What got you into PCs and PC gaming? What year and why?

I got into PC's and PC gaming late last year. I saw this commercial for a game called Grand Theft Auto and though that that was the neatest thing since sliced bread.
The next day I went to Best Buy and bought a computer, some HP branded one with a giant 20" screen, and the GTA game and have been hooked since.
 
Mid 90's...one of my friends showed me Command & Conquer on his PC and it was a wrap. My family didn't own a PC, so I had to talk them into buying one. Then newer games came out and my video card wasn't good enough, so I upgraded the video card...and that is what got me into IT. Down the road I hosted Quake III and Counter-Strike 1.x servers for a few years. Good times!
 
Zepher said:
I got into PC's and PC gaming late last year. I saw this commercial for a game called Grand Theft Auto and though that that was the neatest thing since sliced bread.
The next day I went to Best Buy and bought a computer, some HP branded one with a giant 20" screen, and the GTA game and have been hooked since.
Click to expand...

The way you wrote that sounds as though you only heard about Grand Theft Auto for the first time last year. lol
 
jarablue said:
I was always a gamer. I was born in 1975. Always was a geek. Loved DnD, Dragonlance, Fantasy. My first console was the Telstar Arcade. I played Atari 2600, Coleco Vision (always thought the controllers with the dial were high tech) then when the NES came out I became a Nintendo nut. I started playing on PC's in 1990 with Sierra games Kings Quest, Heroes Quest. I knew then I loved PC hardware. There were so many things to learn, different types of upgrades, VGA? What is that! I remember back in 1990 my buddy showed me how to connect to a BBS over a dialup modem and man...to me doing something like that was nuts. I was 15 and in awe. So between 1990 and 1993 I played with the Sega Genesis and dabbled in my friends pc. Then in 1993 I saw Jurassic Park on opening night and that changed me as a person.

You guys remember the scene where Newman is on his pc at his desk looking at steaming video footage of the guy on the dock talking on the phone telling him the boat was leaving? That scene made me realize everything I wanted to do. I went home that night and made sweet lovin to my girl. Needless to say that weekend she bought me my first own Tandy pc from Radio Shack. HAH! It was a 386 SX (no math coprocessor) that was the DX. 2mb of ram and I bought an extra 2mb for 64$ Had a 80mb hard drive. No cdrom, too much in 1993. I played a lot of the TSR silver box DnD games, Sierra games, all throughout the 90s. I remember getting my first cable modem in 1999 and that was jaw dropping. Going from dialup my whole life to 3mb road runner internet. My friend was sitting next to me in disbelief at how fast the pages were opening up.

Then after 2000 it was pretty much me being an adult and working in tech up until now. Living through all the new stuff and old. I was glad I was part of a generation that still went outside AND grew up throughout all the life cycles of the internet until now.

So thanks Steven Spielberg. JP was a great movie in a great time in tech, gaming and life in general.

How did you guys get started?

:)
Click to expand...

You're pretty much me, or since you're a year older, I guess I'm you. Except my first computer was given to me by my aunt and uncle, and it was a 286-16 with double-height 20MB 5.25" hard drive and a 14" CRT monitor.
 
Always played games on "PC"s. From Atari 400 through today. Had a console off and on, mainly when I was young (2600, NES) cause playing games on a computer was a PITA then (think cassette drives etc.)
 
First rig was in 1997 when I was 7. Hp 8120 with 233mhz p1 with mmx. Had soda off road racing and a wheel. I got like 0.5fps. It sucked.

In 2005 we got another hp (a230n) with. Athlon 2800+ 512mb and integrated Nvidia shit. Got a copy of serious Sam and the rest was history. Added more ram, a 5900 non ultra, and a mad dog psu from compusa which was a fortron rebrand apparently. Was a pretty solid machine at that point.
 
1996
The Pentium had just come out.
I bought my first machine from the huge "computer shopper" catalog/magazine.
I drooled over the Gateway Pentium 166, but sadly could only afford the Cyrix P166+
It was $3000. I had to take a signature loan out at the bank to afford it.
I downgraded the 1.6GB HD to 1.2GB because I thought nobody could use that much space.
Came with a crazy (at the time) 16MB of RAM, 17" CRT, and Win95. Funny, now I'm at 16GB of RAM.

All so I could play Ultima 7 and Ultima 8
 
Pivo504 said:
Starseige: tribes. Most epic mp game ever produced for pc. Learned how to build computers bc of that game
Click to expand...
Same here. Got started in my (eventual) network engineering career due to that game. Worked at an ISP graveyard shift just to be a LPB.....
 
My first introduction to video games was the collecovision console in 1984. I had just arrived in this country with absolutely no knowledge of what a video game was. I became hooked instantly. Then I got my first computer (C64)soon there after. Back then I relished in typing in and compiling word games. You guys remember those. I use to visit the library almost everyday, looking up books on BASIC to get to the gaming code that were in some of them. I was gaming, but I learned a lot about computers via osmosis by doing this.
 
Born in '77. My family never had a ton of money, but my parents still managed to be early adopters with some things. They had an original Pong, Bally Astrocade (which was my first exposure to games.) I don't know how I held those pistol-grip controllers at 3 years old, but I remember every game we had. A friend of the family was similar to my dad, and always had these things. So they'd trade, race out to buy the newest thing, etc. That really benefited me as a kid :D (and I think my kids enjoy the same situation now) Anyway, we got a Vic-20, but I only remember one or two games from that. It was pretty unexciting to me. 1983 hits, and I remember going to Toys R Us with my parents, and picking up the Commodore 64. My dad's friend brought over his 1541 drive, and we played Jumpman all evening. Holy fucking shit! I was hooked from that second. My dad ended up trading a guitar for a 1541, and I was introduced to floppy disks and the wonders of copy-programs. In fact, it was years and years before I realized that you weren't supposed to copy games. :D Never crossed my mind where those crack-intros came from. :p I played the hell out of M.U.L.E. Archon, International Karate, Jumpman, and a ton of other good games all the way up to around 1989, when I finally blew up the family C=64 by trying to hack in a PAL frequency crystal and a switch, so I could watch European demos, and play some of the games that never worked quite right in NTSC.

Luckily we got our first Franken-XT PC, and an 8-bit ISA EGA card, (once again from the same family friend.) I started playing Quest for Glory, Leisuresuit Larry, King's Quest, etc. (PC Speaker of course :D ) That held me over until 1990. That was when the first real price drop happened on the Amiga 500, and I could finally stop drooling over my friends playing Shadow of the Beast, Turrican, etc. Got it for Christmas, with a chip-RAM upgrade. You could switch to PAL mode with a program on a floppy! :cool:

That same Christmas I got my dad a Soundblaster 1.0 for the newly upgraded 286 16MHz (still running EGA, but soon to get our first VGA card/monitor.)

At that point I was torn between playing Wing Commander (fairly choppy until we upgraded to VGA and 4MB of memory on the motherboard 1MB 30-pin SIMMs. Then Commander Keen followed by Wolfenstein 3D, followed by a 386 DX 40 that I could finally start playing Ultima 7 on, then DOOM!!!! It's been a steady path of ridiculous impulse upgrades ever since. :D (go check out that thread where we list all of our video cards for an idea... :D ) Next up was the 486 DX50 then DX2 66 then DX4 100/133 then Pentium 90 (first with floating point bug, then without :D ) on and on and on. Had all the SL2Wx PIIs that would run at 450+, P3 Flipchips, Athlon XPs, A64s, P4s, etc. Every upgrade was either impulse or brought on by some game that I wanted to perform better. Then rather than sell up the old hardware, I've always trickled it down to LAN machines, then family/friends.

I've always had a console or two to supplement the computers as well, and have almost always gone back and picked up the ones that I didn't choose for that cycle later on. Still prefer PCs though, and still go back and play all those C=64, Amiga, early DOS games too. (mostly under emulation now, though I still have boxes of disks, a stack of C64Cs that I cherry picked off of ebay many years ago, etc.)


Edit: This is the video card thread I was talking about: List all the GPUs you've ever owned
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Man, I know I have a lot of nostalgia but pc games/games in the 90s were so good. LucasArts, Sierra, Adventure gaming. Just so much good stuff. The best part was that it was all new and a lot of us were young. So everything that I see my Godchildren, Nieces and Nephews geek out over now, I know exactly how they feel. Being 41, I will always be 23 in my head.

I think gaming keeps you in touch with a lot of different things. Tech is like that.

When I first heard sound coming from a creative labs sound card in 92, man, that was a holy shit moment. The game was Warlords 2 "Farewell Warlord, we shall meet again." is burned into my brain. There was this talking parrot sound effect program that came with the card. Hearing the music in the game then going back home to my Tandy (friend had the sound card, I was poor). My buddy used to make fun of my pc speaker sound. Bleep bleep, whiz, spur, clunk. Compared to real sound with music, oh I was lacking. Fun times!
 
Original Far Cry - graphics blew my mind at that time (the water and jungle) and my friend gave me his old NVIDIA card I think it was a 4400ti. Been hooked ever since.
 
VF31Tomcatters said:
First "PC" was a Mac Cnetris 610...
Click to expand...

Same here. Although I had an even earlier mac with oregon trail and large floppy disks.

On the Centris 6** I vividly remember playing Civilization 1 for hours on end, as well as special Mac only games made by a developer named Ambrosia Software, such as Escape Velocity, EV: Override, EV: Nova, Swoop. Also some honorable mentions include Mantra, the entire Exile: Escape From the Pit and follow up games from Spiderweb Software.

Besides reading fantasy books such as wheel of time/GRRM (Game of Thrones) and SciFi (Dune/Foundation) I was playing a ton of MTG (fallen empires through into ice age) so the gaming was already there.

First PC build promptly included a lost 3-4 years playing D2 and Starcraft, then WoW.... the rest is history.

Playing a lot of BF1 and HoTS at the moment. Enjoying the story of Quantum Break now too. Sigh... we've come such a long way.
 
Last edited:
My friend's family had a Packard Bell 386. They got a copy of Wing Commander 2 and I loved that game. They didn't even have a sound card but it still seemed like the coolest thing compared to the Nintendo our family had.

Within a year or two my dad bought a 486 from a local computer shop and one of the first things I did was save up cash and get my own copy of Wing Commander 2 from Egghead Software (remember that place?).

Flashback: Quest for Identity and Wolfenstein: Spear of Destiny were the second and third PC games I ever bought. By the time I was 18 and could afford my own computer I started to build my own. I think the graphics card in my first build was a Riva TNT2. That was after buying a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 that I put in my Dad's computer. Back when the big argument was 16 bit vs 32 bit color.
 
jarablue said:
I think gaming keeps you in touch with a lot of different things. Tech is like that.
Click to expand...

It definitely is. There's always something to look forward to, just like there was for holidays and such as a kid. I sometimes wonder what people who aren't interested in "things" look forward to. :D I think pretty much my whole life I've been "giddy as a schoolboy" in anticipation of something coming out.
 
i would say my whole life I was a PC gamer. I had consoles but never lots of games for them and the N64 killed consoles for me forever.

My dad was a big PC guy so he always had new games. Grew up on old DOS stuff, all the Sierra games, infocom stuff. I would say Wolf 3D though really turned the tides though then that being followed by doom 1/2, duke 3d, quake, x-wing games. The 90s was one of the greatest decades for PC games. Throw 3d accelerators into the mix and it was a whole new world.
 
I got into gaming in 1992 with an SNES and Super Mario World. My family didn't own a PC until 1998 and the first one we got was crap. A PIII Celeron with 64MB RAM and 1MB onboard graphics. I didn't even try to game on it until 2003 when a friend introduced me to Counter-Strike. I loved it. I could barely run it so I upgraded the RAM to 320MB and the GPU to a GeForce 4 MX. From there I steadily started gaming more and more on PC until 2008 when I have been PC only ever since.
 
toddw said:
1996
The Pentium had just come out.
I bought my first machine from the huge "computer shopper" catalog/magazine.
I drooled over the Gateway Pentium 166, but sadly could only afford the Cyrix P166+
It was $3000. I had to take a signature loan out at the bank to afford it.
I downgraded the 1.6GB HD to 1.2GB because I thought nobody could use that much space.
Came with a crazy (at the time) 16MB of RAM, 17" CRT, and Win95. Funny, now I'm at 16GB of RAM.

All so I could play Ultima 7 and Ultima 8
Click to expand...

that was a huge screen at the time. My family had a 15" crt until 2004 when we got a 17".
 
  • Like
Reactions: toddw
like this
Commodore VIC-20 with some text adventure game cartridges (Adventure Land and Pirate's Cove) back in about 1984. Then C-64 where gaming was awesome, followed by the Amiga. Finally went wholly PC around 1991.
 
I really got into PC gaming back in the C64 days. We had one at my school and all of us had "computer time" when we had finished all our work. I went to a private school thru 8th grade. The C64 could accept my Sega Master system controller witch made some games way better. I kept the controller in my backpack and the other kids begged to use it. The Apple IIc was what we ended up with at my house for a long time and wow did I spend time on that thing. My brother in-law and his college buddies were all into PC gaming and I sorta followed. I own 9 consoles, but PC is where I spend most my time.
 
The first PC game that really impressed me was this:

r2olya.png


Played on an antique Atari 800 :)

Aghh, those were the days.
 
I'm old...first gaming system was an Atari 2600, then got an Atari 5200 a couple years later..then the video game crash of 1984 happened. I got my first computer, a Commodore 128 (running in Commodore 64 mode 90% of the time) in 1985/86, since my dad wanted to get us something that we could use for school for my sister and I. First games we got for it was F-15 Strike Eagle and Silent Service from Microprose.

First PC was in 1990 (or 1991) was a 486SX...First video card upgrade happened in 1992 (went from a 265K to a 512K card!) because of issues with Wing Commander 2 expansion pack I got.

Bought my first PC for myself in the Army in 1994...forget exactly what it was..maybe another 486DX this time around? Remember having issues with floppy drive on it through. I remember playing and completing TIE Fighter in 1994, over a couple days I was supposed to be at some mandatory fun while stationed at Fort Sill. My parents hooked me up with a motherboard/CPU upgrade before I went to Germany in 1995 for Christmas. Remember getting a Orchard Righteous Voodoo card in 1996/1997 before getting out of the Army in 1997.

First custom build was a Celeron 300A I got in 1998. First major purchase (besides my then new 1998 Mustang GT I got in 1997 after getting out of the Army) when I started working in the IT industry.

Was upgrading every 24 months or so at the time, but now its slowed down...come to find out that once your video card can perform well at resolution of your monitor is maxed out at..there really isn't any reason to upgrade it. I did my last major build about 2 years ago and just upgraded the video card since I wasn't 100% happy with the 295x2 I had in it with my new monitor. I'm thinking with the 1080 I have in it now I should get another 3 years, if not more out of it before I have to worry about doing a major upgrade again.
 
LordBritish said:
The first PC game that really impressed me was this:

r2olya.png


Played on an antique Atari 800 :)

Aghh, those were the days.
Click to expand...

Nice! I really wish I could get myself to go back and play U1-U5. I started with U6, really got into it with U7 and U8, and despite it not being the best Ultima game, I really enjoyed U9 for what it was. I'm actually quite ok with playing old games, (I still play all my old favorite Sierra games, still play U6, U7 and U8, and a ton of old DOS games. However, when I've tried to play the oldest Ultimas for some reason I haven't gotten into them. Despite how good I know they are. Maybe I need to play them on the C64. It may just be the no-sound/PC Speaker only thing that gets me about the early ones in DOS. One of the big things that really got me immersed in the worlds of U6 and up was the music. It pulled me right in. I'm guessing that the earlier ones have music on the C64, and Atari computers.
 
Armenius said:
Shareware v1.0 or Ultimate Doom (Retail) v1.9?
Click to expand...

For me, Alpha (I want to say .2 or .4 or however it was numbered). Still had the rifle with bayonet in it, and the blue maps. After that, the shareware release of 1.0 just because I could download it day 1. Got the full version as soon as I finished the first episode.
 
J3RK said:
Nice! I really wish I could get myself to go back and play U1-U5. I started with U6, really got into it with U7 and U8, and despite it not being the best Ultima game, I really enjoyed U9 for what it was. I'm actually quite ok with playing old games, (I still play all my old favorite Sierra games, still play U6, U7 and U8, and a ton of old DOS games. However, when I've tried to play the oldest Ultimas for some reason I haven't gotten into them. Despite how good I know they are. Maybe I need to play them on the C64. It may just be the no-sound/PC Speaker only thing that gets me about the early ones in DOS. One of the big things that really got me immersed in the worlds of U6 and up was the music. It pulled me right in. I'm guessing that the earlier ones have music on the C64, and Atari computers.
Click to expand...

I can say with certainty that anyone who has played Ultima I-VIII when it came out, is not a millennial :)

Oh yea, this brings back the memories. The guardian sounds like James Earl Jones:

 
Last edited:
My Boss oddly enough. Well I used to play startrek on the mainframe; but we had just gotten a few 8088 ibm pc for testing and I was doing some 'real' work when he walked in with a couple of floppies he wanted me to look at. One had kermit (not the frog) and the other had hack (original version that predated nethack by some 7+ years I think). So I started playing hack and accidently killed my dog and felt sad (mostly because our 12 year old collie had just been hit chasing cars). Anyways long time ago. I remember playing doom and wolfestein much the same way where someone brought a floppy into lab. Games were a lot of fun in those days :)
 
LordBritish said:
I can say with certainty that anyone who has played Ultima I-VIII when it came out, is not a millennial :)

Oh yea, this brings back the memories. The guardian sounds like James Earl Jones:

Click to expand...


The reason he's so evil is that he's in dire need of dental work. If someone just fixed his teeth, the ladies would like him more, and he'd leave Britania alone. :p

AVATAR!!!! Know that if I do not get my teeth fixed soon, there will be trouble for Britania!

Well, now you've done it. By posting that video, I'm now compelled to play U7. It's been about 10 years since the last time I played it. I just beat Pagan about 6 months ago. It may be a bit of a departure, but I have to say, it probably has the best atmosphere of any game I've ever played (barring maybe System Shock). Well, time to grab the latest build of Exult, and start solving that murder in the stables. :D
 
First game? Red Storm Rising on a work XT (after hours, of course). That led to my own PC, (a 386SX-16) and Aces of the Pacific, Wing Commander, SimCity...glory days. Eventually lead to me getting in contact with the Microprose guys and a tech consultant credit on Fleet Defender. That eventually led to alpha/beta testing of Longbow and finally a job with EA/Baltimore. Five years there, Designer for Jane's F-15, lead Designer for Jane's F/A-18...all good things come to an end and EA shuttered our little studio in 2000. Struggled for a year trying to get a new game company off the ground before reality set in and I returned to my old job working for the Navy.

It was quite a ride.
 
I actually was introduced to PC gaming as a 5 or 6 year old(so this would have been 1987-88), plopped down in front of my mom's friend's Apple IIGS with "Plunder!". Hooked me like crazy. Later I'd locate a 386 at a local library that some guy just LOADED with shareware, including some Star Trek RPG with ASCII graphics that I have NEVER been able to find or identify anywhere.
 
Isn't it crazy how we had such good times in the 80s and 90s? Well 90s for me is where gaming was at. 1993 was such a special year. I was 18 and software stores were all the rage. Shit was freaking good. 911 changed a lot of stuff and games are completely different now. But there is always good times to be had. I wonder if VR is going to open up a whole new era in gaming? It seems like it has the potential. I am glad I saw all the stuff I did. I am sure I speak for a good amount of people but just once I'd love to go back and spend a month or two again reliving the memories.

14.4 modems, when they came out we were like holy shit. Or when 16mb of memory cost 2k+. I remember when NT 3.5.1 listed it's memory requirements and I was like that is my entire summers wages to afford that. I chatted for the first time in windows terminal by dialing up to my buddies pc in the town over. I remember typing @ echo off to stop having two lines of text repeat in the terminal. Such good times. Fuck I even love you too AOL. Good memories with that...oh yea and bad ones! Anyone remember NeverWinterNights on AOL? Mindspring? I played UT so much in 1999 on my dialup ISP Mindspring that I knew when Earthlink took them over because the latency started going through the roof. Running Gamespy game browser, the really OLD version with the red, yellow and green icons to show ping. I think it was bundled with Baldurs Gate back in Cmas of 98. Or playing Starcraft for the first time. The menu music takes me right back. Diablo 1, the butcher scared me shitless when I first met him. So many countless memories. Such good ones.

They can all be re-created again, we just have our young ones enjoy the time and watch them go through what we went through.

Take care guys,
 
Flight sims are really what got me "hooked." MS Flight Sim, Chuck Yeagers Advanced Flight Trainer, Falcon, A-10 Tank Killer. Heh I remember playing most of those on a monochrome monitor originally. When I got a 486 33mhz with a math co-processor shortly after Falcon 3.0 released, enlightenment had been achieved.

Dayaks said:
U.S. Navy Fighters and Great Naval Battles.
Click to expand...
I still have the US Navy Fighters install CD, among some other random games. Not sure why I have the ones I do and/or where I lost some of the others along the way. I'm pretty certain I have a box stashed in the basement with some original 5-1/4" game floppys though.
 
I had a POS Gateway and under the warranty they would send you the part then give you phone instructions on how to replace the part. Literally I replaced ever part except the floppy drive and sound card. That was in 1996 LOL.
 
IcePickFreak said:
Flight sims are really what got me "hooked." MS Flight Sim, Chuck Yeagers Advanced Flight Trainer, Falcon, A-10 Tank Killer. Heh I remember playing most of those on a monochrome monitor originally. When I got a 486 33mhz with a math co-processor shortly after Falcon 3.0 released, enlightenment had been achieved.


I still have the US Navy Fighters install CD, among some other random games. Not sure why I have the ones I do and/or where I lost some of the others along the way. I'm pretty certain I have a box stashed in the basement with some original 5-1/4" game floppys though.
Click to expand...

If your rig could run Falcon 3.0 you were the rich kid. That game was crazy back then. The technical depth, for it's time.
 
jarablue said:
If your rig could run Falcon 3.0 you were the rich kid. That game was crazy back then. The technical depth, for it's time.
Click to expand...
Heh yeah that system cost just about $3k at the time. Hell I remember paying $129 for a 2400baud modem. I saved most of it up myself bailing hay for farmers during a couple summers (lol Wisconsin) and my folks chipped in the last couple hundred on my bday.

Now that this has me thinking, I'm gonna have to fire up Falcon 4.0 with the latest BMS this winter.
 
My affinity for PC gaming really began in the VIC-20 era, although the VIC-20 was cartridge / cassette tape based. There was a game named dragonfire which I really enjoyed on the VIC-20. If the VIC-20 is not classified as a PC, then my first PC would have been the Apple IIGS. The games I most enjoyed, on the IIGS, were the sierra games: Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top