What or who got you onto PC gaming?

On and off for years. I used to play and program on an acorn electron as a smal child. Remember playing leisure suit Larry in school when the teachers weren't looking (not that they would have known!)

At uni in '94 I had a 386sx40 and my mate had a dx2 66. We used to play doom via lan, him on high quality and me on low quality! Was awesome back then! A year or so later I recall some uni friends pooling funds to jointly buy a ps1 at £300!

I later upgraded to a dx2 66 and some stonking 1mb graphics card.

A ps2 came in 2001 (for me) a PS3 in 2007 and I loved call of duty modern warfare. Had every Nintendo console in between. Then nothing. A barren wilderness from about 2010 to 2015. Life got in the way and It was very enjoyable:D

The silence was broken and a 4670k and gtx 770 was bought simply to upgrade my aging MacBook but the lure of gaming got too much and many many upgrades changes later I'm rocking the 7700k/1080 combo.
 
Playing Wolfenstein on the PCs at school probably got me into PC gaming. Although it was a long time after that when i got my first job before I could buy a PC of my own and even then it was a budget PC that just about handled Rogue Spear and Soldier of Fortune 2.
 
Was round my best mates house who had a pc and we played endless hours on DOS games like day of the Triad, hexen, doom and descent. Have been hooked ever since!
 
Don't know about years or anything but I grew up playing NES, SNES, Megadrive, Saturn, Gamegear and then onto the usual PSOne, PS2 all the way through. I remember that one year for Christmas I received an N64 and Mario 64. You would have thought I was the happiest kid alive. Then moved onto owning the Dreamcast and then Xbox. I didn't have online though as we was clueless about how it works, that or we couldn't afford :(. Luckily I became to love WoW (World of Warcraft) later in life and my mum made my day by paying for my subscription.

I only ever remember the time I was first introduced to online gaming. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on PC and I started playing that Jan 07 2005. My connection was utter tripe and I was plagued by that network error message on some days. It was the first game I used to play loads and the first memories I have of playing online with others.

ETA I remember the first time I came accross Americas Army. The file was huge (at the time) and I left the PC on downloaded all day and night. I was gutted when I woke up to find the file was corrupted.
 
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Started with the Speccy +2 128k and then diverged towards NES and SNES with my brother going MS and Megadrive. Amiga 500 followed by a N64 and Gamegear and PS1. Eventually bought a P2 333mhz in 1998 (i think) and was hooked from then with Kingpin (via Wireplay). I did have an Xbox and a 360 but they didn't see much use. Been 7 builds since then and not even considered a console.
 
It started with a console with a floating joystick with 6 inbuilt games, think it was orange and can't remember the name of it but it was pre Atari 2600 era.
Atari 2600.
GCL Invader 1000, yellow Space Invader and a Grandstand Scramble(both handheld) that looked as if they came straight out of the Blakes 7 prop room.:D
ZX81.
Dragon 32.
Amstrad CPC64 that my brother dropped orange squash all over the keyboard but my uncle was a manager in Clysdale electricals and he swapped it for a CPC6128.
Then a break as I discovered how to use my own joystick on the ladies while growing up in the chemical generation.:p
Sega Megadrive after the price drop.
Super Nintendo.
Nintendo 64.
It wasn't until I had an op on my hand that I turned to PC after a suggestion from my brother as I couldn't hold any controller, after salivating over MW3 and being able to play with a Sidewinder stick, I was sold, then progressed onto using keyboard and mouse which probably actually helped recuperate my hand a lot quicker than it would have taken.

Just been down memory lane, great thread Greg, thanks.:)
 
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my dad got a pc from the purple shirt shop for me to do homework and it come with "command and conquer: tiberian sun" and "blood 2: the chosen" and it rarely ever got used for homework lol
 
My dad bought a Commodore 64 home to help with his office work. I soon realised that I could buy games for it, next purchase for me was a Was an intel dx2 66 with 40m mb hard drive, basic graphics but it was enough to run my first PC game which was Civilization. I soon leaned how to upgrade it with an Adlib sound cared followed by a 3dfx 3d graphics card. Games never looked so good, Tomb Raider looked amazing.
 
Game that made me switch to a PC was championship manager back around 1996.
Before then I'd had Amigas, Atari ST, consoles, spectrums & my first computer a ZX81.
 
Gaming also got me into upgrading which I guess is the main reason for more power for most of us.

Bought a HP Dekspro 386 from work, upgraded RAM, HDD and sold it to fund a 486DX based system and it's been a similar ~18 month major upgrade ever since.

My 980 Ti is almost 2 years old so you know what means :)
 
Another ZX81 user reporting in.
Then went to the C64 (Remember Monty Mole?)
After that I had a few consoles, the Mega Drive being a favorite before buying a PC in the early 90's, it came with Windows 3.1 which should date it quite nicely! First game on that was Command & Conquer.
Had a non-PC owning spell around 1999-2004, when I noticed that Half Life had a sequal coming out I bought a new PC specifically to play it and I have owned a PC since then lol
 
I progressed through ZX81 - Spectrum - BBC Model B - Amstrad PC and then various PCs over the years.
Still got 2 BBCs in the loft
 
It started for me when I played BF2 on my mates PC, it blew me away, I then sold my consoles and bought a PC from currys, I had no idea what the specs where, I still don't.
 
Woo So many old people (another one reporting in now)
ZX81
Vic20
Amiga 500
Amiga 1200
PC (god knows what it was but it played Wing Commander barely)
PC upgrade - built by me
PC upgrade - built by me
PC upgrade - Alienware (cost mega money)
PC upgrade - Overclockers (more reasonable but still a lot of dosh) + Vive VR

Never owned a console apart from a second hand PS2 to play Final Fantasy only, and a Wii to try to get fit.
 
i was born with it i think. Mind you my first pc was super expensive coz i was an Amiga fanboy in those days and thought pc was crap :D First PC was a Pentium 60mhz cost £1500 on credit....man i spent ages paying that back haha.
 
DOOM. Definitely Doom.
I started with a Spectrum 48K, then got an Amiga 500 in about 1990. It was a complete game changer... and then I slated PC users for their crappy games... but then I got to play Doom on a friend's DX2 66, and then the multiplayer version of it and DOOM II at his dad's architect company office... the best PCs you could buy then (probably still DX2 66s, or something, but they did have AWE 32 sound cards, or maybe Gravis Ultrasound - anyway they were awesome.

And since then - I had PCs.
486 SX 25 > Overdrive DX4 100 (?) Doom/2/C&C. This had 4MB of RAM and something like an 80MB Hard drive. That was upgraded to 8MB RAM and a 500mb Hard drive at a cost of about 5 billion dollars. Then we added a Soundblaster 16 and CD rom drive (2x speed) .... wow.
Pentium 133 + Matrox Mystique + 3DFX Voodoo 1 + AWE32 - Quake GL goodness, bit of Half life
Pentium III 450, I think... 16Mb Voodoo 3 3000 - HL awesomeness and Unreal/Unreal Tournament
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.1GHz > OC'd to 1.4 - with stupid hoover cooler on it. Replaced it with a much quieter (and better) Taisol. + 32MB GeForce 2 Ultra
Pentium 4 3GHz. Not sure what it had ATI 9800 pro I think.
i7 920 > now a 7950, 24GB Ram... bit long in the tooth now, I think I've had it since the i7s first came out.... could really to do upgrade, but it still runs most things - although nowhere near at decent frame rates with all graphics options up full.

Not sure what I want - something quiet, fast, 64GB RAM and lots of SS storage.
 
My dad won a C64 when I was a little kid and that started it:p We played together occasionally, I went through an Amiga 500, some Nintendo stuff (SNES, Gameboy) etc. I would go on and off for years but I always went back to some occasional gaming (sometimes even heavier). I went from PC gaming to not gaming at all for a couple of years, then to consoles (PS2, PS3, had a PSP for a while), then I had a longer break again before I went back to PC (7850/Phenom 965). I got it upgraded a couple of times and ended up with a 1070/4790k. I also bought a PS4 half a year ago and it definitely keeps me interested in gaming with its amazing exclusives but I still play some games on PC. I don't game nearly as much as when I was a kid but still can't let it go, even though there aren't that many games that can draw me in and sometimes I turn them off after half an hour.

I guess gaming is just a nice pastime to complement my usual stuff: working, music, learning languages and going to the gym:p
 
Mom was a translator so we always had a PC at home. So that became the first platform I gamed on, with stuff like King's Quest, Wolfenstein, Lucasart's games and whatnot. Had an NES, but I only played a bit on it.

With the SNES though, I really switched to being primarily a console gamer, with some PC stuff on the side up til maybe the mid-late 90's. By the PS2 era, I was console-only for the most part all the way up til 2013. I always had a desktop PC, though. Just always a bottom level one not really suitable for gaming since I had moved out from my parents and didn't have a lot of money(I also didn't game much on anything for a number of years in my late teens/early 20's). In 2013, I moved to England(from the US) and bringing over my crappy PC wasn't worth the shipping cost, so I was gonna need to buy a new PC once I got here. I also couldn't bring my consoles(Wii and X360) over since region restrictions on games would be a pain. So my plan was to buy another cheap desktop for general use and a PS4 for gaming once it came out later in the year. After looking at some PC's(still in the US), I discovered that getting a gaming PC really wasn't *that* expensive(like it used to be back in the day) and that buying a cheap PC + PS4 was about the same cost as getting a good PC with decent gaming capability. The clincher was the fact that if I went with a PS4, I'd have a small library of available games, while on PC, I'd have most new games plus ALL the old games available too, and at cheap prices.

Been gaming on PC as my primary platform since then.
 
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