How did you get into gaming?

Blazzok

Blazzok

New member
What made you get into gaming; how did it all start?

When I was little (pre school days) we only had a 286 which my mom used for bookkeeping purposes. We had a floppy with a bunch of games on it, but nothing really special that grabbed my attention for hours at a time. I would play a couple of minutes and be done; I would rather play outside.

Then when I was in Grade 1 and my brother in Grade 3, we were in a school bus accident and he broke his leg really badly. He got a SNES from someone (or atleast I think it was an SNES, this was in 1994). It was great. We played so many games on that thing, it was fantastic! That is definitely where our love for gaming started.

We moved to PC gaming in 1997 (or atleast I think it was 97, I might be wrong) when my parents bought a Pentium 133 MHz with Windows 95 because of the whole Y2K bug scare, and my mom didn't want to lose all of her data/information. Where the SNES was great, this was amazing. We only had a demo of Diablo, but we played that demo for all it was worth. We were hooked! Quake, Doom, Blood, Age of Empires we got a hold of a bit later. We also started buying PC Format when it released, so almost all of those demo games were also played.

Those were the days. I should actually check with my brother for more details, but I know somewhere along the way we upgraded to a Pentium 2 MMX and I think there was Pentium 4 later on. We only got our own gaming PC (seperate from my moms work PC) when my brother got an Athlon PC, I think in 2001 or so.
 
We had a 486 which I fiddled with and installed some games on the oldest game I can recall playing was Castle Adventure and then also later got a NES one of these ones which i'm sure many South Africans had back in the day.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Adventure

I played a lot of Games but I think the turning point of potential lifelong dedication / addiction (depends on how you want to look at it :P) came with PlayStation and FF7 that game blew my mind, Also honorable mention of Ultima 8 that was amazing so amazing I couldn't figure out how to finish it in my adolescence gave up and played it again about 5 years ago and finished it.
 
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B1nary said:
We had a 486 which I fiddled with and installed some games on the oldest game I can recall playing was Castle Adventure and then also later got a NES one of these ones which i'm sure many South Africans had back in the day.

View attachment 24033

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Adventure

I played a lot of Games but I think the turning point of potential lifelong dedication / addiction (depends on how you want to look at it :P) came with PlayStation and FF7 that game blew my mind, Also honorable mention of Ultima 8 that was amazing so amazing I couldn't figure out how to finish it in my adolescence gave up and played it again about 5 years ago and finished it.
Click to expand...

I remember getting ultima 8, wing commander, syndicate and ...flight commander(?) with a soundblaster 16 soundcard :D

We had to hide the manual from my mom coz she said it was satanic (the pentagram on the brown cover hahaha still remember it).

Also never finished it, also played it again later and was quite surprised and impressed how far younger me had gone without really knowing anything (i think i'd beaten 2 of the titans...earth and water LOL)


...good times.

That and civ 1, sim city (and later sim city 2000) and duke3d (we then "upgraded" our one machine and kept the old one) deathmatch and red alert! Once i discovered multiplayer I never looked back....
 
Father arrived home with this :
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128 KB of RAM, a 360 KB double-sided 5¼ inch floppy disk drive, a 20MB HDD and an Intel 8088 microprocessor running at 4.77 MHz

It's been downhill from there.
 
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Watching my older brother play Kings Quest on an ancient CGA monitor. Plus my Dad always got new games from a friend at work. I also remember many nights on an Atari 2600.

Then I got a Golden China for my birthday.

Never did get a Mega Drive no matter how much I begged - something about having to work for what you want in life blah blah.
 
B1nary said:
We had a 486 which I fiddled with and installed some games on the oldest game I can recall playing was Castle Adventure and then also later got a NES one of these ones which i'm sure many South Africans had back in the day.

View attachment 24033

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Adventure

I played a lot of Games but I think the turning point of potential lifelong dedication / addiction (depends on how you want to look at it :P) came with PlayStation and FF7 that game blew my mind, Also honorable mention of Ultima 8 that was amazing so amazing I couldn't figure out how to finish it in my adolescence gave up and played it again about 5 years ago and finished it.
Click to expand...

i had one of those nes clones (Called an excellent computer, essentially a black golden china) with a reggies 32 in 1 compilation cartridge was a present for my 5th bday in 1990.

First pc we got was in 1994, 386 sx 33 with 4megs of ram, 30mb mfm hard drive and an orange monochrome monitor that probably gave off a shitload of radiation, it ran dos 6.0 and windows 3.1. solitaire and ski free looked amazing, there was also a game called pipe dream which you had to connect pipes to route water
 
No amount of Googling is helping me. We had a console with 1 wired remote control and 1 IR controller. I cannot for the life of me remember what the console itself looked like.
 
Blazzok said:
No amount of Googling is helping me. We had a console with 1 wired remote control and 1 IR controller. I cannot for the life of me remember what the console itself looked like.
Click to expand...

I remember a couple of these
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1024px-Atari-2600-Wood-4Sw-Set.jpg
1024px-ZX_Spectrum128K.jpg

Between friends and family members that had those.
 
my step dad was into computers and he introduced us. i still fondly remember our first 386 computer and playing F1 on it
 
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