https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2zeVj5u77o

I did not grow up in the best area (what can you do?) and like most teenagers I had bad influences encouraging me to pretty bad or downright awful things but video games really helped me focus on something else and stay away from influences that can effect me for the rest of my life in a negative way. The best way video games helped me was my reading ability, I do prefer playing older games like fallout, baldur's gate, ultima...etc. and those games do require a good amount of reading so discovering and loving those games caused me to read more and actually become interested in reading books and expanding my vocabulary.

How did you become a gamer?..How did it effect you?

I was bitten by a radioactive NES and that all but forced me to be a gamer. With great power comes great pwnage of n00bs.

An Atari2600 appeared magically under the christmas tree.
And contrary to popular belief, a lot of games taught me something, not maybe the first console ones, since they were about highscores. Plus they got me very interested in computers ; P

I played Sonic the Hedgehog 2 at my friend's house and I knew that I NEEDED a Sega Genesis. And then Santa brought me one later that year :)

Sigh, always sad to see how old I am.

My childhood era was that of Commodore 64 with games like Zaxxon and other ones I barely remember. Then came the NES and the PC (386!, or maybe it was a 486).

And gaming helped me too, but with English as a second language. I received formal education, but by the mid 90s when games had the capacity to feature lots of text and audio it made a huge difference. Fallout 2 probably taught me more English than years and years of formal education.

What do mean how did I become a gamer? Sonny, I was BORN to Game.

This isn't so bad. C64 and NES weren't so far apart at least. Which is where I became a gamer (NES that is). I had an Atari 2600, but games just didn't interest me much until Zelda and Final Fantasy on the NES.

What makes me feel old is when I meet people who started gaming on a PS1. Sometimes even PS2, which really makes me feel like a relic and I'm only 30!

ZX Spetrum. it was my dad who unintentionally introduced me. I remember he has left the Spectrum on the table and switched on with a tape already loaded. I was young and curious so naturally I investigated.

He was shocked at first but slowly can to accept my... interests. He knew I was hooked and forbidding me would just drive me to get a fix from more depraved places, so he provided a safe environment for me to experiment. He even showed me how to use Sinclair BASIC to make my own. Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

One day, my dad bought one of these (see attached image). It was a video game console from the pre-atari generation, basically just an adapter that provided power and connectors to a self-contained chip in a cartridge. This particular cartridge contained ten variants of Pong. Played it, liked it, wanted more. Wait until you start seeing "shows me how old I am" complaints from people much younger than you ... ;)

Interesting, that's pretty much the same as me. My first experience with gaming was also a Pong clone that my dad bought, only that one was hardcoded, i.e. there was no cartridge. The machine had 5 games as I recall, all of them variants of Pong even though they were called, variously, Ping Pong, Tennis, Ice Hockey, Basketball and Squash, IIRC.

That started my interest in computers, and I've had that interest ever since. Now I'm a software developer for a living.

My first game was Exterminator (a Centipede clone) in a Commodore 64 (yes I am THAT old):

http://www.lemon64.com/games/screenshots/full/e/exterminator_%28bubble_bus%29_03.gif

My first fascination with games was without any physical computer involved. I grew up in a village East Germany/GDR and it must have around 1986. I had never seen something like a real computer and my image of those was dominated by mainframes as large as a house.

Then there was an article in some magazine. It was supposed to be a scathing view on the latest teenager occupation in the decadent West. It described how those poor guys locked themselves in a their dark rooms, with their homecomputer (C64) and a box of disks and sought futile escape from the harsh world of capitalizm by diving into fantasy worlds with imbecile images of warriors, elves and dragons or space battles.

I guess that article had the exact opposite impact on me as was intended. Or the author couldn't conceil his own fascination below all that "unhealthy capitalist spoiled kis" crap.

In IIRC 1987, on summer holiday, I came across the one and only socialist arcade machine. It had multiple games for choice, the one I can remember I was some downhill skiing game. I put most of my allowance in that machine during these holidays.

The same year when we visited my one of my aunts an Atari 2600 with three games (Pacman, Asteroids, Pitfall 2) had appeared in their household. I spent the entire day playing Asteroids and actually beat the game - well it just started over.

In 1988 my parents bought a used C116 with a broken keyboard for 2000 East German Marks. My step-dad fixed the thing and it virtually became mine. It came with quite some games on tape, even some "legal" ones. That's when I started coding, too.

After the fall of the wall I bought my own C64 - the machine from that article years back. I didn't know much about Amiga then and I couldn't have afforded it anyways. The C116 rubber keyboard was breaking down regularily and there were a few classmates that went C64 too, so there was opportunity to share games. A few years later I went Amiga, and then PC when I went to the university. And now I'm also a software developer.

My mom got one of those Atari 2600s with the fake wood design at a yard sale or something and gave it to me when I was like 3.

It all went downhill from there.

It was 1998 and my dad got a Playstation for the family to play and ever since I popped in our copy of Road Rash, I was incredibly fascinated into video games. Though it wasn't until we got a PS2 in mid 2003 when I got addicted to gaming for life.

I was feeling bored and lonely and the Colecovision too, so it just kinda happened in the rush of the moment :P

this was my first game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utytKc91APs (was very very young like 4 years o 3, cant remember really)