What got you into pc gaming / building?

[Gikero]

The original Far Cry. I bought it and a bunch of other games for my new laptop. My laptop had half the required video RAM, but I was able to get it to run. Tweaking settings, and the .ini files, downloading modded GeForce drivers, that was a great time. I learned a lot and had just as much fun tweaking as I did playing the game.

[ElZamo92]

When the "next gen" consoles came out, I was looking to upgrade from my Xbox 360, but the new consoles where outrageously expensive in Mexico (the equivalent of $800 for the Xbone and $700 for the PS4), so I watched tons of videos on how to build a PC and when the Nvidia 900 series GPUs came out I had saved enough to afford a GTX 970, bit nothing else, so I ended with a PC with a HUGE bottleneck with a G3258 and only 4GB of RAM, but it was WAY better to what I was used to. Every game I threw at it ran at 60fps max settings, and it was GLORIOUS. 

[Beef Boss]

I'm more of a PC destructor than a builder,but I mean I sometimes put them back together. Me at least taking apart and working on computers or other tech started before I can even remember. My parents told me the first thing I took apart was a dishwasher, which never worked properly again. From there on I took apart and would rebuild anything that had electronics in it, because I wanted to know how things worked. I'd take apart printers, DVD players, even TVs. Then PCs I started to take apart admiring the motherboard, not even knowing what it was at the time. In fact, I didn't know any of the parts I just loved taking stuff apart. Now I go to school to learn how to "properly" take stuff apart. As a kid after I was NEVER allowed to take things apart that were expensive, I moved to Legos. I'd build huge sets and disassemble them, then rebuild them from memory and improve them. 

I have this little thing, it's like a rule or a testament, I don't know, but if I use it I need to know how it works and why it works. 90 percent of all tech in my room I've taken apart at least twice, Frankensteining parts together to make it work better than before. 

[Kenoxabe]

I just wanted to play on PC. 

 

been playing on PC since 1995

 

Transitioned to console gaming on 1997 but still playing PC (starcraft, jazz the jack rabbit, etc)

 

Up until now, I play on both platforms.

[SlipperyPete]

I got a job at Best Buy in the computers department.

my coworkers (they became friends) there were like "PC gaming is way better"

I built a PC and havent looked back

[Sfekke]

When I got my first new laptop I could call my own browser games where my main type of game I played.

Due to the fact that before that I used an HP Omnibook XE2 (in 2010).

The new laptop wasn't really bought to game (It was 2012, I was 12), I just enjoyed fiddling around with laptops/computers.

Once I noticed my current laptop could play games I dreamed about, back then Minecraft was my wet dream. I before only played it on my parents laptop once every now and again since 2010.

I was quite hooked.

Played that game to death & still playing it.

After I think 3 months I stumbled across the F2P games on Steam (Didn't know what Steam was back then)

Installed Team Fortress 2 & played the living crap out of it.

After those 2 games introduced me to PC gaming it basically went on from there!

 

Before PC/Laptop gaming I played on PlayStation 2 & DS Lite.

I didn't mind staying on older generations of consoles, I quite enjoyed the PlayStation 2 even knowing newer & better came out.

 

That'll be the way I got into PC Gaming.

Like most kids in those years Minecraft played a big role.

I still find that game enjoyable 7 years down the line, although those minigames & plugged up survival experiences don't do it for me. Give me good ol' vanilla with a couple friends.

[RuffRuffmcgruff]

Shout out to Runescape! Was my first PC game I played, I only  got into pc gaming when I bought a laptop back in 2010 for College at the same time a IRL friend of mine started playing a game called WoW. He used to talk about it constantly and it definitely peaked my interest. Since then I started playing on PC more and more. Delved into the world of Steam and have never looked back since. 

 

I stumbled across Linus' YouTube channel about 4 years ago and the first video I watched was the Ultimate PC build. I was hooked, I had a prebuilt at the time but decided that building my own was the way forward. Built my current rig back in 2015 and have added to it since then. Expensive but very very fun hobby  

[Majinhoju]

Playing Doom in the mid 90s is where it started for me..

I started off playing it at a friend's house then when we got our family computer in 96 I made sure to pick up Doom right away.  I couldn't get enough of that game.  While still being mostly a console gamer at the time I started to pick up more PC titles like Command and Conquer series, Diablo, Duke Nukem 3d etc...  Ah.. good times..

 

As far as building.  Probably around the Voodoo2 era is when I started tinkering with the inside of a computer.

I remember pulling out my Voodoo2 card to bring to a friend's house (who had a similar config PC) so we could SLI game at 1024x768, lol.

 

Been doing my builds every since.

 

 

[Eduard the weeb]

Okay so I was in early 7th grade and I had just got a Xbox, anyway one of the kids in my class was roasting me like lol PC > console, so I was like what pc, made him explain basics then started watching YouTube to better understand, learned about pcs and stuff and within like 3 months passed pretty much everyone in my grade in knowledge ( sad seeing how it seems to still be so little compared to some people here ) and then learned about PR and LR and continued learning and now we are here 2 years later. 

[GDRRiley]

Started when I was 5 or 6 play some early war thunder like game (was just planes but ran well on a P4).

then when my parrents got a new PC c2q 8gb (no GPU but kicks ass in CPU bound games at the time) I moved to MC and roblox.

2013 I got my first laptop i7 3rd gen quad core gt65m (was an idot purchase way to much cpu power for gpu) 

This got me into more games and got my library into the dozens

build started with LTT in late 2014 early 2015.

late 2015 early 2016. I got NightHawk and that lead to my library growing to 75+ 

Edited February 21, 2018 by GDRRiley

[Mira Yurizaki]

I grew up with consoles, so games were heavily part of my childhood. Games on PCes just happened to be an extension of that. But my first real foray into playing games on PCs was around 1994 or so when we got a Pentium PC and I think at some point my dad got a copy of Sim City 2000 for me to play with. Then in 1995 we came home with an Electronic Arts triple game pack. That along with America Online's game demos and a 1001 demo/shareware thing on a CD, I dove right into gaming on PC. Some of the PC games from my childhood include:

• Sim City 2000
• Abuse
• Crusader: No Remorse
• One Must Fall 2097
• Jazz Jackrabbit
• Command & Conquer
• Quake (curiously enough this is the only game I managed to play at a time my parents wouldn't let me touch Doom or any other sort of violent game)

Though most of these were demos. But man, demos were great back then. After that, my PC gaming experience sort of stagnated from 1999-2001 and the most powerful machine I had access to was a Pentium II 233MHz deal. But in 2001 I got my hands on a HP cheapo computer from an internet cafe. It had an Intel Celeron and some crappy IGPU but hey, I got to play a lot more games like Unreal Tournament and Half-Life. I did do what tinkering I could, but it wasn't really going to go anywhere.

 

Most of what accelerated my interest was from a classmate who talked about how he built his own PC. It was enough that I managed to convince my dad to custom build a machine for me in late 2003. It had an Athlon XP 2600+, a GeForce FX 5600, and 512MB of RAM. Not the greatest, but I could at least play all of the games at the time. Then as part of starting college, I bought parts on my own and have been building my own PCs since.

[iiNNeX]

AMD Ahtlon 64 did. Back when FPS game were actually good and nobody cared about stupid skin/loot boxes or had P2W elements.

 

Counter Strike 1.6

Half Life 2

Call of Duty 4 (Pro Mod mainly as I was into ESL a lot)

Crysis Wars

 

Dedicated game servers & Modding too!

 

We need to go back.

[Tim_S]

To go back in time...1982. My first computer was a Commodore 64. The is when my computer gaming started. I then went up to a Amiga in the 90's. I started working in a computer shop around 96 fixing and repairing Commodore computers. I had been doing alot of that on my own in the 80s. The guys in the shop was showing me how easy a regular pc was to fix and build. In 97 I built one cause they were having LAN parties playing cool racing games. I wanted in on this. So I built my first computer in the pic. I dont remember any of the specs. I know it wasnt much with 95 on it and it did play the games back then. Would love to get that case back and the fan controller that is in that one to build a modern system out of it.

[Herman Mcpootis]

my pc gaming habit started when my parents got our very first computer (which i remember absolutely nothing about). they got a few of those games meant for kiddies that felt interesting at the time. then i slowly got exposed to lots of arcade games and console games that made me more interested in games and somewhere along the road i learned about steam and got addicted to TF2 and some other F2Ps, and got a few games at my parents' expense(i was a bratty little piece of shit at the time ). fast forward to secondary school and i was quickly coming to conflicts with sharing the family computer so i had to get a new computer for myself, permission or not , then that got me into pc building. then i found out how to get games for cheap, which is how i got my steam library from 10-20 to over 300 in a few years 

[Guest]

I guess it was just a natural progression. We had a Mac way back in the early 90's which played games like Jazz Jack Rabbit, Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego and some car game, where you would get pulled over and fined by the Police for speeding. But gaming was not like it is today, it wasn't something you did everday for hours on end. Then we got the NES and our next console was the N64 after that. Then I believe we got a computer when 56K internet arrived, so we needed a PC to enjoy the light speed web surfing. Oh boy, recalling how long it took to load up webpages, today's generation would be burning down the house if there was 56K today. After that we all eventually ggot our own PC's and the consoles gathered dust.

[Apepa]

Dad's Compaq 486 All-In-One. Doom, Command & Conquer, Star Trek games.

[tatte]

I don't recall the precise year, but I got a Commodore 64 somewhere around mid to late 90s, my older brother also got somewhere around the same time a PC, which I got to use every now and then (remember when PCs used to be so much less personal?) We also had a Philips Videopac G7000 before that, but that doesn't really count for many reasons.

 

Eventually I got my own PC, initially my brother installed new parts or replaced it entirely, I have never asked how he got the machines, but I'm guessing they were old computers from a local school and our parents probably paid for them. He also provided the games. I wasn't interested in new hardware or games, probably because I understood nothing and I was happy with what I had.

 

Gaming was just a thing you could do, much like skiing or reading. We got DSL in 2004, and around the same time I started to have better means to look for and obtain new games (ahem). Sometime after this point I also started to purchase my own upgrades, culminating in my first complete custom build in 2007. Internet played an enormous role in keeping me interested in computers, but it's entirely possible I could have ended up using as much time on the PC without it. I'm from a relatively rural area, so I only had so many options.

 

All in all the journey was very gradual and there was often very concrete obstacles. I got to grew up with games from when they weren't that much better than Pong (Videopac) to the modern post-Crysis days. I have had a PC that was too slow to play MP3s, struggled with HDD that was too small for GTA 2, saved pennies for a new graphics card because the game I wanted to play required newer DirectX and so forth. It has been fun.

[Automobili3XF]

What got me into PC gaming - Curiosity to try anything beyond home consoles, i was aware that the quality of the games on the PC were generally higher, albeit at a higher cost for the hardware.

What got me into PC building- My cousin used to do it, then my older friends started doing it too, i learned from watching them and following the steps, Tom's Hardware also helped me A LOT when i started.

 

Currently i'm running this lazy beast, specs on the signature: