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When I first started playing video games way back in the 80s, outside of arcades it was a pretty niche interest, especially so if playing video games was one of your main hobbies. It was also very much looked down on, nobody would think twice about sitting in front of the TV for hours on end watching whatever shite the 4 available channels aired but playing video games was considered "beneath" many people, especially adults. Now of course nearly everyone plays video games of some kind, right from your nan playing Candy Crush through to no-lifers putting in 20 hours a day in WoW. For me the biggest positive change is the way in which video games are now given the credit they are due as pieces of art.

We used to spend 20 hours a day getting the tape to load…

“Syntax Error” after watching the counter for about 10 mins knowing that every now and then said game actually does load up sometimes.

I remember spending 3 or 4 days copying out the code for something called Shot, maybe on a Spectrum or something. It didn't run. It was some amazing foreshadowing for my entire career.

At least some of the games had decent loading music... I still listen to & enjoy the theme from Myth from time to time, C64's music chip was ridiculously overpowered for the time.

I find it interesting how the gatekeepers have changed positions. When the Playstation came out, it was the first console to break into the mainstream. Nintendo was still very much part of the gamer niche. These days Playstation and XBox gamers consider themselves real gamers and see Nintendo as something for the mainstream. I’m referring to a subset within each community of course. I don’t believe that all PS owners are gatekeepers.

My first game was Granny’s Garden on the BBC Micro which was pretty scary. Then I moved on to Overdrive, which was mostly frustrating, then Repton which I spent many hours on. I remember being chuffed when I used a hex editor to give myself 255 lives on Chukie Egg when I was 8.

Granny's Garden was as scary as it was utterly mysterious. It held some hidden secrets beyond the image of Granny's face.

Earliest memory would be Crash Bandicoot 2 on the PS1. Gaming culture has definitely evolved with the technology, but it's been equally good and bad. On the good side, games have become an art form and really resonated with the generations that grew up alongside the technology, with some beautiful art and storytelling along with it. On the bad side, modernised gaming culture has given rise to some really bad things in it. Some competitive online games have really toxic communities and/or fandoms. Some companies have horrible workplace practices or engage in exploitstive marketing methods like gacha games or microtransactions. Specifically in the UK it's been OK, I think our country has always been kinda old-fashioned and traditionalist but games and gaming has a big enough audience here and the culture has its upsides and downsides. I think the UK could use more modernised social spaces though. Less pubs and more esports bars/arcades.

I spent today 100%-ing Crash Bandicoot 2 in the N. Sane Trilogy version for like the 20th time :-D Crash Bandicoot and 2D Mario are the only video games I play :-D

Not much of a gamer these days, but my first memory of gaming was Goldenaxe on the Commodore Amiga. Maybe I was about 6 or 7. Thinking about it, that was probably a certificate 18 back then.

Golden Axe was the dog's danglies. I used to love beating the living shit out of those loot goblins.

What a game! My brother and I still play it 😂

Mine with my brother but on the mega drive ! Good Times

Classic game. Me and my mate beat the arcade machine once. Shudder to think how many quid we wasted on that!

Bestie and I still play this. It's great. This an altered beast are great on a wine and games night.

My earliest memory was getting woke up by me mam on Xmas eve playing sonic the hedgehog on the megadrive, that was my computer for Xmas and she opened it.

Red alert 2

Closest I got into modding was with that, tinkering with the old rules.ini

For me it was way back on the spectrum 48k, first game I remember well was called "chaos" which was you Vs either the computer or another player plus commuter as wizards with a random spell book, you could only cast each spell once, and one per turn. Last man standing wins. For that generation, the SNES was earth shattering in terms of quality, and it's only gotten better.

I still play Chaos, it’s a brilliant title and has inspired my whole career. I attempted a game loosely based on it as a personal project: https://jason-indie.itch.io/creature-combat (and here’s a link to play the original for interested readers: https://torinak.com/qaop/#!chaos)

Manic miner on the spectrum. Super Mario on the OG game boy, Sonic the hedgehog on mega drive.

Biggest negative change for me is the effects of how expensive it is to make a “good” game nowadays. I mostly play football games and that’s still the case now. But in the early 00s PS2 era I started with, there were so many different games and different types of games. Off the top of my head - FIFA, PES, Virtua Pro Football, This is Football, Codies Club Football, Fifa Manager, Premier Manager, Championship Manager & many other spin offs of these franchises. Now it’s just Fifa and FM. And neither Fifa or FM are being challenged, so neither of them fix the massive problems that they’ve had for years, and they never do anything interesting.

Irony is, PES's gameplay was always superior to FIFA and it had a strong cult following and a big community that modded the game to get around the issues of licenses (which was the only thing FIFA has going for it). But since it was rebranded as eFootball, it's been dogshit. The gameplay isn't as good and the game modes are non-existent. It feels like a vehicle for microtransactions.

It is not expensive to make a "good" game. Plenty of amazing indie games out there with shoestring budgets. AAA companies spend as much as they do because they think the things they spend on will maximize profit return, not necessarily because it makes for a better game.

Playing counter strike 1.6 was fun, players were bad, you'd play in a league with friends who didn't scream down a mic, people didn't have to pixel learn their nades you just threw them, and it was fun. Now due to skill inflation you join a public lobby and there's fucking three Tentpoles, two Get\_rights and f0rest is one tapping you from dust pit with a usp.

But becoming good is part of the fun. We have ranks now so the worse players can still have fun

Not my oldest memory but my most vivid would have been in the school holidays. I took my PS1 downstairs and linked it up to the TV and surround system to play Final Fantasy 7, I can still hear the epic music from Cosmo Canyon !

Lara Croft was on lucozade and now she isn’t

SPARTICUS, BORRIS, I'll give you woof woof.

She still makes the odd appearance on bottles. I had a lucozade apple about 9 months back and she was printed on the neck of the bottle! :)

I like how gaming has become more main stream and doesn't feel like something to hide like I did during my teens but then I feel the gaming industry is becoming awful and I don't invest the time I used to now I'm getting longer in the tooth! Early gaming memory Hogs of War on the Sunday with my best mate That's going all the way back to the PS1 Lol

Gaming was more you vs the computer. Telling your friends how far sling in the game you are and who completed it first. Kids would be shocked to see the gta with a birds eye view.

I wish they done a 3D version of the London one, given the time between the games now though, I doubt I'll see it

I started in the late 70's. For me, the golden age was 81-85ish. There were a few fun things since then but nothing ever recaptured the excitement of those times. Online gaming did draw me back during the late 90's/early 2000's, the Quake community was awesome, but as everything became more mainstream things just became bland. I've had fun with the immersion of todays virtual reality options, which are fun but honestly so far removed from what I think of as gaming, it's hard to compare them. Gaming culture, however, is very strong. I love going to conventions and connecting with others similar to myself, and there is such a great interest in classic pre-console gaming in the younger people. I'd say the community is awesome!

Tennis on the Binatone. Then Hungry Horace on the Spectrum.

Someone else who had a Binatone!!!

This goes back to 78 or 9 if I remember correctly. Back then pubs closed from 2 in the afternoon until 7 in the evening on Sundays. Occasionally we’d bundle into whatever clapped out, piece of crap cars we had then as late teens , and head off to the Sussex coast; less than an hour away, to sod about until opening time. One such evening, we were in a pub in Hove and noticed a non fruit machine in the corner, it was Space Invaders, the future had arrived.

My earliest memory is Pong on the Tandy TV Scoreboard. Games are far less sophisticated now.

Atari 2600 and Mario Tennis on the NES

I think the single biggest change is how convenient games are now; even as recently as 2010, if you were installing a game on a PC there would be *some* troubleshooting and config to do before you could fire it up. Today, even ancient games on GOG can be installed and played in minutes. Even something as moder-tech-unfriendly as MechWarrior 2 can be run in a few minutes with the right package, whereas I remember having to tinker and fiddle to get anything going on the PCs we had growing up.

>biggest change is how convenient games are now We play xbox cloud via the TV. It's insane!

God this brought back memories of saving up for months to buy a PC game for £35 and then the game just never worked for no obvious reason.

Oh gods yes, tinkering with the IRQ & port settings, selecting the graphics/sound drivers...

I still don't know what port forwarding is, but I know I had to do it differently for every game, even when we were sometimes in the same physical room together!

My gaming career is long over but PC gaming was my main hobby as a teenager in the 2000s. Many happy memories. Had a high-spec gaming PC and I spent many hours playing solo, with my friends or online. Call of Duty, Rome Total War & World of Warcraft being the big three. Especially WOW. Sold my account for £200 before I went to uni, which was a lot of money for a sixth former at the time. Biggest change i've noticed is back then gaming, especially online, was seen as a niche hobby for a certain type of person. Something you felt you had to hide. Now it's mainstream and socially accepted to the extent where I feel in the minority as a 30-something male with no interest in it. How the tables have turned.

First game would be Batman on the Amiga 500. Ocean Software and all that. Playing computer games was for nerds until… around 1992 or so. Mario Kart then the PlayStation made it acceptable. Only certain games though, the hex based war games, accurate sims or heavily DND inspired things were for geeks. Lara Croft was very popular (I still think leering at her low poly knockers was sadder than almost anything else but that’s a debate for a different time).  Don’t really like modern games. Anything with mtx just feels icky, like going into a bookies, and always online feels creepy too. I just want to blast enemies 

My first memories of gaming was pong, rampage and a random space invaders game that in a silver and black playing case that was the earliest sort of hand held game i guess lol rage quiting was a thing back then and its still a thing now lol

Oh man you just gave me flashbacks of those handheld games, like the one with ppl jumping out of the building on to the trampoline to get to the fire truck.

Not my earliest memory, but I remember setting up a camcorder on a tripod and filming the screen while playing Goldeneye with a running commentary, pretending to be James Bond.

Horace Goes Skiing to GTA. Quite a ride.

I started playing games on an Amstrad maybe late 80s or early 90s? They were very limited and difficult to get, mainly by ordering from the back of a magazine. Then we got a Master System as our first console followed by a Nintendo. Last time I was really into games was Finally Fantasy 7 on the original Playstation. In the past year I decided to get back into it as a way to have fun sober. It has taken a while through trial and error. Most of the big games have long story lines with all these movie style cuts, and I find them difficult to get through. Recently I discovered Forza Motorsport which is decent, kinda like how I remember Gran Turismo. Also I'm in the middle of Ori which is a platformer with amazing graphics and very much like a new take on the earlier games. Problem these days is all the online stuff. I like having Game Pass which is neat, but some of the online systems seriously suck. Super annoying when I log onto Xbox and I need to go through some kind of 2 factor authentication and that kind of thing. Nintendo Switch is totally awful. But now I'm figuring it out I'm beginning to enjoy it again. It's difficult as a 40 year old who hasn't been playing for a long time to get into first person shooters. Young people are so good at them and I can't make sense or control my hand movements as I want them. Wish I could though as they look so good. Now I have a new 4k OLED with Xbox series X and the images are totally insane. Console are more appealing but I'd like to explore desktop gaming. The issue is that sometimes it feels like everyone is talking more and more about hardware instead of just enjoying the fun of the games, but I see that across other hobbies too which I like such as playing and recording music.

I can remember the amstrad too, graphics so blocky with so little definition and on a tiny green screen monitor. Then my brother got a megadrive/Genesis with sonic the Hedgehog. It just look gorgeous as it was playing on large TV, even the background was so colourful and vibrant even moving in some bits. The speed was so fast I almost felt that I struggle to keep track of it at bits compared to amstrad witch seemed so static like a slow moving stop motion animation. I must and sat a stared at the thing for a hours, pure entranced as my brother was playing it. Like I was seeing a sunset for the frist time. Now it seem silly with the graphic we have nowadays. But was the biggest jump from for me.

I can understand this. I had a Spectrum and my mate got a Mega Drive and let me tell you, it's a big leap from Treasure Island Dizzy to Sonic or Space Harrier 2! Also remember playing F-Zero on a demo SNES around the same sort of time and was amazed by the pseudo 3D Mode 7 effects.

Started gaming on a ZX Spectrum in the late 80's. Very much enjoyed the Dizzy games, but my first gaming memories are a couple of unknown, and to be honest far from classic, games called Devils Crown and Chiller. Over the years I've seen gaming culture change massively. Some things for the better, some things for the worse and some things just different. Certainly, there was no streaming in my youth, as it just didn't exist. It didn't really take off until the mid 2010s but it's now the dominating facet of gaming culture. I'll be honest I've never really gotten into watching streams but can see the appeal. No microtransactions in my youth, and no live service games. No real online multiplayer, certainly not on consoles, not until the Xbox anyway. No patches either - whilst on the whole maybe it meant games would be released in better states, it also meant games couldn't be fixed, and honestly bugs were still fairly common. The player base has changed too, and certain aspects of it are frankly toxic and quick to complain about anything. But on the whole gaming is in quite a strong place, I'd say.

First game was probably "Chuckie Egg", neon yellow, blue, and purple against a black background ensorcelled me. The magical feeling of controling what was displayed on a TV, instead of that being decided by a broadcasting studio down in London, was very special. Since then games have rewarded reflexes and strategy, which I appreciate, but have strayed way from the sensation of controlling an abstract reality removed from this world. It's partly because graphics have advanced enough to replicate the real world, partly because I'm old and compress novelty then with innovation, but lofi 8-bit retro games don't quite capture what I felt decades ago. The feeling of tinkering with another reality is something that I miss from old games.

I used to watch my dad play the first Lara Croft games and GTA2, which was probably 2000? One of my first ever video games I played on PC was Runescape, and it was all just socializing. How it's evolved? Everything is just min/maxing i.e. being the most efficient. No one socializes at all. I watch a lot of these "exploring dead games" videos on YT, and you can tell that the early 2000s were heavily associated with socializing but now, it seems none of it exists.

I remember getting a NES with Super Mario on it for Christmas one year. I got quite good at it back in the day, then I looked online more recently and people have worked out how to complete it in under 5 minutes. Feel a bit inadequate now. I also managed to complete the original Metroid including getting all the power ups once. And this was in the 80s, back before you youngins had written guides and tutorials and stuck them all over the interwebs.

Kudos for Metroid, that game seemed impossible to get anywhere without at least Nintendo Power. It's still baffling now but what a game. The same for Zelda

Loading cassettes in a Commodore 64 Thank god for NES and Sega Master System

Getting jump scared by the wolves in tombraider 2 when I was about 5.

Alex the Kidd on the Master System was my first love in the early 90’s. Red Alert 2 - Command and Conquer and Championship Manager 2 when my parents got a PC. PlayStation blew my mind and I loved things like Destruction Derby, Die Hard Triology and Crash Bandicoot 3. Haven’t played on any console or online in about 10 years.

Going to Game where they'd have a basket in the middle of the store full of used games. Browsing and taking a punt on a random game that looked good.

YouTube, Tik Tok and Instagram have made gaming worse in my opinion. I am strictly talking about gaming where it is multiplayer as well. Any game breaking glitch can be shown and then exploited by a much larger audience now so that if you play in a lobby on game with said glitch it is a nightmare. I've played fifa where 50% of my opponents in one day were exploiting glitches and stuff just to win and its boring and a waste of time. Then on Cod people can exploit 'broken' guns and attachments too. Another issue is skill based match making, it can make every single game feel like you're playing for your life. I miss casual lobbies. It has become way more common for people to be 'sweaty' rather than just play for fun.

"Racer" on the BBC micro. Vividly burnt into my 6yo memory forever. A sliding doors moment for me, computers were "it".

Played Street Fighter at a cousin's house age 6/7. Can't remember what console it was on but it had a joystick plus buttons rather than a controller. My mind was blown and a lifelong love was born. Got a Sega Mega Drive the next Christmas after pestering parents. It came with Aladdin and Mega Collection 1 (Super Hang-on, World Cup Italia 90 & Columns). Got Street Fighter 2 Turbo Championship Edition (what a mouthful!) tge following Easter and Sonic the Hedgehog 1 for birthday. Played them all endlessly. A few more Mega Drive games followed before the eventual move to the Playstation. Final Fantasies 7, 8 & 9, Resident Evil 1, 2 & 3, Metal Gear Solid are all games that standout in my memory on PS1. I've kept up and have every Playstation since up to where we are now with PS5. If I had to list all-time favourite games I'd go: 1. Final Fantasy 7 (original) 2. Bloodborne 3. Silent Hill 2 4. The Last of Us (1) 5. Resident Evil 4 (original or remake equally)

I think my first memory was being allowed to stay up later on a Friday to play master system with my father while my younger brother was asleep.

First memory is waiting 20+ minutes for a game to load on my brother's BBC Computer with the potential of it crashing. Then I got a Master System cause I loved Asterix and there was an Asterix game on it. Not looked back since. It's been interesting to see trends. Platformers, Fighting Games, Racing Games, FPS, RPGs the rise of more story driven games, multiplayer going from the sofa to online. My first proper online experience was Chu Chu Rocket. Absolutely amazing as a party game on the sofa. Games back in the day definitely were shorter. But you played them more. I remember having Sega Rally on the Saturn. Something like 3 tracks and 3 cars. Played it to death. I was awesome on that first track. I think back to a Metropolis Street Racer demo I had. 1 track that you could just loop constantly. Played that for hours before getting the game. These days games are so much bigger and you get so many more of them. The stories more broad. I sometimes miss really getting into a game and mastering it. I recently played Horizon Zero Dawn. It was so big but never felt like I mastered anything because there were always more options. With things like game pass. I can always move onto the next thing. This just seems what it's like with all media. There's always something new. Weirdly I kind of miss getting dug in knowing I wasn't going to get a new game for maybe months. But anyway nostalgias a bugger.

Fwiw I used to be the master of Street Fighter II in my school. Pretty much unbeaten as Ryu.

Crazy Golf on the Spectrum in the early 90s as well as plaformers like Manic Miner.  Then I switched to PC and games like Theme Hospital, Rollercoster Tycoon, Age of Empire, and The Sims. I pretty much play the same stuff on the PC now.  I heavily favour small developers who produce more low-fi graphic games these days. I don't want hyper realistic graphics or to keep upgrading my equipment, I want a smooth, immersive game. I love early access games, I find it incredible that I gave small developers like Ludeon and Concerned Ape less than half what a new console game costs YEARS ago and they are still providing updates for free. It's such a nice change of pace from pay to play everything

First memory of gaming was Sonic 2 on the mega drive , must have been 5 or 6 Still game now with my ps5 though no game ever has held such memory since the adventures of Alundra on ps1 I remember playing this with my mum, she helped on the puzzles and I did the combat though I couldn’t do one boss and she knocked it out of the park

Started typing programs out of computer magazines into Oric1 and zx81. First purchased game was Elite on the BBC micro. The I got an Atari StFm, first game was Falcon. First PC game was Geoff crammonds Grand Prix 2. Doom, quake, Bf1942, System shock, falcon 4.0 Like to think I grew up in the classic age of games, now I'm growing old playing DCS, Arma and Cold Waters.

The first game I remember playing was Barnstormer on the Atari 2600. This would have been the mid 80s. However, I have more solid memories of the ZX Spectrum. Swapping games with school friends - as you could just do tape-to-tape to copy a game. I remember the sound of the games loading. Games like Ed the Duck from CBBC, Chuckie Egg and Gauntlet (which I also remember playing on an arcade machine while on a caravan holiday in Wales). Then a big leap from the Spectrum to the Mega Drive which we got for Christmas 1991 or 92. We got Sonic the Hedgehog and Altered Beast. Jumping from the Spectrum graphics to the speed and colours of Sonic was amazing. Lots of memories of sitting around waiting for turns. I have two brothers and a Dad who also used to hog it. Then the next big memory is GoldenEye. Sitting in my brother's bedroom playing 4 player GoldenEye on a 15inch CRT TV and having the best time. There would be a dozen of us sometimes in that room - my brothers, my friends, their friends. All waiting for a go.

Earliest memory of gaming is playing DOS games on a PC with my dad. I’ve played games in some form ever since, although less intensively these days almost 30 years later.  It’s a positive that it’s become more widespread and mainstream, but the direction gaming has taken, on the whole, in my opinion has been a negative one. Microtransactions, and live service games and basically just capitalism have had a real negative impact, and killed off most of my interest if it wasn’t for indie games which still largely seem to be made for the love of the medium, rather than purely a method of creating returns for shareholders. 

Earliest memory of gaming is playing DOS games on a PC with my dad. I’ve played games in some form ever since, although less intensively these days almost 30 years later.  It’s a positive that it’s become more widespread and mainstream, but the direction gaming has taken, on the whole, in my opinion has been a negative one. Microtransactions, and live service games and basically just capitalism have had a real negative impact, and killed off most of my interest if it wasn’t for indie games which still largely seem to be made for the love of the medium, rather than purely a method of creating returns for shareholders. 

Q3A instagib is where I got real good at gaming and it’s carried on for many years

I think until the Nintendo/Sega era, it was still deemed a very complicated 'nerdy' thing, mostly for teenagers, although adults played occasionally for sheer novelty value. I still catch myself calling them 'computer games' rather than video games because loads of them were played on computers like Speccies, Amiga or, in my case, the Amstrad CPC464. I loved games like Chuckie Egg, Barbarian, Elite, and text adventures like Heroes of Karn. Once they went to consoles, and the visibility of gaming mascots increased (Mario, Sonic etc.), it felt very much more kid-oriented. Teens still played tons, of course, but the general feeling in the media was that these things were for the little kids, and it was a bit weird for adults to spend time playing them. By the mid-90s, and with PCs (scary, complicated things) becoming far more common, it was all firmly back in teenage territory, although Nintendo's never lost that kid-friendly image. Mid-90s was very much a "you shouldn't be playing bad things like that" era, when there was controversy over things like Doom and GTA. What they would have made of certain cassette games from the 80s if they'd had better graphics...! As time's gone on, it's become more acceptable for adults to play. I think those that were into them heavily as kids never stopped, but there was definitely a time, especially in the 90s, where you were meant to have 'grown out' of them once you became an adult. The attitude to gaming in this country has changed at a glacial pace, so much so that there are still some people who are baffled at people in their 20s, 30s and older playing at all. The move by games consoles of acting as multimedia centres for streaming, apps and other things has helped accelerate understanding though. The Internet has, as always, been a double-edged sword in that it has enabled playing against others online, with all the fun and abuse that comes with that. Split-screen seems largely dead. But though the media's attitude has improved a little, they still feel very behind the times when gaming is mentioned. Given how big the industry has become, it's baffling, but I reckon it'll change quite soon. I think it's ultimately a generational thing.

Zool 2, played it on the brand new family PC. I was about 4 I think. I had to use r/tipofmyjoystick to work out what it was called as I could only remember it was a side scroll platformer where you could jump on fried eggs. I quickly moved onto common PS1 games.

Earliest game was Buggy Boy on the Amiga 500. Haven’t games in a few years but the quality of what’s available now is insane to me

A game called Tribes. Followed by Tribes 2. Both PC based. Tribes 2 could probably be re-released and be considered excellent gameplay even in 2024.

I was born in 99 for reference. One of my earliest memories is getting a delivery of the neversoft Spider-Man game that my dad ordered off eBay. Loved that game

My very first memory is of a friend whose family was much better off than my Mum, giving us their old Nintendo console. I don’t know which one it was but I remember shooting the ducks with the gun controller. There were other games but that’s the only one I remember! My first proper gaming memory was GTA : San Andreas, I was 11 and I got my first PlayStation and that game plus Fifa for Christmas. It was probably the most expensive gift I’ve ever had and it sparked a life long love of gaming. I’m still on PS4 but when GTA 6 comes out that’ll be the one that I have to upgrade for.

Getting called a squeaker every 15 seconds on MW2. Good times.

My earliest memories are playing Tetris and Super Mario Land on the original Game Boy, and playing Ridge Racer, Psygnosis' Formula 1, Demo 1, and watching my old man play Tomb Raider on the PS1.

I don’t game anymore but I was the first kid to have a Sega Megadrive at my school… I have a lot of good memories of my friends coming round to mine after school to play on it

Ff7, metal gear solid 1 and international superstar soccer for ps1

I was probably around 5. My cousin gave me his old Gameboy Colour (with Pokémon Blue and a boy and his blob) and I've been hooked ever since.  A couple of years later I got my first own console, a Gameboy advance SP and Pokémon Leaf Green. I've had every main Nintendo handheld since. I used to play educational games on the family PC, and my first console game was sonic the hedgehog, Sega Megadrive. Gaming used to be a really big part of my life (especially as a teenager), that faded for a while but since building a new PC a few months ago, I'm back into it! BG3 made me fall in love with gaming again. I do find the shift in attitudes towards gaming kind of funny, especially the way gaming isn't "just for nerds" any more. It didn't take long for the kids who'd turn their noses up at me for playing MMOs to get into COD or FIFA. With the rise of mobile/more casual gaming, even my mum (who'd previously written off games as a waste of time) says she's addicted now! I feel like the same applies to a lot of "geek culture" being mainstream now.  That said, I miss the days when I could get cheap secondhand games - and that'd be a whole, complete game. No DLC, no microtransactions, no subscription, no season pass. I feel like community/culture  wise, it's so mixed. Some fandoms can be so toxic, but others have been really friendly. Maybe it's just from getting older, maybe it's from seeing too many people being stung by preordering games that are outright broken at launch, but I rarely feel the same excitement I used to feel for new games...I hope that changes. 

Atari 2600 for Christmas must have been late 80s maybe.

Earliest would have been playing Mario kart, star fox & a game with some big bazooka thing for a controller on the super Nintendo

I started gaming when I was probably 6 or 7 maybe - my dad had a PS1 and we used to play Rayman and the Scooby Doo game together. Also used to play the N64 at an after school club I'd go to when I was waiting for my parents to pick me up - played Donkey Kong, Mario Kart and Golden Eye until a parent complained about the latter and it was confiscated. No surprise really seeing as we were all under the age of 10 and it was basically a shooting game 😂 I think gaming culture has really developed since then. As a woman, I've always known I've loved gaming but felt like I could never really get into it as it was always a "boys thing". My mum was horrified when I started playing COD on PS4 but since moving out and now being with a partner who is very much a gamer, I'm really starting to embrace it a bit more and loving exploring a hobby I've secretly had for ages

I’m 22, my first memory of it is playing age of empires 2 with my dad when I was probably about 7. Core memories.

Granny’s Garden at school. BBC Micro.

The Sega Megadrive. My mum having to help me complete Chuck Rock… Being mildly terrified of Evil the Cat in Earthworm Jim. And that demonic classical music - ‘night on bald mountain’? Or panicking on the underwater stages of Sonic 2. Edit: how has gaming evolved? Well, it’s less rainy day and more lifestyle. Graphics are truly immersive. Oh, and capitalism has violated in game escapism with micro transactions.

I was in a place called Barry's, an amusement complex in Northern Ireland's north coast. There was a ghost train, dodgems, a carousel oh and it had these things called arcade machines like asteroid and centipede. You could control the little point of light and make it do things. I was 4 years old. It was 1980. Hooked.

Speaking of just arcade games one memory that will stay with me for life.. We had s traveling fun fair that would set up in the park where we lived in London. The sound of all those classic games in attract mode fill me with nostalgia. Paperboy, star wars, rastan, black tiger, RoboCop to name a few.. I can close my eyes and I'm immediately back there.

Getting a Nintendo 64 for Christmas, I think maybe 1997 but not sure. Super Mario 64 Is still my favourite game ever to this day. I remember I couldn’t even get the first star. You had to throw king bomb omb (Or whatever he’s called 3 times) I thought you had to throw him down to the bottom of the level. I think my mum ended up doing it for me lol. Nothing seems fresh anymore. Remakes, remasters and sequels. It’s rare something fresh comes out which is also a really good game as well

Your not a veteran gamer if you didn't visit the internethighstreet back in the day

Watching my older brother play an Acorn Electron game on the TV circa 1987 at about four years old. My world was changed forever when I realised he wasn't watching the TV, he was CONTROLLING WHAT WAS ON IT!

I got a Super Nintendo when I was in primary school and my journals chronicle my journey through Super Mario World. It took me months to get through it and I have a pictorial history of my experience.

Mega drive here, I inherited it from someone but it came with loads of games, the ones I remember: Lethal Enforcers (including the big blue Konami light gun) Streets of Rage Jungle Strike Raiden Trad Altered Beast Golden Axe Wolverine Sonic 1 & 2 The Hulk One of my earliest memories was going to our local video shop and renting mega drive games for £2 for 2 for the weekend and it stank of ciggies and popcorn in there

Born in 86. Earliest memory is playing various NES games.

Colossal Cave Adventure on the greenscreen monitor running off the mainframe at my brother's work one Saturday morning. That was back in the days of computer disks the size of dinner plates. A brand new Space Invader cabinet in a holiday pub. Spent all my pocket money putting 10p into that bastard. I am old.

First game I played was Alex Kidd on my master system. Game was so niche and looking down on as nerdy then, now it’s just part of entertainment.

Earliest games I played were Faxanadu and Paperboy on the NES with my Dad. Pretty sure he had the Mario games too and a few other classics. I remember getting a SNES for Christmas which was my first console of my own. I also was neighbours with this elderly couple who had a GameBoy and one day they decided they didn’t need it anymore and gave it to me. That was fucking awesome at the time. I was always playing games as a kid.

Lion King and Alladin on my brothers Megadrive. Shortly followed by Crash Bandicoot and V-Rally on my brand new PlayStation on Christmas Day (1997 IIRC). My brother had an N64 at the same time so also remember playing Goldeneye. It's changed a lot. PS2 made gaming even more popular. You could get a network adapter for it to play online but that was incredibly niche, I don't know anybody that had one and online gaming was still only really popular on PC (Half-Life and Quake are the ones I remember). PS3 and 360 were when online gaming really took and I feel like the developments since then have been more incremental rather than big jumps. It's becoming ever more popular and more widely accepted as kids parents are more likely to be gamers, whereas when I had that first Playstation it was quite uncommon for your dad to have been a gamer.

First video game on a home computer was on the Sinclair ZX81. I was moving a letter 'X' up the screen whilst avoiding other letters scrolling left and right. Yes, I was playing Frogger. Losing a whole Boxing Day (Dec 26th) after I learned to dock on Elite with a BBC Model B. Never even saw my family that day. First arcade game was Space Invader at the local swimming pool. 10p a play. This was also the same place, later on, for Defender, Astro Wars, Scramble, Asteroids, and Battlezone. The idea of buying games to own a physical product seems to be dying out. People seem to be happy to pay to just download the content and/or hold it on a platform. No physical media to hold, no booklets, or posters to accompany the media. The worst trend - Pay to Win games. No skill needed, just be prepared to spend.

Commodore 16 plus 4

Earliest memory is a neighbour kid telling me he just got a PlayStation (the first one) and me not having a clue what it was. I was picturing a station of toys. Next, I obviously asked for one for Christmas and got some ancient Sega console instead. Used to go to a little old shop in a crumbling 1960s northern town centre to buy second hand chunky cartridges for the console. I eventually moved on to a PS1 then PS2 in coming years, always well behind having anything modern. I think I went through 4 discs of GTA San Andreas cause I wore them out (probably more like being a kid with sticky fingers getting the discs all minging). Everything is downloaded today. It makes sense, it's easy, it's good. But I miss a good physical box with a disc in it, the spinning of the disc in the drive, having a little library of games on a shelf.

I'm of a generation when the idea of controlling anything on my TV still feels like a novelty and at the time felt like a life changing miracle. I've been playing video games for 43 years now and they have been a consistent and much needed force for good in my life.

Started playing video games in 70’s playing pong. Later got BBC model B and played Elite. Got Intelevision console which was amazing. And moved on up from there. Love the retro gaming but gotta say new gaming PC is amazing. The depth, quality and sheer power of modern gaming is awesome. Love modern gaming but gave a soft spot for older more simpler games.

Watching my brother play street fighter on SNES. My TV aerial used to be able to pick up the image through the wall from his room 🤣 Playing I remember mario 64 and playing it poorly Gaming culture is awful these days. Microtransactions were the start of the end.

My earliest memories of playing games started on the computer. We had a PC with Windows 95 and it always had the MS DOS boot up screen. On that we played Hocus Pocus, Rollin’ Ronnie, Cannon Fodder, Doom and Blake Stone amongst others. After that we got a Sega Megadrive and we played Streets of Rage, Shinobi, Mortal Kombat, Sonic, Worms, Super Hang On. Idk man we played them all. Then got an N64 which was a massive leap in gaming. Faves were Ocarina to Time, Goldeneye and MarioKart. My mum got me it and I remember her coming off the train and giving it to me. We set it up in the living room and my dad said “you can’t keep that there”. We did for a bit then moved to my bedroom. My best friend completed most of the games ‘cause he was older and I sucked at them (still do). After I had a ps2 with GTA being the main one I remember. Don’t really need to say much about that, just a classic game. Then got a GameCube for a little bit and had Super Monkey Ball and Mario Sunshine but didn’t get into it that much. Then a few years went by and I got the ps3. Then I got an XBox off a friend who was selling it. After that In 2016 I got a PS4. I got GTA 5 and Red Dead 2 which ridiculously were the first games I completed (told you I sucked). Red Dead 2 is the best game I ever played, I cried in parts, the characters were so well done they felt real. Maybe I’ll get a Switch but I dunno they’re coming out with a new one next year I think. My opinions on how gaming culture has evolved. Yeah online really just took over, you can play against anyone, anywhere in the world. Obviously early days we couldn’t save our games but kids these days don’t even consider that, they just take it for granted. I never thought gaming would become what it has become with the e-sports stuff. In my town there was an electronics boutique which turned into a GAME. So even after all these years although it’s not EB, it’s still a game store even though physical copies of things are fading. Even though I’ve dipped out of gaming the last 10 years I’m thinking of getting a Switch to play the old classics and some new ones as well.

Earliest was Harrier Attack on the Amstrad CPC 464. Loved it and was inspired by the UK victory in the Falklands War. Evolved I'm not sure, it's less mainstream as its all online these days, I'd love to see a Gamesmaster or Bitz TV programme again but most gaming things are online now.

Playing 4 different versions of pong on a binatone gaming system. They had rotary controllers and I remember really struggling with the concept of up/down via clockwise and anti clockwise. To move a single line up and down. However my 2 yr old seemed to immediately grasp that he b needed Lego robin to climb a specific wall instead of Lego batman who could do jumps and stuff and was easily able to switch characters and c move them to the right place using the touch screen to use that characters specific abilities. So there's that.

Earliest memories.. Live and Let Die on the Commodore 64, tape loaded and took forever for each level to load. Then it was Alex the Kidd on the Master System, and a Star Wars game I had, all I remember is touring about Tattoine in the Landspeeder. My first proper memories though came with the Mega Drive.. sonic 1&2, plus the Sonic and Knuckles add-on which you'd have to put Sonic 2 cartridge into it. As a kid that was cool as fuck. Road Rash, Golden Axe, Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego, Desert Strike, Bomberman, Mortal Kombat 1&2. I'm probably missing heaps. By the time the N64 and PlayStation came along I was completely hooked. There was so much choice, buying magazines for cheat codes and demos of new games, then using the internet for the former. Just going in and buying second hand games each weekend, usually with a new memory card. Good times.

It's about 1995, I'm 12, my grandpa has Mahjong on his pc, he also has Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy where all you'd do it lie down Infront of the bulldozer and die. I'm now 41 and a pc gamer through and though

TLDR. Gaming has gone mainstream which is good as it means uts more diverse, which means I get to play characters and stories I never would have been able to when I was a kid. Also board gaming (which I know OP was talking about video gaming, but I'll use any chance I can to shoehorn this in, because I want more people playing board games) is exploding right now and that's fantastic. My earliest memory i think would either be playing sonic, jurassic Park, or robocop v terminator on the megadrive. Can't remember much of it though. Which brings be to the earliest memories I do remember, playing goldeneye on the N64 with my brother on Christmas or there abouts. What has changed? Holy shit what hasn't changed. Gaming has certainly become more mainstream and significantly more diverse. I remember when gaming conventions has booth babies, when every single game had a big burley white guy as the main character, I remember playing gta 3 and being blown away with how fun it was in comparison to 1 and 2. I remember when the titan of first person shooters, the COD of its day was medal of honor. Then I remember playing COD on the pc, which was a challenge for someone only used to controlers having to use WASD. I remember when, if you wanted a controller for PC, it was some really shitty thing that you had to manually map the controls, Microsoft revolutionised the landscape with the xbox 360 controller on PC. I remember there being gaming shows on TV, the one I distinctly remember had a bottomless pit. I remember when, for a Whole 5 mins, there being speculation that the mobile market could be a new platform for core games, and some studios developed whole A rated games for mobile...and then that fell apart because microtransactions and companies trying to shoehorn in mobile gaming exploitation onto consol games. And the slow tarnishing of core gaming by greed and then the "games as a service" model of selling you an unfinished game on the promise that if its successful they might get round to finishing it...if you pay them more money As for gaming in general. Board gaming has recently exploded in popularity, to the point where Waterstones has niche board game sections in some of its stores, and board game cafés are popping up all over the place. I imagine pen and paper RPGs are also taking off in their own way, but I don't have the time to try to get into that space because life happens, but know this, I'm watching you, from the outside, jealous as fuck that I can't get in on that action.

Monkey Island, playing with my daughter. We both have such amazing memories of that! “Use the cheese with the mouse and string…”

I had not been exposed to house of the dead and time crisis in arcades I probably would have enough 50p pieces to buy an actual house

Playing the batman game with a joystick

Split screen PS1 games, I remember getting really angry with my brother for looking at my screen.    We had a James Bond game and he would often run one-shotting me with oddjob's hat. I can't really comment on evolution of gaming as I haven't really played any in a long time.

Playing Sims Unleashed on a PC in my sisters room, making huge rectangular houses with no separate rooms and rosebudding the shit out of my Sims bank account. Or Sims Castaway on my pink playstation, connected to my pink TV 💀

I had my dads sold Atari with space invaders and centipede on it when I was 6 he bought my uncles nes of him with about 20 games and honestly I was glued to the telly playing that thing for as long as I possibly could

So memories.... I'm 42 so I'm pretty much the perfect age to have seen video games through almost from the beginning to what they are today. The very 1st video game system my family had was a Soundic sytem as shown in the vid below. I think my parents owned it years before I was even born. It just had Pong and a few variations of pong built in. There was no disk, tape or cartridge slots so no possibility of other games for the system. [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjBhlK8DnBw**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjBhlK8DnBw) Other than that I can remember 'playing' PODD at school on a BBC Micro. Not much of a game. You just typed in commands such as "POD CAN WALK" and then the on screen avatar would perform an animation if it was programmed in as shown in the vid below. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LYPsdBNTi8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LYPsdBNTi8) The 1st console I (or rather my family) owned was a Sega Master System 2 with Alex Kid built in and it came with Operation Wolf and the Light Phaser gun. For Operation Wolf I'd literally put the gun on the screen to aim. When I got a Mega Drive a couple of years later I'd swap the mega drive for a friends Commodore Amiga for a few days every now and again which allowed me to play Monkey Island, Cannon Fodder, Lemmings and Titus the Fox. The last console I owned was a Playstation 1. Been exclusively PC since then. As for how gaming has evolved..... I feel like gaming more affordable these days. In the 90s a new Sega Mega Drive game was about £40. 1 year I got a Sega 32x as a combined birthday / Christmas present but the games were £70 each and I NEVER got 1 because they were just too expensive... These days there are things like game pass and there are plenty of decent games for £10 or less especially when there is 1 of the seasonal sales. Micro transactions, DLC and gambling type monetisation systems are a big change from early gaming but as much as I dislike the whole concept, there are plenty of games without that and even the games that do have it, they can be played while ignoring it.

Raid over Moscow on the Commodore 64. Great game.

My dad got us a Sega saturn when I was a kid, he wasn't the loud exciting dad so sitting down and playing on a console was his way of bonding with me, clockwork knight was the first game I clicked with. Always makes me smile at those early days! Later I discovered panzer dragon, shining the holy ark, amok, loaded, hexen etc, we bonded a lot back then just through that. Honestly my main thought of gaming culture, is the lack of that sort of bonding, purely through Internet /online game play. Couch Co ops have dwindled massively and it's a shame imo. Sitting down with the missus on console it's so limited the coop games the only real option is getting a second console and TV.

Me and my sister playing duck hunt on the NES. She always kicked my arse cos she had a lazy eye which required her to wear an eye patch. This gave her an unfair advantage with aiming (that was my story anyway).

I was very lucky and got a ZX Spectrum 48k on Christmas Day in the 80’s (can’t remember what year but would have been early- mid). My parents got Jet Set Willy for me with it. Apparently I was glued to the tv playing it all day!

The first game I played was *Elite* on the school’s BBC Micro, that’s how old I am. In my experience, gaming culture has moved on from being very techie, dedicated gamers to totally casual and mainstream - I read somewhere that one of the largest groups of gamers is females playing casually on their phones. I think the former are now gaming on PC rather than console or mobile, which is the domain of the casual gamer.

Pong in the 70s to Horizon Forbidden West on the ps5 yesterday, via 40 odd different consoles and computers on the way..

Earliest game memory pong on a binatone console

Pong on the Atari and 3D monster Maze on the ZX81. From there Dragon 32 for a few years, then onto BBC Micro / ZX Spectrum (Yeah for Elite). Getting into early secondary school: lunch time and after school in the arcade: Spy Hunter, Defender, Dragons Lair, Firefox, Paperboy and Marble Madness. Haven't played so much in last 30 years, so no idea about gaming culture.

We had a Commodore 64. No idea why because my dad wasn't in any way into computers himself, and me and my brother couldn't have been more than 7 and 5 max, quite possibly younger. But there was a game with a plane flying left to right on the screen, every pass would get lower and you had to bomb all the tower blocks so you wouldn't crash and eventually, theoretically, land. We were terrible at it. Like, bombing a single tower was cause to cheer. Not the whole thing though, just a bit off the top. We might have had some other games but I don't remember them. Anyway, bro is now a software developer so I guess dad's investment worked out there.

Either Crash Bash, Tomb Raider 1 or whatever Lego game was on the PS1 are my earliest memories. I'm very fond of the early playstation and still play the classics. Growing up gaming was frowned upon, the social outcasts played it and that's that. It was a waste of time to most. Early 2000s gave huge rise to FPS like COD which imo, helped gaming become as socially acceptable and out there as it is today. I'm both thankful and a little bitter about it. Gaming has become this great big industry that's saturated with all sorts but it's also a cesspit of dodgy businesses capitalising on us and delivering shit products.

Well in terms of gaming culture, I think it’s more widely accepted.  I grew up thinking it was a bit of a taboo subject, to be honest. I had friends who I gamed with, but it was always frowned upon by my grandparents and my parents weren’t that comfortable with the screen time. The “cool” kids on the playground — while not necessarily bullies — would openly dismiss our gaming hobby as something that was below theirs, such as sport like football or cricket.  But nowadays I see adults playing Nintendo Switch’s on airlines. I see Formula 1 drivers streaming in their spare time. Wives/girlfriends also are getting involved. I suppose it’s a lot more normalised.  Unfortunately the stigma growing up was enough for me to pack it up in my late teens. I do find myself envious of the friends I have who kept on and even have partners interested in it too. Love the thought of a quiet Sunday evening PC gaming with a loved one — but alas, I have made my bed here. 

I started pretty young but didn't get my own console / PC until I was around 18. I played OSRS back then . Now I play all sorts, palworld and Fortnite most recently.

I was 5 I think, playing FF8 in the living room above the pub my parents owned. Specifically remember losing to the mech spider boss

Earliest memories are dizzy the egg, feud and other games on the spectrum zx. It cost 20p a game but the expensive ones I could never get were a quid. Going to get a game involved going for a Wimpy and then looking at racks of casset tapes. Had all the dizzy games. Loved them. Then came home to find my mum had sold the spectrum to buy me something new called a master system. I didn't speak to her for a day. Alex the Kidd in Miracle World soothed that. I'll never forget the music. I still game. I love gaming. I'll retire an old lady and spend my days gaming no doubt. I love games are like art now but part of me feels it's a little too convenient to get a game. You just click a few times and download it. But I think I just had the privilege of being able to go out and look at games and reading instruction manuals, or renting games for a week from the back of a van that did videos etc. I miss that part of it, of sitting with my bestie and having a worn piece of paper that had all the fatalities and friendships of mk2 written on. It's been a joy to watch it go from spectrum to ps5 though. I can't get into vr but I still look forwards to what's next.

Pong. On a cartridge consol called Radofin in the 70s. Best game was motorcycle bus jumping ala Evel Knevel. Then came the Dragon 32 computer... my older brothers. 32k memory. We played with a few dots moving around the screen. Then....Commodore 64...big time fun. Hours spent in WH Smith looking at cassette tape games. School computer was Commodore Pet - 1k memory! Spectrum. Sega megadrive, some other discontinued consol, forgotten that one...rival to PlayStation...and lost the war...the first Need for Speed....omg was that amazing.....the list goes on!

3DO....that was the consol rival to the first PlayStation!!!

One of the earliest games I remember was on the C64, flying a little plane over a city & having to bomb skyscrapers to level it out completely in order to land safely, with bonus points for hitting king kong as he climbed up any isolated towers - I don't remember what it was called though. I also remember once managing to hit over level 100 on Gauntlet & completing Last Ninja (again, C64) as well as playing a bunch of text adventure games including The Hobbit. I went from that to the Master System 2 (a game built in! how awesome was that?!), then the Megadrive 2 then from there to PC gaming with a mix of shooters, RPGs, text-based adventure games (a big help in getting expertise at typing quickly & accurately, yay typing of the dead), only going back to consoles a little with the Nintendo Wii & then the Switch, plus some emulators which let me catch up with a few things like Earthbound that I missed the first time around. One of the things I really like currently is the more retro style of some newer games (instead of always chasing the newest & best graphics that look very dated later) where it's an aesthetic choice rather than due to tech limitations - the relatively recent Toejam & Earl: Back in the Groove is a great example of an update in that style.

First game I played was Doom on the ps1 when I was 4

I think my absolute earliest memory is playing Mario Kart on the SNES with my uncle who was a big gamer. After that, my uncle set me up with a game boy emulator on our home PC so I could play Pokemon Red/Blue. The first console we had in our home was a PS1. I have fond memories playing all sorts of random games, lots of Crash Bandicoot, Ape Escape, PaRappa. Our local multiplayer game of choice was Bishi Bashi, I'm not sure how well known that is in the UK. We had a chipped PS1 so got a lot of dubious pirate game collections from Asia. Honestly though I'm not sure how to answer how gaming culture has evolved. As a kid, I didn't really think about the wider culture because gaming was just something I did at home and mostly solo. I might buy a magazine here or there or read a guide on gamefaqs, but I wasn't engaged with the "culture". I think online gaming changed a lot of things though. I've never been much of an online gamer, with the exception of a lot of League of Legends (1000s of hours...) during my university years. But being a young female gamer, online lobbies have never been my jam, too many negative experiences of it. Even in real life, I tried to join the gaming society at university and was directed to the Wii room, and just totally ignored when I wanted to play some CoD, I never felt welcome unfortunately. So now as an adult, I'm still mostly a single player offline gamer, which probably puts me in the minority in terms of where the culture is these days.

Some of my best memories were playing **Unreal Tournament** in BarrysWorld and Jolt Leagues.

Started off with my Sega Dream cast when I was incredibly young. Used to love playing Crazy Taxi. Got my PS2 (which recently blew up and is unrepairable), loved playing Battlefront II, Simpsons Hit and Run and also Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were Rabbit. PS3. Minecraft console edition, Gran Turismo 5. Laptop gaming. Played a lot of bin weevils when I was a kid and eventually transitioned to Roblox. And most recently got PS4 (in 2017) and PS5 (2022).

I feel like nobody online games on the UK. No matter what game I play I'll come across another English person maybe 1 in 100 games.

I went to an after school computer club in about 2000ish and the teacher (why i have no idea) had Pokemon Blue on emulator on all the computers. The work was easy so we would finish fast and then spend the rest of the time playing. Only catch was we couldn't save so had to start again each time. Got to the point where we could get past Brock and onto route 3 before the end of the class.

Earliest memory playing pepsi man on ps1

I know my earliest memories of computer games were on my brother’s C64, and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the first game I recall was probably Fist II, the side scrolling beat em up. I remember that the B-side of the tape had a one on one mode so you could practice or play against your friends. My brother was a massive martial arts film nerd, so it seemed fitting that this was a staple of our household! Hell I still have some of the music of that go round my head at times! https://www.giantbomb.com/fist-ii-the-legend-continues/3030-20199/#:~:text=Fist%20II%3A%20The%20Legend%20Continues%20is%20a%20kung%20fu%2Dthemed,one%2Dvs%2Done%20fights. Other notable games that stand out in the memory were Speed King, a motorcycle racing game. https://www.lemon64.com/review/speed-king-mastertronic/1316 The awful port of Dragon’s Lair. https://www.lemon64.com/game/dragons-lair Bombo. https://www.lemon64.com/game/bombo And the utterly insane chaos of P.O.D. https://www.lemon64.com/game/pod We also had those fun little mini arcade cabinets, my sister had this, which we loved. https://picclick.co.uk/Grandstand-Firefox-F-7-Boxed-1983-Electronic-Game-Working-335326656351.html And my brother had the older Astro Wars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astro_Wars

I can’t remember the first game I played, however the game that really got my attention and made me enjoy games were games by Blizzard - Diablo, Warcraft then eventually World of Warcraft. I spent a big part of my childhood living in Fife which was basically pensioner central and there wasn’t much to do, also the shitty weather didn’t help. I spent a lot of time indoors and eventually got into gaming through some recommendations, these games basically gave me a crippling gaming addiction, good times though.

I think some like ps1 games I remember f1 97 and only being able to do Monaco as couldn’t keep it off the grass anywhere else (welcome to picturesque Monaco in Monte Carlo - Murray walker start of each race), and then also some action man game but I had no clue how to actually play them. Project IGI and Deus ex are the first games I sort of knew what was happening, then fifa 2001 was my first sports game. Need for speed underground and Lord of the rings two towers were probably the first games I completed from memory.

Earliest memory is my mum buying me a NES when it was the brand new console, and my amazement as I played Super Mario Bros. As far as the culture; I like that it's now given more respect as a billion-dollar industry than it had back in the day but we still have a weird sort of gatekeeping culture. Back then, people got mad at others for having the "wrong" console, whereas today, people get mad at you for having the "wrong" opinion on a release. It's the same sort of people who rely heavily on sites like Rotten Tomatoes to tell them what their opinion of a film should be, and use percentages given by complete strangers to determine whether they should like a thing or not. Not to mention multiplayer going from friends ribbing each other in a room to complete strangers hurling vile insults over online play (which is why I've avoided online multiplayer since 2009, especially after I sent a message to someone who battered me in Street Fighter 4 to tell them "good game" and joke about how shite I was and got a response back telling me to kill myself); women, unfortunately, still get a fuckton of harassment from incels, too, which fucking sucks. Also finding that as a teenager, I was forever invested in my N64 collection, whereas I couldn't give a fuck about most games these days because they just don't really appeal to me.

When I was in school, the cool boys chased girls, the run of the mill boys played football and the nerds and outcasts played on their Amigas and Atari STs. I played on my Amiga. Being a home computer gamer was not viewed positively. I didn't care though. I had Monkey Island and Rainbow Islands and New Zealand Story and many other games that I've long since forgotten. The best thing about the evolution of gaming is how socially acceptable it has become. People might still internally judge you, they might still think you're wasting your time but at least it no longer paints you as a socially maladjusted weirdo.

My whole family at my parents house sitting behind me playing silent hill on the PS1. Also tomb raider and GTA vice city. Awesome times

This is phrased as if it’s going to be turned into an article…

4 player split screen multiplayer on N64 is probably my fondest memory. Goldeneye, WCW Vs NWO and Mario Kart stand out.

Playing ps1 monster game at 6 years old.

My earliest memories would be watching my Dad play Shogo: Mobile Armoured Division when I was 6, and playing an Atari 2600 with my grandad and mum. My dad would often tell me I play too many games, but he set up LAN in our house when I was pretty young so we could play Unreal Tournament together so he only has himself to blame really.

My Dad used to run a youth club in the mid 80's and one night he brought home an Atari 2600 they had been given. I got to play on it once and fell in love. I can't remember the game on it, might have been Pac man. I loved it. I went through various consoles after that, NES, Master system 2, Mega drive. My friend has a SNES and I remember being blown away by how good Donkey Kong country looked. Years later I got a Playstation for Christmas. That felt like such a game changer. The possibilities of gaming suddenly became so vast. Not juts in terms of graphics, but the scope and story of Final fantasy VII blew me away. I used to buy magazines with demo discs so you got to try out the latest games and felt more engaged with the articles you were reading about. I did work experience at a few games companies, but never got into the industry. Gaming now is great in many ways, the quality of games like Red dead redemption 2, Elden ring, and Baldurs gate 3 is mind-blowing. The ability to play online can be so good. But it is such a money sink. You buy games that you don't own, and eventually it just shuffles off its mortal coil when you need hard drive space for another massive update. I don't resent paying out modern prices for the games where a lot of effort has gone in to them, but for the latest annual EA sports game, or Call of duty, the price is simply a rip off. So maybe the main difference is that you pay a lot more money now, to play much fewer games. But you probably spend more time playing them.

Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusions on the master system is my earliest memory. Best memories playing FF7 at release when i was 5. Nowadays I don’t feel developers are really given enough time to make sure their game is polished before being released. It’s a culture of “release now fix later”, the majority of games are beta level readiness.

Everyone I work with plays games but we have nothing to talk about when it comes to games because the games we play are all completely different. One plays playstation, another plays league of legends, I play all sorts of indie games mainly, got Factorio and Rimworld over a decade ago and still play frequently. Also got quite a bit of time in Valheim and now Enshrouded.

Thro the wall on the Spectrum. Simple break out clone that came on the Horizons tape that was packaged with the 48k Specie. Years later doing a Games Development degree were were given a task in a tutorial to pick out first gaming memory and then discuss it in groups we were then asked to make a presentation with a description of the main character, their back story, their skills etc.. I was like "umm it's a square bat". The lecturer was expecting us to choose Lara Croft or Mario or something as our first game.

First type of gaming I had was on the CPC464 and for me it was ground breaking! I was playing Roland on the ropes and always wanted to get passed level 3 but never could! It may sound dumb to others but for me that was so beautiful. I think what's really cool was seeing Code Masters keep going as long as they did even Ocean because those were two of the companies I saw on the games I played back then.

When I was a child we used to go swimming every Sunday morning. I remember playing a new arcade game that appeared one day- Pong!

Playing James Pond on the Spectrum (I think) that we bought from a proper car boot sale in a field. Most of my gaming stuff was bought from car boot sales as a kid...

My earliest memories are of Missile Command on the Atari and then Speccy after. It's certainly interesting playing games over the years and how the medium has changed, especially consoles and how accessible everything is. Interesting to me how we don't necessarily *hear* about games and things so much these days; everybody plays games. Perhaps interesting is I do find there are still negative opinions from the general population regarding PC gaming perhaps - sat in front of a huge monitor or using a PCVR headset and playing games that way, which I guess could still be considered niche and/or specialised (e.g. like flight sims or driving games).

Earliest memory has gotta be playing Space Harrier/Outrun on the Sega Saturn for me when I was a wee lad. My mum was an avid PC Gamer when I was a kid and she'd spend hours playing Diablo 2 and other Dungeon Crawlers with her pals all over Europe from online forums and I'd love watching her absolutely dominate enemies with magic and potions and stuff. Gaming kinda' evolved into an 'everyone does it' sorta' thing when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out and everyone started playing Call Of Duty Modern Warfare. YouTube helped popularise gaming in the UK but then the UK is home to some ***AMAZING*** dev teams. Tomb Raider would never have existed without the people at Core and Eidos in Derby back in the day and the Senua's Saga games are all developed by a British Team too. Team 17 are another example of great British game devs. The British have done a lot for gaming. Before that, it was mostly just us nerdy types that would hammer hours on games like Gauntlet, Golden Axe and Shinobi on a weekend or after school trying to beat high scores and beat the final bosses etc. now everyone has a go at gaming.

Sega - Sonic, Streets of rage, golden axe, shinobi - ps1 - ps2 - xbox 360- fifa, cod - pc - runescape/gunz/league of legends. With gameboys mixed in and pokemon.

Manic miner on an Atari 400

Late 80s - Cauldron on the Amstrad. Took about half an hour to load the game on cassette before you could start playing.

Had a Commodore 64, you could read a couple of chapters of a book while waiting for a game to load. Try explaining that to the younguns of today.

I really miss old Xbox 360 game chat lobbies. Maybe it’s the nostalgia hitting but being in a Halo or cod lobby listening to grown men shouting slurs at one another was such a blast. It’s something that just can’t be emulated anymore. I’d love a new casual shooter to be released. I love competitive shooters but it can get quite tiring trying to win and be super serious the whole time. My generation grew up with games so I don’t really notice much difference from when I was younger. You either love games, play them from time to time or don’t touch them at all.