What or who got you onto PC gaming?

My parents in the mid 90's just as both consoles and PC's were a regular occurence in the house finally game in to me badgering them. I wasn't allowed a console as it would 'rot my brain' but a PC for homework use was allowed.

This was just as p4's were being released, my dad went and spent ******* hundreds on a 386 sx33 as the guy in the discount computer store told him is was exactly what he needed. Floppy disk drive only, 50mb hard drive and the selling point was that it had windows 3.11, instead of 3.1. Everyone else at this point had just got windows 98.

I started my gaming career having to trawl bargain bins looking for games that would run on my only gaming system, still had my other hobbies but this was like something brand new to me aged 14 that every other kid had been using for 6-7 years.

I was playing transport tycoon like it was the best game ever 5 years after my mates had forgotten it even existed, still love that game now and blame my lack of gaming upbringing for the fact that I love games now.
 
DEL 707 said:
Without going to all the consoles I've owned, it started with a ZX Spectrum +2, then a Commodore 64, then an Amiga 1200.

1st PC I can remember using was my cousins, only game he had was Monkey Island 2, blew my mind that he didn't have to use floppy disks or keep swapping them every minute!
Went round a mates house who had Doom, but it wasn't that much fun, litterally everytime you did something, you would get the loading icon.
Next I remember playing Doom 2 at HMV in Oxford St, don't see many places demoing PC games these days.

The 1 christmas, we finally got a 486 with Windows 3.1, I remember thinking it was the dogs dangly bits because it had a double speed CD-ROM!
I got Doom 1&2 and the original C&C.

Uncle came round for christmas and was addicted to Doom, I helped him shop for his 1st PC after new years.
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This thread refreshed my childhood memories.
I started on a PC it think was 386 and Me with my cousin play dave 1 and dave 3. Then come the Doom 2.
After 6 months i bought a latest pentium 3 and then i played MAX payne, need for speed 2 and GTA1 and 2
So the list go on as i updated my system.
 
Always been a gamer with amiga then snes , my brother was the one who got me into pc gaming playing red alert / Starcraft over lan .. then I really got into it when bf 1942 came out which led onto cs etc :D great memories
 
My uncle was/is a PC gamer and I guess it came from there. Gave me a potato PC back when I was 4/5 with MS DOS games like Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, Put Put games and as I got older more and more point and click games (Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle) a bit of WarCraft Orcs and Humans until eventually I was playing UT99 in his computer room with Him, 2 cousins and myself.
 
My history was with a Vic20, C64 and Amiga (commodore all the way!) then I played doom at one of my friends. Shortly after cleaning up my poop after my first encounter with a pinky, I went and joined the pc masterrace and never looked back. I have played with various consoles over the years but always fall back to the pc. With the advent of the Steam Link, my PS4 hasn't even been turned on for about a year :)
 
i bought half life on my first pc played it to death and then opposing force / TFC but also played dune / command and conquer, doom quake, on a mates pc before that .
 
Lineage 2, I was in my mid teens at the time, best mate was playing it at launch and convinced me to join, so I installed it on my mums PC, was hooked into PC gaming from that moment on. I did have a few consoles before then, but was more of an 'outdoors' kid lol.

Love Lineage II, wish I could go back to Vanilla L2 and just grind sleepless nights away like I used to. But those days are long gone.
 
Well, I am 40 next month and my PC gaming goes back 22 years. Championship Manager/Football Manager got me into PC Gaming.

I had the original CM on Amiga and when Championship Manager came out in 1995 it was only, at first, on the PC. It was the only reason I bought a PC. I did play a few other games (Command & Conquer being one series) but for quite a few years CM was my only real game. I remember breaking up with more than one girlfriend for CM!!

My real life mates never really got into PC gaming and they stayed with consoles.
 
ZX Spectrum I think its was called, then a Commador 64 (Good old Clive) Then got my first PC early 90s. I used to play HALF LIFE (Loved it) Running round with a big red crow bar smashing things to pulp with it :):) .Then I discovered Counter Strike. My PC was sooo under powered that it woulnt play Counter Strike Online I was gutted. I eventually worked my way up to a AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core with 2 250Gig WD Raptors set up in RAID. I paid a LOT of money at the time, they had just come out.. heheh they were the days;)


xl.....out
 
Started when I was about 4 with a Sharp MZ700. It was a beast of a machine and for the early 1980s it was as bad as you can imagine. I was hooked though. Notable titles.....land escape.....digger.

From then I progressed for a number of years onto Spectrum. First the plastic keyboard based 48k+ and then the drive based +3. Games were cheap back then and I could afford to buy 3 or 4 £1.99 cassette based games a week with my paper round money. Life was great.

The next was my Amiga 500....the Batpack to be precise and this changed everything for me again. It had 512k ram AFAIK, and the first upgrade I ever did was sticking in another 512k to take it to 1mb so I could play Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back. I purchased an external drive for it to make my Xcopy/pirating games life easier. Notable titles for me were the Eye of the Beholder series, Captive and Moonstone.

I had the Amiga for a number of years and balanced it alongside the time I spent on my SNES and Mega drive. By the time A-Levels came along I was aware of Doom. My friend had a 486 dx4 and I was blown away by it. The price also blew me away however and the idea of dropping over a grand on a PC was nuts for me.

So to ease my Doom itch I did the next possible thing. Purchased am Atari Jaguar.....yeah bad move. Only ever had 2 games for it apart from the bundled one. Doom and AvP. Enjoyed both of them a lot but it was an expensive console for 2 games.

My first 'PC' was purchased for me by my parents for my studies. A monochrome laptop (green and black) running Windows 3.1 on a 386. I took this to University with me alongside my PSX but it wasn't long before the same friend who had the 486 dx4 showed the Rebel Assault games. Terrible games but the FMV blew me away and once my student loan came through I dropped £1800 on a P133, 16MB RAM, 1GB HD, 14 inch CRT from Escom. The rest was history. I still game on consoles and I haven't missed a variation from 1996 onwards.....every PSX variation, every xbox generation, every Nintendo generation and the DS and 3DS handhelds. I do still however always default to my PC and regularly drop a shed load of money I gaming and upgrades every year.
 
I'm 37. Parents were in IT so they were bringing PCs home from work in the eighties. First one that I really started gaming with was a 286 beast of a machine.

First games were text adventures, the only one I remember the name of was HHGTTG. EGAroids asteroids clone was first graphical game I played.e

Kinda moved away from PC gaming the last few years. I spend all day working on games on PC so I like to detach and play in the living room. That and I don't have a GPU powerful enough to run my monitor res, and I object to the insane prices these days.
 
Punt said:
My history was with a Vic20, C64 and Amiga (commodore all the way!) then I played doom at one of my friends. Shortly after cleaning up my poop after my first encounter with a pinky, I went and joined the pc masterrace and never looked back. I have played with various consoles over the years but always fall back to the pc. With the advent of the Steam Link, my PS4 hasn't even been turned on for about a year :)
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The same for me with the Commodore route, after an Atari VCS Woody. I was looking at the PS4 until getting a Steam Link for 20 quid. Now I won't get one, unless they get really cheap. The only thing I want a PS4 for is the NHL games.
 
I dabbled in PC gaming when young but not in a big way at all, it was simply a case of: 'had a pc, so I installed The Sims, Age of Empires and Sim City etc'

I got into PC gaming properly a few years ago after stumbling across the DayZ mod on YouTube.
 
I kind of fell into PC gaming relatively recently, and historically probably spent more time on consoles. Early on in life I had the classic ZX Spectrum and Amiga 500, but following the Amiga ended up purely console based, and up until a couple of years ago still used a PS2 and PSP/DS for all my gaming needs (what can I say...I like the PS2's vast library and never felt the urge to go next gen!). But I always had one eye on Humble Bundles...

...and without even realising it amassed about 300 games for very little outlay. And as a result I kind of transitioned into PC gaming because I effectively collected a vast library of game choices with very little effort. I've been PC gaming for the last 2 years because of that. Although that being the case I need to upgrade my 7 year old PC and with prices what they are I'm not especially tied to a PC only future. I'm just fickle...
 
I was trying to work out the years for my computer purchases. Not sure it's exact.
I got a PC after spending too many hours playing Civilization at university. I went with a Viglen as my first purchase as it's what they used at uni and I liked them.

1982 - Vic 20
1984 - C64
1989 - Amiga 500
1992 - Amiga 1200
1996 - Viglen Pentium 120 - Diamond 3D GPU
1998 - Self-built Dual Pentium II 400 - Orchid Righteous 3D GPU?
2000 - Mesh Pentium III 933 - unknown GPU
2001 - Dell Dimension 8100 Pentium 4 1.9 - unknown GPU
2003 - Self-built Pentium 4 3.2 - Radeon 9800XT then Radeon X1800XT - still in operation next to me right now
2007 - Dell Vostro Core 2 Duo laptop - nVidia 8600M GT GPU but moved to console gaming
2016 - HP dc5800 Core 2 Duo (from 2009) - no GPU but still very capable for basic computing

Going back to PC gaming when I've saved up for a new laptop with either 1050Ti or 1060 GPU.
 
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My earliest gaming memories are very blurry, my sister playing games on tape when I was maybe 3 in the mid-late 80s, but me personally was early 90s wing commander, Gabriel knight, on a 2nd hand 386 that my folks got from a friend when they upgraded.
 
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