never looked back.

Battle Tanx was the fucking shit.

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

My first console was a Gamecube. Sonic Mega Collection, Sonic Adventure DX, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, Mario Sunshine, and Spongebob: Battle for Bikini Bottom, among others, were all great to 6-year-old me, but I became a gamer for life one fateful day visiting my dad in Pittsburgh. We went to The Exchange (a local media shop there who're still open(!)), and I saw this box art:

Being a HUGE fan of pirates at the time, I BEGGED dad for a copy of this game ('twas only $20). Went home, excitedly plopped it into my Gamecube, and my (not-insubstantial) interest in video games blossomed into a outright passion that hasn't gone away since. Sadly sold it to pay for a PS4 (a decision I'm STILL kicking myself over), so replayed it on Dolphin last year with my newly-built PC. Still holds up pretty damn well, I'm happy to say! REMAKE IT ALREADY, SEGA, YOU COWARDS!

The Exchange is a pretty nice store chain, but the games can be overpriced nowadays. Nevertheless, a friend I’ve known since grade school and I have gotten quite a few good games there. Sonic Colors, The SpongeBob Movie game, Animal Crossing New Leaf, and I think I bought said friend a copy of Super Mario Galaxy 2 at The Exchange for his birthday like 3 years ago.

 

[Mary the Goldsmith]

I was around 5 years old I think, I was playing in my room with my toys, and then my uncle came into my room and said he was going to show me "something fun", and he led me to the living room and showed me he had bought a SNES as a christmas gift, my dad and him had just finished connecting it to the TV and stuff, and we played Super Contra, I've pretty much been playing vidya since then

 

[Jason Wynn]

Mostly through my dad. Used to watch him play RPGs like Might & Magic on the Commodore 64. I’d “help” him draw out maps for that game on grid paper. We’d play games like Asteroids and Combat on the Atari 2600, and when I got a NES for my 6th birthday, he played it just as much as I did. Might sound lame but one of my fondest memories of early gaming is playing a shit ton of Bases Loaded 2 with my dad over a summer. Good damn times

 

[Master Xehanort]

My dad was a gamer. So when I was born and growing up, I learned to play from him. First console was the N64 (though I did play a PS1 at one point or another). Obviously I became a lot more obsessed with it in my teenage and adult years, but I hardly play games now. In fact the only games I've actually "bought" are free games lately.

 

[Mista House]

My cousin had a ps1 and I used to play Medieval on it. After that my parents got me a Ps2 and the rest is history.

 

[Kheapathic]

Babysitter's son and their son's friend had a NES. Fondly remember sitting on the floor playing Mario, Kung Fu Master, Ninja Gaiden, and Excitebike. Bugged my mom until she relented, it's been downhill ever since 1988 or so. Then found out my cousin's had one too; They had Ducktales and The Little Mermaid (best Capcom games) as well as Legacy of the Wizard.

 

[Soycast Guy]

I know this is a pretty basic answer, but Mario was my introduction to gayming. When I was really young I would play the normal Mario games, Mario party, Mario kart. The DS was my childhood.

 

[beef lo mein]

For some reason my aunt was really on top of new techie stuff. She had a microwave when they were basically brand new, she had all these weird, fancy push button appliances, and she had Pong when it came to the home market. My cousins were really decent about letting me play with them even though I must have sucked, I was five. They had a lot of handhelds, too, like Mattel Football and Merlin, I still don’t get through a holiday season without the memory of that tackle bleep from Football.

I was a weird little kid, but I was super, super into video games in general. My mom and dad both bowled on a league, and I played a lot of Asteroids and Missile Command, (which was my favorite) at the alley while mom and dad were taking out a 7-10 split. When the Atari 2600 came out, my grandma got it for me for my birthday. She knew how much I loved playing with my cousin’s games, and she had saved all year for it for me. It was the coolest present I’ve ever got, to this day, in terms of how excited I was. I cried so hard. My dad set it up for us, and me and grandma played Combat all night long. We used to play Super Breakout and Night Driver and Pinball and Casino on it together, those were ‘our games‘ and we always had the best time. We kept that up until she passed in the late nineties. More than anything, I wish I could see my gran, sit down with her, and play games again.

It is definitely kind of embarrassing to post this, since I’m probably one of the older oldfags here, but I still game. For me it’s just as relaxing as watching a movie or reading a book. I’ve had every system, pretty much, though not an Intellivision or ColecoVision (that one was the big deal, graphics wise) and very oddly, never an SNES! Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, Gamecube, PlayStation, Xbox, all of those. I get sad sometimes—games are in a horrific slump right now—but I’m always hopeful that things will get better. I save all my consoles as I can’t bring myself to toss them; they’re all in great shape and I wish I could set up a little game room just for chilling and playing games or movies. The survival horror genre is my favorite, Silent Hill is my first actual favorite, but Rule of Rose is one of the best titles—and I also love ARPG’s. I wish that they’d do a remake or remaster of Champions of Norrath. Tomb Raider was amazing to me when I first saw it, it was in the window of a game store on Broadway and it ran constantly people would just stand there staring at it, like they couldn’t believe their eyes, the way it looked. KotOR was great and I loved DA; Red Dead Redemption and Fallout were awesome. Arcanum is still really high on my life for all time favorites. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was great, Deadly Premoniton was crazy fun; I like it when people take chances and make something weird that ends up working out. I also played stuff like Style Savvy, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon on my many DS’es.

Right now we’re playing Judgment on the PS5. I wish you could go into more buildings in that world, it looks so great. About halfway through. I play a lot on Steam, too and am looking forward to getting a Steam Deck next go round. We have a private Wrath of the Lich King server that’s just friends and family and that is tons of fun, just enough to raid, though no battlegrounds, sadly. We joke that we’re going to be playing that till we drop dead; it might even be true. Anyhow, fun thread, and it’s neat to hear everyone’s recollections. Nice to see what everyone is into and how they got started. Going to play some D2 (no remaster!) and chill with some Christmas tunes. Hope everyone is having a good one.

 

[Therapy Dog]

One of my earliest memories is watching my brother play Space Invaders on some sort of console, though I have no idea which it might have been.

My father also used to pirate games from his friends at work in the late 80's and he'd bring round random shit on like 10 floppy disks (the old 5 inch ones that could only store like 1 megabyte per disk). Some of my favorites as a kid were the Quest series of games from Sierra, like King's Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest etc. They literally taught me how to read and write at age 3 since they were parser-based (as in, you have to type shit in order to get your character to do things in the game).

 

[Wesker]

Got a hand-me-down console when my cousins got SNES.

Earliest game I can remember playing.

 

[I am Jack's dead arm]

First game I remember playing is Space Invaders at the bar my mom worked at. I never had a 2600. I did get a Laser 128 (Apple II clone) and Sega Master System when I was in my teens. The first console I got with my own money was the Genesis.