How did you guys get into PC gaming ?

[Evonisia]

I've been gaming on a PC longer than anything, mostly because my Dad PC gamed. I remember some probably crap Wacky Races game and Traintown (Train Town?) were the shit of my youth.

My first console was a PlayStation 1 in like 2004 in something like that, then the 360 in 2007. Didn't really become more console-oriented till about 2009, but now I'd say I play PC and console in balance.

 

[Buffoon1980]

I started off playing LucasArts and Sierra adventure games in the late 80s. Zak McKracken, King's Quest IV, Hero's Quest, Space Quest III, these were my first PC gaming experiences, and still amongst the most memorable. However, after that I didn't really have a gaming PC until 1997, and even that barely qualified as a gaming PC. So, in the interim I had a Mega Drive and then a PlayStation. And they were awesome too.

 

[Imre Csete]

My father brought work home on a Commodore64, I started playing LucasArts adventure games from walkthroughs in my language. Then played years of X-Com and Jazz Jackrabbit on DOS, getting games were hard here.

 

[gorfias]

It's weird, because I was playing PC games long before I felt the industry of PC gaming, probably because I was playing on ancient hand-me-down systems like the Commodore 128.

LOL, I had the Commodore 64 and it was relatively new (got it in a trade for a 1973 Dodge Charger) around 1984. The 128 was way out of my league though friends told me of its amazing graphics!

My father brought work home on a Commodore64, I started playing LucasArts adventure games from walkthroughs in my language. Then played years of X-Com and Jazz Jackrabbit on DOS, getting games were hard here.

I played Ultima 3 and 4 on mine. 4 was huge, came with a map, 8 temples, 8 cities, 8 dungeons (and several floppy discs!). The company would go on to release a free emulator to celebrate the games anniversary back in the late 90s. Ends up the entire thing that took me 3 years to finish was well under 1 meg.

I still play consoles, but as a typical household needs a PC anyway, I'd advise throwing a decent graphis card into it and get some great games super cheap. Great, different experience.

 

[CeeBod]

When I grew up in the UK, what consoles existed were crappy, and computers were the best way to game - the awesome Spectrum 48k, the Commodore 64, and then the wonders of 16 bit with the Atari ST and Amiga. At some stage during my student days I upgraded from my old and creaking Atari ST to a shiny 486DX266, and have been a PC owner ever since. )

I do own a console (does that mean I can't be a card-carrying member of the master race?) but that's just for playing head to games when I have friends over, which is the only thing I find consoles do better than PCs.

 

[sapphire475gs]

I was raised in a computing environment exclusively composed of Macintoshes since I was born in 1990. My family, from my own parents to my grandparents living only a few university blocks away, was a Mac family. It had been since the dawn of PCs. They had them for work purposes.

Consoles: not allowed because examples of life-ruination had occurred in some cousins of mine. I was also judged to be addicted to games myself and wasn't trusted to play responsibly. The most I ever got was a Game Boy Pocket, then color. I had only been able to afford a handful of games, and nary a one was ever given to me as a birthday or Christmas present.

Windows: not allowed because they were trash and bore expensive upkeep to keep them working properly, and games could make that happen rather easily.

If you can't imagine it already, I was a starved beast in a cage for games at the dawn of the internet. My obsessions festered went unmet for most of my childhood, and the backlog, console and PC, is almost the size of gaming history itself.

My family subscribed to a magazine called Mac Addict. Magazines in that time would release an issue along with a software CD full of utilities and games to demo as promotional material. Especially prominent was the software of one of that magazines premier sponsors: an indie game developer called BUNGIE. I learned of Marathon, Myth, and Oni well before Halo came out. When it did, I wasn't surprised who made it (history at that point and after has made me sad for the company, of course... they formed my childhood with their work on the Mac).

The magazine introduced me to all sorts of games, though. Ambrosia Software was a significant player on the game scene back then for the Mac, introducing a centipede clone for instance. A space-faring RPG that even attracted my father to games for a bit was Escape Velocity (also made by Ambrosia). I had played strange Mortal Kombat clones with squirrels, a Doom-inspired Bomberman (Boom! it was called), X-Wing, Shattered Steel, etc. Even though it was "just a Mac", it grew my obsession with games to the point where I would eventually study games that weren't available on the system and know everything about them without ever touching them.

My relatives especially helped create a computer gaming culture in our family through Blizzard Entertainment. Though my participating cousin and uncles number a total of three, we held family LAN parties for Warcraft II and Starcraft. Even after the world opened up to me, we still have managed a few times to play Starcraft II as well and continue to plot for more. We still use Macs for that purpose, among others.

These days, I've run out of time in a day to do very much gaming. What I do amounts to a bit of time in Destiny on the PS4 in days I can manage (not even every night). I have a Steam backlog of Mac games and Windows games (I run Boot Camp) on my own Macbook Pro, but I had gotten to a few things before that thing everyone told me to get (read: life) became a glutton for attention. I can't recommend it in good conscience, by the way. If I ever tell you to get one, it's equivalent to me saying "go to hell". It certainly feels that way to me, because my passion for games has yet to wither away.

So, if you ever cared "whether the Mac was made for games or not", know that I came from the standpoint of instead asking "whether games were made for the Mac or not". Thankfully for me, they were, and they still are.

 

[Kevlar Eater]

It was less by choice and more by force. It was late 2010/early 2011 and my relic of a desktop quit working; actually, the HDD died, Windows XP was no longer supported and I've been wanting a new PC a long time ago. Before my old computer died on me, I had been looking at guides on piecing a computer together, what I wanted to build with and with the help of a few reliable experts online, found a good price on parts to get my first gaming PC started. I thankfully bought it all before my old computer died, so there wasn't much waiting between destruction and creation.

Haven't looked back since.

 

[BeerTent]

I was gonna say something to @SilentPony ... But, uhhh... like, 4 or 5 people beat me to it.

Anyway, I grew up gaming on an AMSTRAD. Inserting the floppy discs to load DOS up into RAM, and then popping another disc in to play pool or frogger. As a grew up, we got better computers, and we got the Genesis and Nintendo. The console games were super fun, but often dominated by my brothers with overly complicated games. To me, 3D boxing wasn't complicated. Mechwarrior was simpler than Shining Force 2. So, I played those games on the PC while they had climactic battles in Phantasy Star and SoulBlade. (Fuck you, Li Long.)

We also had this simple top-down game with a blue maze and wireframe tanks. Me and my Dad would play that game all the time, but Mom would never touch a keyboard or console. So, to spend more time with Dad in the morning, we'd fire up the 386, put in our params, and try to gun eachother down. Every day we switched it up with bullets bouncing or destroying walls, there were 3 or so mazes to choose, and sometimes one of my brothers would join in with a 3rd tank. I had a blast.

Eventually as time went on, Shooters became a thing... "Wolf3D" was super exciting to me. Consoles just didn't have it, and when the PlayStation came out, I was too young again, to understand and have the patience for games like FF7 and Metal Gear ("I gunned all the dudes down, I don't understand why I had a low score!!" - Young and incredibly stupid me). So I played DoD and eventually Natural Selection at an astounding 7FPS(I'm so sorry for being that young kid who should NOT have had a mic.) The PC also offered me the ability to see the files the game consisted of, and I remember playing LDA's Treadmarks, and making "custom" weapons by editing the INI files. Modding, was something that the PC has, that Consoles STILL don't have to any purposeful extent. If you don't code or script anything, it's not a fucking mod.

Over time, the XBOX came out, and the only reason I liked that console in my teenage years was the softmodding. FINALLY, a console that could do more than just play shitty games with ham-handed controls? Fucking sign me up!! One of my friends convinced me to play XBOX games, and I convinced him to be part of the PC master race. I never bought live, so we hardly played console games together online. Console games are still fun in the same room, but I'll get to that.

Finally, when I moved out... Dystopia, Programming, Ventrilo and teamspeak... Competitive gaming. The console offered none of this. Dead Space. That was all the 360 had for me. Halo 2 was so meh compared to the 1st that I never actually beat it on my own. 3? Never bothered. And the multiplayer had absolutely no cooperation, nobody talked, and those who did were sappy children. XBOX live gold was the biggest waste of money I ever paid. At this point, the console no longer had free Singleplayer games. The PC didn't offer this per-se, but you get the point. With that said, I try to buy all the games I want now. I'm 27. If I can't afford it, I don't get it. I lost the patience for piracy.

Today? I just can't bring myself to pick up a controller anymore. I see a cool PSX game for nostalga's sake, but after playing it on my Gen1XBOX for 15 minutes, I'm just wishing I had a mouse and keyboard instead. I even caught myself thinking that Legend of Mana would probably be better on the PC, even though that's simply not true at all. I have a few of my GF's consoles huddled around the TV, but... I just can't bring myself to try games like Okami. I'm spoiled. I want my Long War, I want my Verdun and Darkest Dungeon. You can get PayDay and Elite Dangerous on the consoles, but it doesn't feel right. You need a mouse to navigate the Galaxy map, and I just don't have what it takes anymore to think differently to shoot on a console. There's no buggy-ass Hox-Hud on the console either.

Finally, the last problem consoles have had throughout the years was money. Yeah, you could rent PS4 on the genesis 4 or 5 times and beat it, but now-a-days? Renting is trying to be quashed, and the consoles themselves cost more than my PC. Why do I want to buy a $500 do-one-thing machine to play 2 games? If there were 20 or so exclusives I could die for, then I'd consider the console... But until then? I'll never buy a modern console. Neither of those things actually have anything good about them anyway and less and less games are giving us split-screen functionality. The party games on the XBOX and PlayStations were often low-budget and shitty. The Wii is the best choice, and I don't host NEARLY enough parties and events for one of those.

Holy fuck I ranted. I'm sorry. That's why I'm part of the master race. I have an IT background, and consoles just got shittier over the years.

 

[aozgolo]

In 1997 my family got their first computer, nothing special but was a big deal for us, after I finished school that year (I think I just finished 5th Grade) My dad took me to CompUSA to let me buy a game, I chose Dungeon Keeper (over Diablo of all things) and played it rather extensively. Over the next few years I played a couple of CRPGs like Ultima VIII, Baldur's Gate, Diablo, and Betrayal at Krondor. I also had consoles, SNES, PS1, PS2, etc.

A few years pass, my dad finally buys himself a new computer and I inherit the old one, playing it for about a year or two then finally I get my own computer for Christmas in 2002 I believe, and play Neverwinter Nights on it, then I got Morrowind and that kind of solidified my PC Gamer career, especially once I discovered mods. My computer at the time didn't even have a GPU, it would overheat and die every half an hour playing Morrowind and I would just fire it right back up and continue where I left off.

Fast forward several years, I finally build my own computer from a Barebones Kit and have over time upgraded that one until nothing of the original machine I had was left and now I'm here with my own monster gaming rig with over a thousand games on it.

 

[Xeros]

My parents bought a Compaq with Windows '98 and a large case of games and software. One of those discs contained Moto Racer. 6-year-old me was mesmerized by the blinding speed and graphical fidelity. Then I played Half-Life. And the rest, as they say, is history.

 

[leberkaese]

Every single gaming person I know played consoles at one point.

In the beginning, there was peace. We all played on our glorious SNES - nobody owned anything from Sega. But the rows became devided in the year '97, later known as 'the year of the breach', when suddenly some people played on their PS1 instead of a N64. This trend continued to the next generation: Either PS2 or NGC. Dark times were upon us.

But then... one after one they should fall. Each and every one gave into the love of the PC master race. When it would've been time to buy a PS3, a XB360 or a Wii, everybody bought their first gaming PC. We were united once more! Awaiting the appearance of our lord and savior Gaben.

Now seriously: it's really weird. Everybody from my friends was totally into console in their childhood/early youth. But at one point everybody started playing PC. It was pretty sudden. One of the biggest reasons was probably World of Warcraft. Everybody and their dog played that one.

 

[Dirkie]

I think it was 1987 or 1988 when my dad brought a second hand C64 with floppydrive, tapedeck and footwarmer (the powerbrick) home.
Oh, the fun we had with it. Frogger, Zaxxon, Grand Prix and loads and loads of other stuff.
Years passed and on the philips 9100 somewhere in the early '90ies I started with Danger Dave and Captain Comic.
Around 1997-1998 I bought my first own pc and got bitten by Red Alert, Baldur's Gate, Half-Life and Unreal, things somewhat escalated from there...

Still, the most useful feature was the footwarmer that came with the C64, no other computer i owned has that personal touch.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Many, many moons ago my Dad got a PC that came bundled with Assault Rigs, Wipeout and Mechwarrior 2, the enhanced 3-D Rage editions no less.

From then on I've been pretty much hooked. A brief blip of no PC games came after the release of Half Life, but Battlefield 1942 put pay to that gap.

 

[tacotrainwreck]

First there was Megarace. Then there was Doom, and then Command and Conquer. It's been a long, strange trip ever since.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I didn't. I've played some games on PC, because there it was, but I've always been a fan of consoles.

First there was Megarace.

That's the first time I've heard that game mentioned since I played it when I was a kid!

(the host guy was annoying)

 

[Remus]

An Apple 2 Plus with stacks of old Atari games and a few strictly PC adventure titles. After that I got a free Windows PC with one of those at-home degree programs. I used it to play Diablo, Commander Keen, and later, Everquest. My first real gaming rig came some time later - got it custom built to play Doom 3 and to improve frames in Planes of Power for Quarm raids.

 

[JohnnyDelRay]

Too long ago to remember clearly, but it started on a 286 with black and green. Simple helicopter games and then Dig Dug and stuff like that. Moved on to karate-ka, then Prince of Persia, and I guess the floodgates opened after that. My mother ran a school so I spent most of my time there hanging out in the computer lab. My dad also built PC's as a hobby and for work so I always had one around the house.

Though I got a Gameboy and NES soon after they came out, I always gamed PC and Console alongside each other, but usually around 75% PC. Still a PC gamer at heart, and always between 1-2 years late to each console generation.

 

[DarklordKyo]

I played a crapload of various Humongous Entertainment point and clicks, and the PC ports of Earthworm Jim, Sonic 3 and Knuckles and Bug back in the 90s. Afterwards, I was a Console Peasant until I got a Steam account (as well as a computer that could run Tron 2.0). A while later (which includes a graphics card upgrade, a dead PC, and an upgrade to a $1000 desktop) is when I fully converted to the Master Race (though I do still play console games, though mostly on my Wii U nowadays).

 

[The Madman]

A friend of mine had the original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans on his old DOS PC and I always loved playing it whenever I was over. Eventually my father would buy a decent computer for work related stuff and I ended up hijacking it for copious amounts of Age of Empires and Mechwarrior 2, which were pretty much my gateway drugs into PC gaming. Haven't really stopped since.

 

[Creator002]

I was a console person (got my first console at 5, N64).
Around 2011, I felt as if PC had more to offer. I liked single player games more than online, and it seemed every 360 game was online focused. Sold that console, made a PC.
Now I play a bit of both. Console for games with friends and exclusives, PC for alone time and Bethesda games.