I was 6 or 7 when a cousin who's been living with us at the time bought a Commodore 64. I've never seen a computer before and I got instantly hooked.
Shortly after that he moved away to go to college so he left it to me (he took it back a couple of years ago, but it's broken now anyway
). However, by then I've slowly started losing my interest. Luckily, my neighbour had an Atari 2600 so I'd spend days at his place playing games like Yar's Revenge, Missile Command, Kangaroo, Asterix... At the same time, my other cousin had a cheap faux NES clone (you know, "1000 built-in games" kind of thing with 1000 games actually being endless variations of maybe a dozen titles) so I'd go there from time to time and enjoy some Super Mario Brothers and Contra.
The next big thing for me was discovering the arcades. I've spent enormous sums of money in those places, but I also had great fun. It was a completely different experience than sitting at home playing games all on your own or with a friend or two.
When I was 13 I met this guy at school and soon we became really good friends. We both wanted an Amiga so bad, but none of us ever got one
Anyway, it was around that time that my C64 cousin got back from college, got himself a separate apartment and a PC, a 386DX running at whopping 40MHz, with black and white monitor and no sound card. One day I came to visit him so he showed me some games. I remember playing Xenon 2, Prehistorik and some stupid Windows game that produced the most incredible music I've ever heard coming from a standard PC speaker. We played around with it for some time, but then he had to go to town so he loaded this game to keep me occupied for a couple of hours, a game unlike anything I've ever seen. It was The Secret of Monkey Island.
To make a long and boring story short and boring, soon that friend got a PC of his own and I got mine at the beginning of 1995. I got stuck with that piece of junk til last June. I'm talking about PC here, not my friend, I got rid of him long before that
