Community Did lil baby you start off on computers, consoles, or in the arcade?

On the boob tube, in you parents office, or 25¢ at a time??


  • Total voters
    57

Trisolarian

Junior Member
Jul 12, 2019
1,284
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Never saw a NES or SNES until I was in highschool, which was the mid 2000s lol.

Got to play a tiny bit of my cousins sega gensis and more of his N64, until I got the one I shared with my twin brother.

I played a few arcades, maybe a couple of times a year but it stuck with me each time.

So, combo of arcade and console. I played DOOM in the middle of 2002 for the first time, watched my friend PC game in 2002 and 2003 and got my first actual copy of half life and installed steam in 2004.
 

Digoman

Lurking in the Shadows
Dec 21, 2018
854
2,390
93
Started gaming with an Atari 2600 sometime before 1985. Also played a bit with friends Apple II and Commodore 64. Then my mother returned from the US with a PC-Jr (how the hell she got through customs with that thing and a monitor is still a mystery). Basically she asked a friend what computer to buy - since since the Apple II was popular - he said PC, and she bought... the Jr.



That thing was a nightmare. It had 3 voices and colors, but lower specs than a PC-XT (even if we had the expansion to 256Kb). Also, I think every connector was proprietary except for a RCA output for TVs. When it worked and games had support, it was great because it did offer visuals and sounds way better than others PCs, but I spent a lot of time trying to make things to run and support was minimal, except for Sierra games - probably why to this day I still have a fondness for them. Also trying to solve stupid adventure games puzzles with a text input parser, on a foreign language and before public internet was a basically an activity for you and all your friends.


(Tandy and PC-Jr had basically the same visuals and sound).

Still, it was the machine that got me into gaming seriously... even if we accidentally formatted one of the few games that came with it (a cga Sherlock Holmes one). And also where I started to learn to code in BASIC, which by the way came in a cartridge.

I did have a couple of SEGA consoles - over here Nintendo wasn't as dominant as in a lot of places - the Master System and the Mega Drive, and while I have good experiences with them like the first time playing Sonic, I was already a "PC gamer at heart"... plus the pirated games on PC were a lot cheaper :p

I can't remember if jumped I directly to 386 or had 286 before that, but from that point forward... my god... the late 80's and 90's were something else for games on PC. The first time seeing a 256 color game (King's Quest V), using the MT-32 for sound, the birth of several genres like RTS, Space Sims, City Builders and so on.

Good times :)

And... I almost forgot to push post now because of the darn link lashman posted....
 

gabbo

MetaMember
Dec 22, 2018
3,506
5,542
113
Toronto
My parents had a commodore 64 for work and purchased a couple games for it (I only remember Top Gun). That was my first introduction to gaming. Then they got a 486 for work and my cousin installed copies of Commander Keen and Wolfenstein and Test Drive on it. That was my true introduction to gaming - with occasional visits to a cousin who had a NES but not a lot of games for it.
 

texhnolyze

Child at heart
Oct 19, 2018
3,581
8,584
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Indonesia
My very first encounter with video games was with a NES. I was still like 6 when I visited an older cousin's house at a time. He let me play for a bit (guess what, Mario) and I was instantly hooked. But it wasn't until a couple of years later when my parents finally gave me my first console, the SEGA Genesis. Consoles were imported very late over here, me and lots of my friends were still playing SEGA and SNES in the late 90s, only the riches who were already playing Playstation around that time.
 

Phoenix RISING

A phoenix always RISES!
Apr 23, 2019
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Ann Arbor, MI
www.geeksundergrace.com
I started off with an NES, but my first computer was a RadioShack TRS-80 (Tandy) that played Ultimate Pitfall or something.

Then I was on Sega Genesis. My first PC was a Packard Bell that could play Duke Nukem 3D. My dad got an ATI All-in-One which was better for its TV converter than for accelerating games. Every 3 years we'd upgrade to an E-Machine, which allowed me to slog through Command & Conquer, Myth, Baldur's Gate 2, and Quake II at low resolutions.
 

Gelf

Junior Member
Apr 22, 2019
105
312
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A mix of playing games on a school computer and arcade machines from the time it felt like anywhere you went you could at least find a Pacman or Space Invaders cab. I'm not sure which actually came first.

First home system was an Atari ST computer. Systems like that and the Amiga felt like a good halfway between PC and console, you put the disk in and it just worked but it was still a computer that let you tinker with stuff.
 

C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
3,992
11,886
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I started off with a NES and Super Mario Bros. + Duck Hunt and my dad had a work PC which I was allowed to use when he wasn't home, with all the classic LucasArts adventures installed on it, plus Commander Keen and Doom.

I kinda went back and forth between PC and console at that point. My brother grabbed a SNES that I used some of the time, but I preferred the Mega Drive, and I've generally preferred Sega from that point on.

Kinda went off both PC and Sega Saturn around the N64 era as they were both very expensive and I was young and from a working class family after my folks split up, but jumped back on in my teens for Half-Life and Counter-Strike with some raggedy ass potato PC.
 

Parsnip

Riskbreaker
Sep 11, 2018
3,028
6,665
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Finland
Out of those, Target Renegade was by far my favorite.


A straightforward beat 'em up that me and my brother played for hours upon hours.
It's always so weird to see and hear other versions of games you know in some fashion.
The NES version of Target Renegade has the dopest soundtrack. Bless Tim Follin.

... and Hostages! (none of those were brand new or anything, mind you)

I knew this game as Rescue- The Embassy Mission. On a NES, shocking I know.
 

Kthulhu

Junior Member
Feb 28, 2019
25
36
13
My uncle gave our family his Super Nintendo which came with Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World. My dad would play Sim City 2000 a lot on his Compaq desktop. My church I went to as a kid let kids play GameCubes and N64s on some TV's they had set up which had Smash 64 and Melee, Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Lego Island Racing, DK64, and Buck Bumble of all things.

So I'd say I had a pretty good starting point.