How Did You Become a Gamer?

[marioruggerio]

When I was in Kindergarten I had surgery and had to miss like 2 weeks of school. My dad brought his NES out of the basement, hooked it up and taught me how to play Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. It definitely cheered me up, and my love of games began right there.

 

[nariette]

My brother got into gaming when "lego star wars" on x-box came out. He was a huge fan of lego and star wars, so he got himself a console. I was a really lonely child, and just watched my brother play games usually instead of going out and making friends. As I got older, I thought "hmm, I do want to watch him play games, but my brother isn't playing anything I like to watch right now. Maybe I should start playing games myself". I started with real casual gaming (I still adore the lego games, guilty pleasure), but got more interested in rpg's later on.

My first game I owned was Fable: The lost chapters. The Fable saga is gradually becoming worse in my opinion, beacuse they focus more on the details of the game than the story and combat. Though all the quests are creative and fun, the combat is bad. It will always be one of my favourite game series though. I simply can't hate it.

 

[littlealicewhite]

My mother and her friends were gamers, mostly pen & paper games, but one of them had an Xbox and a couple games. One day they let me join them in playing Halo. That friend died when I was 10, and in his will he left his Xbox and game collection to me. That collection included Halo, the Sims and Morrowind.

 

[Stinovitch]

The first game I played, has to be Duck Hunt if I recall correctly. My Dad used to play that and Mario with me on the NES when I was like 3-4 years old or something. Since then my interest in video games became only bigger when I became older.

 

[the_great_cessation]

The first game I ever owned was Ocarina of Time (It was not the first game I played though as I had played a plethora of different NES, SNES and Genesis titles at friend's houses over the years). Although it would go on to become my favorite game of all time, I originally didn't play it much because I found it very obtuse and quite frightening (I was about 7 at the time). As a result, I grew up mainly on games like Yoshi's Story, Super Smash Bros., Mario Party, Donkey Kong 64 and Kirby and the Crystal Shards. Despite this, gaming was always just a distraction for me or something I did when friends were over. However like most people in my age range, the video game that really changed how I interacted with video games was Pokemon (Yellow version to be specific). I remember getting it on Christmas '99 and just losing my mind over it. I spend literally days playing it and recess at school was always dominated by trading, battling and general Pokemon talk. As a result, the following year or two would be mainly focused on the Game Boy games and it's spin-offs (Snap, Stadium, etc).

As I got older, I ended up returning to Ocarina of Time and Marjoa's Mask (which I also owned but never played much) and I absolutely fell in love. From there on, Zelda became my next big obsession and became a defining part of my childhood. It was from here that I would really branch off and start experimenting with different types of gaming experiences.