My best friend in elementary school had a C64 and we'd play games on it whenever I was at his house. My dad bought himself an Atari ST for working and making music with it and he wanted us kids, and maybe me in particular, to share his enthusiasm for it, so he got me some public domain games to arouse my interest. He doesn't play games himself though and has little love for them, so I guess that experiment failed as I didn't grow up to be a computer scientist, coder or musician, and just stayed a passionate gamer wasting my time. ;)

I never really got any games of my own and my friends always had the better gaming computers, C64, Amiga and PC, while I was playing free indie stuff (and the occasional pirated point-and-click adventure exchanged with classmates) on a black and white monitor. That probably made me all the more interested in games though, and it also made me appreciate the little things, which might be why I still cherish indie and freeware games today, eager to try out and collect each and every obscure title.

I had played games before on a whole bunch of systems (mostly at friend's places) but it wasn't until we got a 486DX2-66 in 1994 that gaming became the most important thing in my life, for several years to come. Before that, access to games was limited but starting from 1994 I played the living crap out of that computer. I feel fortunate for having had the chance to dive into PC gaming during it's Golden Age, seeing as many of the most epic and revered titles were released in the mid 90s (UFO, TIE Fighter, C&C 1 etc). The 486DX2-66 is one of the most fondly remembered in the history of PC gaming, it could run all those epic games up to and including Duke 3D and even Quake 1 at lower resolutions.

Game & Watch, back in 1985 or so.. Also, the NES with Mario & duck Hunt Deluxe box, Megaman 2, Zelda 2.. Ahh.. If only the Wii VC was not that bad joke, with insane price and fucked up PAL, I tell you!

It goes back a while......a loooong while.

I didn't become a gamer, I was born one .

There was an arcade near my school when I was young (11, or 12, maybe) and there I got exposed to the games I now consider to be the pillars of my gaming culture (Ghosts'n Goblins, Commando, Shinobi, Section Z, Altered Beast, Magic Sword etc...). Then my friends had computer with games on them (An Olivetti 286 with monochrome screen and the mighty Prince of Persia running on it, an Amiga, etc...).

How gaming affected me as a person? Whatever I do or I'll do in the future, my imagination is a central part of my being, and at the core of my imagination there are *my* games.

By playing games, I think.

My first game ever was Diablo. I was ten at that time and it was truly an eye-opening experience. Addictive, too. I sometimes go back to playing warrior or rogue and roam the dungeons once again. The haunting soundtrack of the village Tristram had been a ringtone in my mobile phone for a long, long time :)

A semi-friend of mine had an SNES and an original Gameboy (you know the one, grey plastic, size and weight of a brick, everyone who had it also had Tetris), and I had a few (educational) games on a DOS-based computer.

Even with Nintendo's apparent rampant popularity in the UK, and a fair few people I knew having Nintendo systems, I never really got the gaming 'bug'. It was something fun to do on occasion, a diversion for me -- reading was more my vice at that age.

Come 1997, I got a new computer, Windows 95, and bought a few games. Dungeon Keeper, The Sims 1. Dropped out of PC gaming as I couldn't really keep asking my parents to upgrade the computer just to play games. Turned to console + handheld gaming instead, finally diving into Nintendo systems (GBC and Gamecube, followed up by a GBA, DS, Wii, and 3DS).

Only when I met my husband and he began to talk me through computer upgrades and fitting them for me did I turn back to PC gaming and realised just what I'd missed. I have ~14 years of PC gaming that I missed out on (excluding time before I started playing video games), and GOG is one of the sites which is helping to fill the gap of all the games I missed.

This thread is making me feel REALLY FUCKING OLD!

Yeah. At the same time if I look at games like Skyrim I sometimes think "How is that possible? Wasn't it only yesterday I played Dungeon Master with my younger brother?"

As I recall, Nintendo's popularity wasn't all that rampant in the UK in the 80s and 90s, at least not in comparison to the rest of Europe, and certainly not in comparison to the US.

I was amazed how many people owned Sega Master Systems and Sega Mega Drives in the UK, especially as you'll find plenty of people here in Germany who don't even know what they are.

Good point, btw. How do you become a "gamer", what exactly makes you one? Is there a fine line somewhere between "real gamers" and people who "just" enjoying playing games? Is it a term you can apply to other people according to what they like and do, or can you only apply it to yourself, depending on your pride, your ties with specific groups of people or your self-image ("I am a gamer, because identify with gaming culture")?

When I was a kid in the late 70's I got into some programming courses, and any time you touch a computer, trying to program games is a natural thing, even at that time. Didn't have one at home until the ZX81 (ZX80 didn't work and was returned), and while I did try to program Space Invaders for it (machine code programming wasn't easy, no assembler, no debugger, never could get these branch offsets right), I wasn't a gamer at the time. Played a little more on the VIC 20, but I probably only became a gamer, in the sense of buying games and spending a lot of time playing them, on my next computer, the Commodore 128.

I admit there's likely bias there -- barely anyone I knew had anything other than a Nintendo system (friend in secondary school with a Dreamcast; my husband still has an old Megadrive kicking around). Where I was growing up, it seemed to be Nintendo was synonymous with gaming, at least until the Playstation came out (though much amusement when my mother couldn't remember what system I had and kept on calling my Gamecube an XBox. Thankfully I always had specific, usually console exclusive games that I wanted so I never ended up with an unusable game).

I define myself as a 'gamer' because I have gaming as one of my top hobbies. My husband plays and enjoys games, but is not a gamer. He'll get a new game, play it straight through, and likely never touch it again. He's on the final stretch of Saints Row 3 at the moment, and as soon as he finishes it I see him going to SR4, completing that, and never touching the games again unless I or a friend want to coop.

So for me, if someone said "oh yeah, I enjoy playing games, it's my main hobby", they're a gamer. Anyone who gets involved in gaming discussions (like this thread), they're a gamer. Others can and probably will disagree, but that's my benchmark.