What or who got you onto PC gaming?

Nice thread Gregster (It beats arguing over AMD/Nvidia any day LOL). Blimey I'm 49 and I can remember having a Binatone 8 in 1 orange and black piece of plastic with two paddles and a gun for shooting the moving square bouncing round the telly. Then it was an Atari 2600 or VCS as it was called back then. That started my love for Atari and I went on to an Atari 400 then an 800 with a real keyboard and then I think it was an 800XE with a 1050 drive (Happy Chipped) and then I got jealous of all the cool Commodore games and got a Commodore 64 second hand. Then it was an Atari ST as I loved messing around with keyboards and midi at the time, then with my first proper job I bought an Amiga 500 on the never, never. Then just after getting my first hard drive for it from Silica Shop I sold it all to buy a PC because I wanted to play Falcon and Red Baron. It was a beige (wern't they all LOL) midi sized beast with a 386DX 33mhz chip and a 105MB Hard Disk (Yes MB not GB) which was great for a few years until the hard disk crashed hard while playing Wing Commander. I've been building my own ever since. Milestones in gaming have been anything by Synapse software or Lucasfilm on Atari and anything by Adventure International. C64 there was Paradroid by Andrew Braybrook and stuff like Delta. Music of C64 games was sublime back in the day, that SID chip could sing. Atari ST/Amiga there was Starglider and the only football game I ever liked...Kick Off. AS far as PC games goes the big game for me was Wolfenstien 3D which begat Doom which begat the one that changed it all...Half-Life which gave birth to Half-Life 2. There have been many many many amazing games along the way and I am sure we will get many more....if only we had time to actually play them instead of arguing whose card is the best or whose is the fastest. As long as it runs smooth at the resolution you have then why worry. It's the games that matter at the end of the day. If GFX cards keep going up in price I will be going for a Scorpio (as long as they allow mouse n Keyboard, of course ;)). And I'll keep what I got for internet and other stuff. It was long.....my apologies :p
 
Great to look back! I'm 36 and started really early on an Atari 2600 playing Pitfall, DigDug etc. Moved onto an Amstrad CPC464 (with colour monitor...bonus!), head over heels and paperboy were a couple of favourites. Had a really obscure Amstrad console after that I've forgotten the name off. Then had a Megadrive followed shortly by an Amiga 500 Plus, my favourite computer by far, still got it to this day and fire her up now and again. Used to subscribe to Amiga Power....epic magazine in its prime. After the Amiga had a PS1 until in 1999 got my first PC, a P3 450 with 64mb ram and a 6 gig hard disk. Being a noob I didn't realise the importance of the GPU. It had a very poor ATI rage pro chip on the MB, so I shorty afterwards corrected my schoolboy error and bought a 3DFX Voodoo 2000 and discovered the joys of Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament. Been a PC gamer ever since but have also had PS2, PS3 and PS4 (recently sold the PS4 after realising that it was only sat gathering dust), so currently on PC only, got an I56600k, GTX1070 and 16gb ram so a fairly decent spec. Toying with getting a VR headset in near future.
 
Best friend had a high end PC and a ISDN line which made playing games amazing at the time compared to playing on a Playstation. Then became a hobby for me and started upgrading my PC to be able to game and been at it ever since.
 
Probably when we got our first pc at home. It was a pentium based system running windows NT i think it was? Used to love playing about with that as a kid. But as i grew up i got given the NES which was old but played it a lot especially mario. Which got me into gaming. Then we got a cheap but cheerful Intel Celeron based system. It's where i got into pc gaming properly. I tinkered with it, upgraded the memory from 64Mb to 128Mb with Windows 98 on it. Upgraded the OS to Windows XP then because games ran like crap on the onboard graphics even after overclocking the celeron from 1.9Ghz to 2.3Ghz and getting 512Mb of ram i decided right need a graphics card! Then that was it i kept upgrading until around this time the xbox 360 hit.
Used to play PS2 and Xbox quite a bit but PC dominated until i got the Xbox 360 and i let my PC gaming go some what. Until i went to University where i used my uni money as an excuse to get a proper desktop computer for uni work as well as save up for a decent graphics card.


That reminds me, when i used to play Age of empires a lot online with a dial up connection ohh man. Mother used to pull the line to disconnect me so she could use the phone. The rage was unreal lol.
 
Great to see so much love for the Amiga. Those of us fortunate enough to have experienced that generation were very lucky. Shareware was big and some of the demos were amazing feats of music and artistry (Jesus on Es - Spaceballs etc). Me and my brother would play Kick off 2 a lot and the genuine rage in him was real and he truly wanted to kick my head in :D I don't think he ever once beat me either :D :D :D

Going a bit further back, the C64 was very impressive and anyone remember Hypersports/Daly Thompsons Decathlon/Summer and winter games? I went through 3 joysticks on those games with mates and the faces pulled were hilarious :D Elite was my true long lasting game though and I even had a cardboard cutout of what was what laying over the keyboard for controls.
 
Let's think - 49 here
First computer was probably a zx80 which I built from kit form with my dad. Going from there I had a Zx81 and then a ZX Speccy by which time I'd learnt to program and was freelancing writing Games for the likes of Ocean (mainly arcade copies) and the Gargoyle games (some of the games i was involved in will be remembered :) )
From there I took a break (Uni etc) and then had both a Atari ST (mainly for music) and then an Amiga 500 600 and 1200. I had retired from writing games (had lost touch while at Uni) but funnily enough one of my housemates during my first job post Uni was a published Games programmer for the Amiga so our shared house was very much a games mecca with many consoles PS1 , Saturn, N64 , Snes, a series of quirky old 8 bit computers (I used to collect them , Jupiter Ace etc :) ), plus a whole load of PC's (he used to run the PC Hardware website www .bxboards. com (anyone remember that - btw what's there now is totally unrelated - the original BXboards went a long time ago) so we always had kit to review)
From there once the computer scene had pretty much settled down to PC or Mac , I had a series of PCs
 
First computer zx81 followed by a 48k and a spectrum +2a.

This was followed by a Sam Coupe. A commercial failure but I loved that computer. Had to sell it a few years ago as needed the money and really regret it :(

I then moved over to an Amiga 600. So many great games and fond memories.

Following that it was a natural progression over to a PC. First PC was bought with a first year student loan in 1995. Money well spent :D
 
59 here..
Started with a Dragon 32 which was impressive for the time
Spectrum 48 - spent ungodly number of hours on Manic Miner
Acorn Electron
Acorn BBC
Amstrad PC (college work)
Amiga 500 (added a 52MB HD :O )
Amiga 500+
PC 386SX 33 - the only PC I have ever bought, all others since I've built myself.
From there I moved on to 486DX2 66, DX2 100 and added hard drives, 3DFX graphics, sound cards and anything else I could get my hands on, including one of the first CD writers.

I originally moved to PC for Civilization, Doom and Arena, the ancient ancestor of Skyrim. :D
 
I was introduced to gaming first by my farther (who worked for BT) he had an Commodore Amiga, It got me playing all these games:

Bloodwych
Nitro
Alcatraz
Wizball
Dizzy

These are just the few that I remember! After that we had a Megadrive and various consoles up until the Sega Saturn, after this I got my 1st computer it was a Time Machine the only spec I remember was that it had the 1st AMD CPU that was clocked at 1Ghz and was a socket A. It had an on board graphics card, I tried upgrading it to include a 3DFX Voodoo but it didn't have an AGP socket. After I learnt the error of my ways I took a trip to PC world to purchase a HP tower that had one but it was a Intel Pentium 3 CPU.

When I got my 1st job at 17/18 I started saving for a new PC, I decided to purchase an Alienware PC I spent about 3 grand in total. It had a Intel P4 Extreme Edition CPU 3Ghz, and a Radeon 5870 (that's all I can remember). After that I then decided to make my own PC's rather than buy them, I've been building them for friends for a long time, I'm now on my 4th PC that has a full custom water cooled loop with SLI graphics cards!
 
I go back all the way to building a zx80 kit and philips g7000 console
zx81, spectrum atari800xl atari 520ST amiga 500 then a 1200, all playstations, all nintendos


but it was mechwarrior that made be buy a PC!

I still have pc and multiple consoles, that way I dont miss out on exclusives...platform isnt important as long as the game is good
 
What got me into pc gaming was the game ultima underworld,i loved games like dungeon master,eye of the beholder on the amiga,
but when i saw ultima underworld,i just had to get a pc.
My 1st pc was a 25mz intel cpu,4mb memory,130mb harddisk,no sound card,3.5in and 5 1/4 in disk drive,14 inch monitor,cost £1200,that was 1992.
 
My dad bought a PC in I think it was '94, it came with a butt load of game demo CDs, duke nukem, theme park and loads of others, been a PC gamer ever since.

Before that we had a spectrum and an amiga which we still have in the attic I believe, along with all the games we had for them. :)
 
=XDC=FluphyBunny said:
Oh wow myself and my brother played that on the Spectrum. Black and yellow graphics, split screen game play, sharing a tiny keyboard, and its still one of my favourite gaming experiences to this date. Also Eye of the Beholder on the Amiga was amazing.
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Dungeon Master was the best out of all the Dungeon crawlers. Played it again recently downloaded RTC and its still amazing today 30 years later.
Games were so much better years ago, i hardly game at all nowadays,, been there seen it done it.
 
Always had a home computer growing up.

Got a ZX Spectrum +2, then bought an Amiga from a friend.

Dabbled with a NES for a while.

I then reluctantly purchased a PS1 as unable to afford a PC... the day I got it, my father who I thought knew nothing about computers said "What does that do".. I replied "plays games". He said "Well, is that it, that is a waste of money, me and your mum will lend you the money for a PC".

I then bought a P200MMX with 8MB RAM and a filthy S3 Virge VGA card which I later upgraded to a Matrox Mystique 220 with a Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo card:D

Championship Manager and Half Life were my games of choice.

The rest is history.

Thank you Dad :D
 
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Was always into gaming had a NES but then my dad got a 386 pc with Prince of Persia and some Lamborghini or similar racing game

this was back in 1990 or 1991 and pc has been my preferred platform since
 
First game I ever played on my own PC was Age of Empires 2

Fast forward many years later... Wanted to see what the PCMR hype was about so bought a GTX 760 to try out PC gaming.

Wasn't enough so built a new rig in 2015 with a 5820k and 980ti to play with all the bells and whistles
 
mossi123uk said:
in school I took I.T class and all we did all lesson was play diablo 2
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Wish our PC's at school were powerful enough to run Diablo 2, they had a hard enough time running Paint! :P

Though someone did manage to install Wolfenstein 3D on the library computer, which was considered an act of god.
 
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