How old were you when you started 'gaming'?

5 and under.

we got a 2600 when I was 7, so then. by then we'd stop at the arcade at the mall also, & geeked on BASIC games on my dad's Kaypro.

5 and under for me - we had an atari in late 80s that i got to play and i watched a friend's brother play thru the entire Super Mario Bros. 3 on nintendo when it came out. i think i started playing games on my own initiative ~1990 w/ secret of monkey island + loom + secret weapons of the luftwaffe.

might've been SMB1 actually now that i think about it

my dad was really into gaming, like he played ad&d and war game miniatures and stuff in college and he bought an nes maybe around when i was born so i always had videogames in the house. im not sure when i started playing nintendo, probably not till i was 5 or 6 but it always sorta there

think I was 7 or so when I got an SNES for christmas - iirc my dad (and possibly me) drove to new york to get one

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s5/5x06/thegame015.jpg

i've always wanted to try that game. it looks stupid with the simplistic putting the ball in the hole mechanics. but it seems to inject morphine directly into your brain!

ahahaha i hate you abbott

Real answer: My parents were really against arcade games. OTOH I was intensely fascinated with them. When I was four and five I'd walk across the street every day to watch people play Gauntlet in the front of the grocery store (IN SPITE OF my intense fear of teenage boys). Then I would walk home before it got dark and draw comics about GAUNTLET.

For Christmas at age five Santa brought our family a Nintendo. My dad had promised us for a long time we would get one if we didn't use arcade games. "If we save all those quarters, we can buy a Nintendo that we can use over and over."

I think I only ever had two games for my SNES: super mario world (came with the SNES) and street fighter II (picked up a few years later, used, at a game shop on south street)

My dad worked for the IRS and he had a color laptop at work (deluxe!!!) which he would bring home and stay up very late playing Centipede. We would get woken up by him yelling, "SHIT!" I think he beat his personal goal and THEN gave up because he was worried it was too addictive. Just like how at the end of Count of Monte Cristo he gives up revenge, after having exacted all the revenge he could have wanted. Was Centipede my dad's Chateau d'If?

HE WOULD NEVER LET US PLAY IT BTW

remember getting a game boy pocket when it came out. my friend had these awesome SUPER MEGA 328 IN 1 pirated ROM cartridges from asia that I would play, I think I picked up a few of those for myself in later years (though I don't remember how)

If you are a female child AND bad at video games you get to play them for like four seconds before some guy rips the controller out of your hands in condescending disgust.

This is why I am glad I am now an adult woman who is bad at video games so I can have 300x tries at that fucking impossible timed jump* without getting demoted.

*meaning all of them

think I was 7 or so when I got an SNES for christmas - iirc my dad (and possibly me) drove to new york to get one

for my 8th birthday all i would tell my parents i wanted was a super nintendo and banana peels. i wanted a snes and found banana peels intrinsically hilarious. the morning of my birthday i woke up and came downstairs to find a suspiciously nintendo shaped box on the dining room table. when i opened it i found a single banana peel and a clue to where my 'real present' was hidden. when i found that one and unwrapped it it was another clue and another banana peel. i dont remember how many of those stupid boxes i ended up opening although one my dad even weighted and dropped to the shallow end of our pool but i did, eventually, end up unwrapping an snes. no other bday gift my parents got ever really compared tbh

tbf, when i was a child i often had to contend with some guy trying to rip the controller out of my hands (or joystick at the arcade) in condescending disgust. it's kill or be killed out there. i still rarely play fighting games bc of bad memories of some teenager beating me over + over again w/ the exact same fireball/uppercut combo in MK xp

I don't think I ever made it past the first world of super mario world til my parent's friend's kid came over and like, beat the whole thing and I was really jealous

oh god now I have memories of watching somebody play SMB or SMW at someone's house.

also going over to someone's house for a birthday party and they had sonic and it seemed so awesome, how fast sonic went.

for my 8th birthday all i would tell my parents i wanted was a super nintendo and banana peels. i wanted a snes and found banana peels intrinsically hilarious. the morning of my birthday i woke up and came downstairs to find a suspiciously nintendo shaped box on the dining room table. when i opened it i found a single banana peel and a clue to where my 'real present' was hidden. when i found that one and unwrapped it it was another clue and another banana peel. i dont remember how many of those stupid boxes i ended up opening although one my dad even weighted and dropped to the shallow end of our pool but i did, eventually, end up unwrapping an snes. no other bday gift my parents got ever really compared tbh

― Lamp, Wednesday, April 25, 2012 10:49 PM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark

lol for one of my birthday's my jewish uncle got my mom to play a trick on me - she gave me a shoebox and said I couldn't open it til after the birthday party but I could shake it etc.

I shook it and to my 8 year old years, goddamn if it didn't sound like a bunch of SNES cartridges rattling together!!

when I finally opened it, it was just a bunch of my old toys. and the message was that I had enough toys and could just play with my old toys instead.

TRS 80 was the first go round but i didn't get my first, long outdated garage sale 2600 till i was about 11.

we got the 2600 shortly after Space Invaders came out so it was the new hot shit at the time, but already then it was way lame compared to the arcade. I remember when Pac-Man came out & it was so horrible compared to the arcade.

would like to hear about people who were drawn to gaming from early to mid 80s PC gaming, b/c that was pretty hardcore then

i was on the cover of a national teaching magazine as a gamer actually! we had computers in the classroom when i was in second grade and i learned logo and turtle and basic and played MATH INVADERS and am quoted extensively in the opening. wish i had that things somewhere. so truth of the matter is that i've been gaming as long as i can remember but i don't consider myself as a gamer up until i got that 2600... and later when i saved up and finally bought that NES

Interested to see if as many people as I imagine are sort of life-long bums re: video games... my dad brought home an Atari 2600 jr. when I was... under 5, anyway. Maybe 1989 or something. I played it a bit & watched him play it. I was a fiend for games as long as I can remember but there were no arcade machines in my small town and I didn't get a 'proper' console until 1995 when my mom's boss bought her kids an N64 and hand-me-downed a SNES to me. I sitll feel as though I don't fully understand how I was playing Mario Bros. on my Atari 2600 (I guess it came out before Nintendo launched their own console?).

err that was an xpost to the top, i guess i can already see how many people are the sort of life-long bums etc

I've also been thinking recently about how possibly enlightening it'd be to get people writing professionally abt games who DIDN'T fall into the '5 and under' category b/c I am pretty sure 100% of reviwers etc do

& forks i think we all need to see that mag cover!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_oE2I2Sips

think it was 9-11. for Christmas we got one of those machines that played 3 or 4 variants of Pong, wd've been late 70s I guess. loved it.

home consoles and computers didn't come out until i was 9 but before that we had hand held electronic devices, and of course down the local rugby club i was fascinated at phoenix and pleiads arcade machines.

hand held i played, firefox, astro wars, muncher. and later (and still have) frogger and tomy 3d sky attack.

so i guess 6-8

sorry, should have said "i didn't get a home computer until i was 9" they were about (apple and atari) but never knew about them at the time. first computer was a zx spectrum

had a ZX81 :D

scouring the web and our first machine may have been the Magnavox Odyssey 4000, i think i recognise the box.

Age 4
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/binatone_TV-master-mk-4_2s.jpg

Played it so much I wore out one of the controllers and the pattern of the tennis court got burnt into the TV screen.

My parents bought a Nintendo when I was about 4. I used to get really excited when I made it to Mouser in SMB2 even though that isn't very far into the game at all. Also remember my cousin visiting and us trying to play Duck Hunt by sitting right up at the TV with our guns on the screen to shoot the ducks, which didn't really work. Played lots of Blades of Steel and Ninja Turtles.

Then when I was 5 we moved to a new neighbourhood, our house was broken into, and the Nintendo was stolen, so I had a couple years of NO GAMES until we got a Sega Genesis.

5. a BBC micro that my dad was sometimes allowed to borrow from work.

my first computer that i played games on, which we owned as far back as i can remember was an "acorn electron", hahaha.

around 5. my parents bought a new tv and got a sega master system II with a built in "alex the kidd in miracle world" along with it. never finished that cursed game.

ZX81 doesn't really count for gaming and i'd also discount the handful of game + watch etc type things that i played on once or twice but didn't own, so i guess i'd have to date this to the spectrum, dunno when we got ours but 9-11 will probably cover it.

i probably played at an actual arcade maybe twice a year, once at the local fair and once on holiday, on the cross channel ferry or in some seaside resort or what have you.

I was ten, it was 1981, I guess there wasn't that much around that I could have played any sooner. I wasn't allowed in arcades, like, ever.

man i played a load of games on the ZX81! especially my first proper experience with text adventures

ledge you are so wrong

http://s.uvlist.net/l/y2008/03/48398.jpg

I'm pretty sure this was our first, if not second.

http://www.pong-picture-page.de/catalog/images/atari-cx30-paddles.jpg

ok maybe there was a huge zx81 gaming scene but all i recall is some shitty demolition derby thing that i probably typed in by hand.

got an n64 when i was 10, played a lot of shitty freeware pc games before that though so i dunno. voted 9-11

if game & watch counts i had the donkey kong one, so i was maybe 5 or 6? my first computer was an amstrad cpc 464 with green screen monitor, which i got for christmas when i was 8.

never forget xp

there used to be a rack right at the front of the supermarket with tons of 99p cassettes for speccy and c64 and a little row for amstrad. i would just stand there browsing through while my parents got the shopping done, then they would scoop me up on the way out. if i was really lucky i would actually walk away with a new copy of O Mummy or Roland Goes Digging in my little fist.

got an n64 when i was 10, played a lot of shitty freeware pc games before that though so i dunno. voted 9-11

― ciderpress, Thursday, April 26, 2012 9:29 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

remember buying a CD from office max - like "100 games on 1 CD!" or something. there was commander keene, this helicopter game, some other freeware stuff.

also remember getting X-WING as a kid for like a 386, because I was really into star wars, but I never made it past the first mission, which was to blow up some freighters.

xp Fuck games on cassettes. People these days are all about retro gaming, but they don't have to deal with the hassle of loading games on a dodgy old Dixons mono tape recorder.

loved those CDs - or floppy discs tbh iirc - cos they reminded me of the C90s me and my mates used to swap that were full of random Spectrum or yes, ZX81 games

X-WING

Knew somebody at university (who was a stoner or course) who had this game on his PC, which he kept in his walk in closet so he could sit there playing it in complete darkness.

anybody who can't be arsed to wait 15 minutes for a 16K game in lo-res black and white with no sound to fail to load properly isn't a hardcore gamer imo

flight simulators never got better than TIE Fighter, tbh. if I ever make fuck-you money, I'm building a closet a la your roommate, snoball, and I'm gonna sit in there in my TIE pilot uniform.

its sad he was millonare

I had the CD version of TIE Fighter, which had all the mission briefing and in mission comments spoken by actors. That was really (TIE) advanced for the time.

TIE Fighter (Collector's CD ROM) is the greatest game ever created

you guys got me thinking about my gaming bona fides

so one of the things is that when i moved in fifth grade to a new neighborhood i became close friends with a guy with a PC (i didn't get one till like 2001) and his dad would buy games from clearance sales every single time he saw them. The first ones that really REALLY got me hooked were Ball Blazer and Wing Commander. Then Monkey Island.

original Tie Fighter, which i had on umpteen floppies, was excellent and waaaaaaay better than xwing alliance vs tie fighter which for some reason even though it appeared to be the same game just bored me.

and it came with a cool novella

re xwing v tf, was one of those games i had to constantly keep reinstalling and playing over again for whatever pc problems i was having - ie FUCK checking 128 different floating cargo holds again and again.

i grew up on the road so i spent lots of time in mangy clubs/convenience stores/whatever playing pinball and early arcade stuff but never had anything at home until the C64 so i guess under 5 and then a big gap until 12-14 i guess? i went all fucking in on the C64 though, suffered through tape drive bullshit i would buy at comb liquidators and then started painfully typing in programs from whatever the C64 gaming magazine was and some other books i bought (truth be told i would start the typing and then my mother would have pity on me and take over). then i got a floppy drive and started trading cracked games with dudes and it was all over

My brothers were several years older than me and avid skiers; we lived 15 minutes away from one of the area's major ski spots and would go practically every weekend in the winter. They had an arcade with what seemed to be every awesome videogame known to man and I would spend as much time in there as I would on the slopes.

Also, I befriended a kid who lived across the field from me whom I didn't actually like because he had an Intellivision. I think this was all around age 5-6?

We got an Atari 5200 when I was 10 and I loved that machine to death, esp. the Ms. Pac-Man game for it

I can never remember what my first system was because the memory is hazy (maybe a Coleco Adam?) but the first game I remember playing on it was Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom. My dad won the system at an auction. I was around five.

http://videogamecritic.net/images/coleco/buck_rogers_planet_of_zoom.jpg

also going over to someone's house for a birthday party and they had sonic and it seemed so awesome, how fast sonic went.

this is a lil proustian madeleine for me, as consoles were explicitly verboten in my household. i fucking loved video games, and was the horrible kid who beelined to the genesis anytime i was at someone else's house. kind of a problem. it was a joke every year at xmas: i'd ask for a console, and get flatly denied. sleepovers and the odd holiday were occasions for renting a console from blockbuster and mainlining. nb this is why i have a scar on my left thumb (buddy brought over an enormous CAN OF PUDDING---devoured with mountain dew back---that the lid of which, when sorting recycling the next day, slashed my hand to the tendon. my dad sewed it up at the kitchen counter and, seeing as the nick was longitudinal with the fibers, declared it a non-issue, had me move my thumb to show how tendons work, and then i read a comic book or something)

also like djp i lived a mile away from the OTHER major ski area and saturdays were four hours of junior race and an afternoon of playing (but mostly watching) x-men (best ever) and mortal kombat (i sucked, but the gore was ~thrilling~)

then my buddy got D00M and we literally planned days around it. his mom would actually kick us outside after an hour or so, and then we'd walk around in the woods and talk about D00M and think up better games and comics

NERD

omg they had X-Men at WV, loved that game SO MUCH

would seriously consider buying a cabinet of it

The student's union at the technical college I went to had the 4 player version of The Simpsons.

i played the FUCK outta rush n attack in our college student's union
which is sad considering how old that game was even then

Blasteroids, Final Fight, Air Buster, Raiden - it's a surprise I got any studying done.

man i remember when MK III for the Playstation dropped; one guy in my dorm got it and the WHOLE DORM was in that room or in the hallway waiting to play

in the students union at my uni i spent a small stack on 720, Indy and the Temple of Doom, and Super Space Invaders

if i could own one arcade cabinet it would be this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(1983_video_game)

i thought for a second NV was claiming that the destruction of the WTC got him into gaming

i actually, er, can't remember, i think i have been playing videogames p much since i started walking. 80s baby, right.

elder brothers had: a ZX spectrum, a master system, i think also a commodore 64? and i had inherited the first two when they went to university, which was the year i started school, i think - having been annoying them about them for years already

my mother sold the spectrum without telling me a few years later. it made me very sad.

My first gaming memory is being 4 (so 1984-5) and watching my Dad play Hungry Horace on the ZX Spectrum. He asked if I wanted a go and I was too nervous, but I remember playing a few kids' games not long after that. (Sudden nostalgia burst for some half-forgotten do-sums-with-Paddington game)

Gradually got more and more into them between then and about 8 or 9 when the Spectrum had more or less become mine. My Dad was mostly bored with it, but I'd beg to go to the many computer game shops whenever we went to the nearest big town, or spend hours staring at the £1.99 games in the local newsagent and occasionally be allowed a new one.

I s'pose my transition to full-on gamer was complete age 9, when I started buying a Spectrum magazine every month, having ~opinions~ on the latest games (most of which I never got to play because they never reached "budget" before the Spectrum market died circa 1990), drawing pictures of alien spaceship explosions on cassette tape inlays because I was going to write the game to go with them, 'cept my 10 PRINT "spacecadet is awesome!": GOTO 10 level skillz were not quite up to the task, etc...

My first year of university was all about Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move, which there was an arcade machine of in the student bar, and Civilization II, which someone had put a pirated copy of on one of the computer room PCs and I copied it onto about 12 floppy disks and carried it back to my student room to my own PC which I'd got as my 18th birthday present

Atari 2600 picked up at Christmas when I was...6? 5? Something like that. Dad was really into it, too.

holy crap:

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/80-hours-creating-working-star-wars-micro-arcade-machine-20120428/

The sit-down SW arcade machine is tops, but I freaked out when I encountered an EMPIRE machine at the Classic Gaming Expo last year, like I had discovered El Dorado. I remember playing a bit of a broken rom version in an emulator pack like 12 years ago, but never knew they had a commercially available version, much less one that just could be modded into regular machines.

Also, I probably have pre-memories of playing arcade machines.

i was 6 when my dad brought home a NES as a surprise, in 1989. in the year leading up to it, i would always go to my neighbor's house across the street and watch this older kid (probably 16 or so, actually) play SMB2 all of the time. he would always play as luigi. later, when we owned SMB2, i would always play as luigi and my sister would mercilessly make fun of me while i would deny that my choice of luigi had anything to do with the neighbor. the neighbor also totaled his car and blamed it on an "oil slick". he played waaaaay too much nintendo.

we only had a few games: smb1, 2, 3 and Dragon Warrior. i played dragon warrior on a loop, beating it over and over until we got a SNES.

okay, i'm way young in context here, but the first videogame i ever played was super mario 64 at my neighbor's house. i went there every single god damn day to just watch him play that game - actually playing it scared the hell out of me. i must've been 6.

the first videogame i ever owned was midtown madness for pc. i was playing pajama sam-esque kinda things beforehand, but this was the first mind-blowingly interactive game i ever played continuously for years straight. multiplayer was too fun. must've been 9 or so.

first game i ever bought was medal of honor: allied assault, and i had to be at least 11 then.

I probably have pre-memories of playing arcade machines.

One of my earliest ever memories is a game memory. It was my older brother's birthday, and he went to a Laserquest style thing. I wasn't old enough to play, so my mom took me to the arcade to show me her Phoenix skills. She made it fairly far, she killed this thing:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9d/Phoenix_Stage5.png

And my impression as a three year old was that she'd won the game and I was super impressed.

I went to a special preschool when I was 5 where I played a bunch of games and learned to program, so that I guess (unfortunately I'm not in the picture)

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=dW0zAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vOgFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6734%2C1411992

I don't really play games any more though

of the kids in the picture, one is a herpetologist, one is a surgeon, one is a psychic, and one is a town manager arrested for prescription fraud

a herpderpetologist?

snakes, man

i do have a pre-memory of being at a showbiz pizza and playing crystal castles

ALSO can't believe i didn't bring this up: one of our closest family friends ran his own business and his business was buying and placing STAND UP ARCADE MACHINES in bowling alleys, pool halls, laundries and the such so he would almost always have two stand up cabinets in his home and these would ROTATE so every time we visited (and because they had kids and the machines kept us busy and it was a long trip to get to their house and they had a few guest rooms, we would visit for ENTIRE WEEKENDS) there were NEW ARCADE CABINETS. I remember Super Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man, Joust, Frogger, Defender, Tron, Pinbot, Commando, Galaga... anyways we would put a gazillion credits on these and just play for hours. So though I vote 9-11, the age of my first console, this started when I was like 5 so write me in for gamer from birth

pretty sure i've posted about this before so keeping it short
1. Irvine Sports Centre - school trip when i was about 9 years old, supposed to do healthy things like swimming or ice skating - in the foyer they had a Space Invaders machine, blew my tiny brain - spent all my money playing it and then watched other kids play
2. Glasgow Airport - dad got a new job where once a month he flew to meetings in London, mum would drive him to the airport, i'd get up at 6am or whatever just so i could go along and play the arcade machines they had - Pacman, Scramble and this hang-gliding game that until about 5 years ago i could never track down the name of, Fast Freddie

I've been thinking about this question a fair bit, and ultimately I think the answer is... a few years ago?

Of course, I can chart a history of games that I played, and that shaped my consciousness of what gaming is, or should be: Manic Miner, Dizzy, Wishbringer, Sonic, Sim City, Quake, GoldenEye... But I never had a console of my very own as a kid, and was usually content to let my older siblings or friends play, so I could actually experience what the game had to offer instead of being constantly thwarted by poor hand-eye coordination. I wasn't "gaming". And I was too wrapped up being a music'n'lit nerd to miss being a games nerd, even though I'd keep half an eye on what was going on in that world. But yeah, then things like Shadow of the Colossus and Katamari and Guitar Hero piqued my interest, and the explosion of free flash gaming meant I was actually already playing, so now I'm a bit more personally invested in actually trying stuff out for myself...

^^^this actually my experience too. even though I fiended over other peoples consoles, I didn't "game" until a couple years ago. freshman year goldeneye binges aside, those were purely social

poxen. I had an early experience with Phoenix too. I used to watch some older guy play in our local sports club when i went in with my parents. I was blown away by that big spaceship thing in your pic, to the point that when i went back into infants school on monday i had wrote a piece about it in a "what you did at the weekend" exercise. I even gave that spaceship a name "Big Charlie", and I'm not sure why but it's something I remember.

My brother might have a more accurate timeline, as he's a year and a bit older than me, but I've ticked "5 and under". I remember the day my dad brought home a Spectrum 128K that he bought from one of his buddies at work (he was in the RAF, and I think this is how we got a lot of things; people posted to different countries and offloading their stuff) and it would be my main gaming staple, even after I later persuaded them to get us a NES for Christmas a few years later (games were too expensive, so the Spectrum still got played).

Anyway, even before the Spectrum, which I guess must have been around '87 or '88 when I was 5/6, we had a Commodore 16 (or possibly +4 - I'm never quite sure which model we had). I don't remember getting that, it was just something that was there. But I remember watching my mum play Fire Ant - she was way better at it than us (or, at least, me). Treasure Island is one of my more vivid memories of the Commodore. Trying to run away from long John Silver at the end was terrifying to me.

My first computer was a Commodore Plus/4, must've been about 1984-85 so I was 8 years old. I completed Fire Ant and Treasure Island :)

Treasure Island on the plus 4 could well be up there in my top 10 games of all time. On the speccy they ruined it by adding in little annoying sub games.

I don't think I ever completed Fire Ant, but we used to play through Treasure Island with weird regularity. Thinking about it, besides Mario Bros 3 it's probably the game I've completed most... It really was awesome (or, at least, my memory of it). Don't think I ever played the speccy version.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

huh. interesting that nobody started in their teens.

though maybe that says more about the ILX demographic than anything

yeah well maybe YOU say more about the ILX demographic than anything

sorry, just wanted to say something like that

forgiven