To pc gamers what year was your first gaming pc ?

Technically I started gaming on pc in 1993 however 2004 was when I built my first gaming pc just to be prepared to play half life 2

Hmm not sure.

I've been PC gaming since the early or mid 90's. My mom went back to college to get her degree and computers were sort of a must-have at the time for education so we got our first PC then.

A short while later, optical discs (CD's) came on the scene, so we got a Creative Sound Blaster CD-ROM drive or something like that and installed it in the computer. I guess technically that was the first time we messed around with a computer? Anyway, it came with a Lucasarts bundle and that was sort of where I went from "I can play games on this PC" to "OK I think I am officially a PC gamer now".

It had all the greats, including Monkey Island, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Loom, and many others. I think we also got some other games like Dark Forces, Tie Fighter, 7th Guest, and Dune 2.

Then around the late-90's in high school I got my first job at age 15 washing dishes and saved for a video card so I could play Half-Life. I installed the card (I think it was a Riva TNT 2) and that was when I got into the 3D age of video gaming!

I don't think I built my first PC until college, so like 2002 or so. It was intimidating but I saved a lot of money and was able to salvage some parts from old university PC's. Ever since then, though, I've been upgrading and building my own.

....well now that was a nice trip down memory lane 😁

Wasn't an actual "gaming" PC but it was a Christmas gift from my parents for my bro and I. Something with Win95 and some kinda onboard GPU. Used to run games like Elite Force pretty well. First one I built was back in 2008 or so with (I think) a 4850.

Edit: Did have a C64, which I guess is a "PC".

Started PC gaming on the ol BBC Micro (wasn't mine of course). Loading games from tapes probably instilled in me a hatred for loading times 😅. Elite was the standout game. I had no idea what I was doing but spaceship goes zoom!! I also vaguely remember a game called Frak! This was 80s/early 90s.

The first PC that I bought with my own money was an Advent 7039 laptop. I had a few gateway PCs before that as my dad worked at gateway but I had to share that with my brother. But the 7039 was mine. Lasted me about a decade before kicking the bucket.

My first desktop PC that was fully mine was a Core 2 Quad QX6700 and an 8800GTX.

When I was 13 and it was to learn up some stuff and for school work not for games. I learned up some programming and also how to put games on there anyway. I used other computers before then at school and I got interested in doing computery things, but depending what you did the teachers got mad so I needed my own to tinker on. It took a while but I got one. I don't know if it counts because it was my dad's computer for work, that's probably why I wasn't supposed to put games on there. After a while I saved up and bought my own crappy one, and then got a real job and got a real PC and for a while I upgraded like every 3 months for any new thing and sold off "old" parts. Then all that got kind of boring. Especially now when there's like one slot on a motherboard and it's for the GPU. And now the GPU is the real computer, the motherboard+CPU is basically the add on.

Got into PC gaming a (small) handful of years ago. Before that I was, uh, pretty young. Had a PC, but just basic, didn't build it. My brother gave it to me. Eventually, same brother taught me how to build my own, so I did that....with a lot of his help, lol. Incidentally, said brother is the reason I'm even into gaming. He had a stack of consoles, tons of games, controllers, etc., gave it all to me. Even his old EGMs, GamePros, etc. Really got me into retro stuff, which is, by default, superior to everything else, I was happy to find.

I started in 2013 when I purchased a gaming laptop. Had fun for a while, but ultimately didn't stick with it.

Fast forward a few years and steam deck was announced. I pre-ordered day 1 and now only use it as my gaming device... It's easy enough for console gamers and complex enough for those who like to tinker. Hardware of generation easily.

That was the Commodore 64 for me back in the 1980’s.

The year was 1992 and I was rocking my neon clothes. After using several PCs at friends' houses and school for years, I finally convinced my parents to buy a 486DX2 66 mhz with 8MB of RAM. It was glorious at the time.

1998. Pentium 2 MMX 266, 32mb RAM, 2GB HDD, 4mb AGP video

First games Doom2, Warhammer: Dark Omen, Fallout 2, Quake, Quake 2, Half Life, Carmagedon, Age of Empires 2, C&C 1 and Red Alert, Grim Fandago, etc.

My parents had a PC when I was growing up in the 90's that I played some games on like C&C, MS Flight Combat Simulator and Rainbow Six Rogue Spear.

I got a Toshiba Laptop for school when I was 11 and attempted to play games on it, but it was not a gaming laptop.

then I got a Dell with a Pentium 4, 512mb RAM and a ATI x300 in 2004. This is when I started tinkering and upgraded it to have a glorious 1gb of RAM and a ATI x1600 after a couple years.

I built my first PC from scratch a few years later when I was 17. I think it had a core2duo of some kind and a mighty Geforce 7600 GT

Commodore 64 in 1985. The greatest gaming computer ever.

I also played on a "real" PC around that time. I loved DOS games such as Commander Keen, Larry 1 & 2, Digger and Alley Cat. Some games were CGA only and in glorious 4 colors.

The first PC that I touched was the Commodore 64 in 1984 when my father brought it home from his workplace. I was nine years old at the time. However, I did not use a PC of our own until 1993 (before my senior year in high school). It was there I placed some the early mouse and click adventure games (e.g. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis), as well as Ultima VII: The Black Gate and its sequel Ultima VII: Serpent Isle.

The first PC I owned with my own money was an Acer laptop in 2003 and have been using several laptops through the years. The most recent laptop I owned is the HP Victus, my first gaming PC.

@pmanden: You could have had a lot more colors with a CGA card if you plugged in a composite TV

It was around 2003 I bought an HP desktop. I don't remember what the specs where since I was so young, but I saw my buddy playing Everquest and I had never seen an MMO before and it blew my mind. My first PC game was Morrowind, and a baldur's Gate 1 and 2 pack.

I quickly got into RTS games like Warcraft, starcraft, and Command an Conquer after that because consoles didn't really have any good RTS games at the time. After that it was World of Warcraft. I balanced having a PC and consoles up until around 2015 when the Witcher 3 came out and I wanted something that could run the game on max settings and kinda of slowly went full PC after that.

I was mostly a console gamer since the early 90s with SNES and Sega Genesis, I didn't get into actual PC gaming until much later in 2007 when Crysis was coming out, I knew I had to build a PC from scratch but lucky for me, the information was out there on the internet as to where to start building my first PC and with it, I had the EVGA GeForce 8800 GT & Intel Core 2 Duo E6600. I gotta say, Crysis blew me away how amazing that game was and there was nothing like it on consoles.

But even in 2007, I was still playing on consoles till the end of the PS3/Xbox 360 era. When both PS4/Xbox One arrived, I went full-time on PC and to this day, I don't ever see myself going back to consoles at all. Gaming on PC just makes my gaming life so much easier, I'm able to have a gaming PC that can play games to my will (consoles still have a long way to go to be on par with PC) and my PC can be used as a great workstation. If it wasn't for Crysis, I probably would still be stuck on consoles.

Edit: PC & Nintendo Switch is by far the best combo for any PC gamers IMO as Nintendo does make great exclusive games.

@davillain: I never agreed with the PC and Switch combo. Switch hardware is shit and you can play Nintendo games on PC now with emulators at higher quality. Also, I generally prefer Sony and MS first party compared to Nintendo first party with the exception of Zelda. So, I was much more interested in owning PS and Xbox consoles to go along with PC.

I bought a Switch at launch, but later sold it because there were no games that I wanted to play. I never even bothered with the Wii or Wii U, but I have owned all the PS and Xbox consoles (no Series console though). Gamecube was the last time I was actually a fan of Nintendo because they were still focused on making AAA games and part of the traditional console war.

Now pretty much all the games come to PC, so I am happy.

Probably, either in 1998 or 1999. I was in second or third grade back then... I don't even remember the specs it had, Pentium something... with Windows 98 perhaps...

Dunno but I had a P.C. built to run D00M 3 well. I was very excited to finally play the game, as a young kid who binged the other D00Ms and was a big fan.

Needless to say I was extremely disappointed, D00M 3 blows.

Something DOS based, early 90s. Played OverKill a lot on it.

If recall correctly it was a voodoo 1 something or another with a shitty cyrix.

Many house computers prior but never owned.

1986 on a Mac and 1996 on windows.

The Adam Home Computer (Colecovision).

Unless you consider the Bally Astrocade which I learned Basic on. lol :P

The Acer Nitro I'd been given in 2024 was probably my first proper gaming computer, prior to that I was still was going through different low - mid grade laptops and mobile devices through the years often daisy chaining them on a network to lessen the work flow.

My first was a 486 40Mhz with 4MB RAM 500MB HDD, had a 5¼ and 3½ inch floppies a CD tray where the CD went into a cartridge then you loaded the cartridge, had DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.12 I think. It could play Wolfenatein 3D, but I had to learn to make a boot disk to play Doom.

I have seen the Adam Home Computer as a child in the mid 1980s, but did not know until years latter how it had issues with quality control. It must have hurt Coleco's image back then.

The early years of the PC were different than right now as there were companies like Commodore that acted like the Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft of that period. The PC platform was like the home console market in the 1980s before it was unified.

Having grown up in the 1980s and seen first-hand the early years of PC gaming gives me a different perspective of gaming than someone who grew up in latter decades and only read about the early years through second or third-hand sources.

Eh, they didn't sell that many of them anyway. I think it was like $600.00 to $700.00 when it launched. Also, I really never had an issue with mine and it used metalized cassette tapes (high speed digital data packs or something or other they called them lol ) as the medium. I still have my complete system and games all in its original box/packaging. ;)

The Colecovision console itself I think did alright at the time as it was a step up from the Intellivision.

@lamprey263: Oh 40MHz? I guess it was an AMD CPU?

Probably Windows 3.11 For Workgroups

They all really screwed up when it came to making upgraded machines and selling them. There were compatibility issues between models, lack of software for upgraded hardware, so some were seen as expensive and mostly useless upgrades or dead ends. And they needed upgrades because for productivity software the low resolution was not great for displaying a lot of text. Software ports between the various platforms were not always done well and not always by the same team. Around here businesses were also standardizing on IBM, and more software was being written for that platform. Amiga seemed to hang in there because of the Video Toaster. Apple because of the Mac and the advantage of WYSIWYG software.

Yeah, I bought a Pentium 90 MHz PC in I think 1991 or there abouts and the OS was 3.11 Workgroups.

At that time, it was a monster PC, fastest CPU on the market baby!!! Think I paid about $3500.00 for it. lol :P

@SecretPolice: Holy f*** that's a lot, esp. if you adjust for inflation. Did you have to deal with the FDIV bug?

My first gaming PC was a 286. Around 1985.

@girlusocrazy:

Yeah man, got it from the now defunct Circuit City. lol :P

No bugs I dealt with I can think of at this time.

@SecretPolice: I heard their service was state of the art! That's lucky

I've been playing games on PC since the early 90's, but the first time I opened up my computer to stick a GPU inside was 2004.

Got some good time in on a Commodore 64 in the late 80s, but didn't own it. The early 90s was when I first owned a PC. It had a monochrome monitor. Tee hee! There was fun to be had.

Ha ha, my first computer was a Commodore 64 too! Good times! Mine was a C64c - which was the beige model. My brother had the brown (bread bin) C64. In the UK we were mostly using cassette tapes. Floppy disc games on the C64 never really took off here. Had it for Christmas 87, kept it until around Christmas 91 when it was replaced for a Sega Mega Drive.

Second 'PC' was an Amiga A500+

For the hardware we consider on here as a 'PC', my first real one was a Cryrix '586' 100Hhz based machine which was almost like an early Intel Pentium, but not quite. Faster than a DX4 100 (at least I think it was). I bought it to play games, but it was outdated within less than 12 months as more advanced 3D games started to come out and my poor old PC just couldn't cope.

I remember being quite disappointed with the performance of Virtua Fighter 2. I bought a PS1 in 1997 to play games like Tekken and Grand Turisomo.

It wasn't until I got my second PC in 1999 with its 3DFX Voodoo card that I actually got my first proper gaming PC.

Its a fair point. I just want to have that unique console that only Nintendo can provide despite their hardware of choice is indeed shit! I did ended up playing Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom on PC because those type of games needed to be play on 60fps. 30fps, couldn't do it lol. (And for the record everyone, I did purchase both Zelda games and then, playing them on PC so I can show my contribution towards Nintendo. Buy one, get one free if you catch my drift😉)

1990 - Acorn Electron

1997 - PC (Windows 95, Pentium 166 MHz CPU, 16 MB RAM, 1 GB hard drive)

I played Solitaire back in the day on PC, never played another game on PC again.

Sad story man, almost as sad as The Pianist.

From what I remember, back when I was a kid kid. My dad took some computers from his workplace. We had two of those. Vague memories of playing stuff like Mortal Kombat, Duke3D, Red Alert. Remember my brother explaining how to boot them in DOS.

But not as sad as PC👍

Cool,

Your PC experience:

My PC experience:

2007, I built a PC because I was impressed with what Crysis had to offer and I wanted to experience it.

This explains a lot. Now I am starting to understand your trauma and delusional views towards PC.

Oh, I also played Minesweeper too. Did you actually believe that🤭says a LOT about you bassy.

I know you have always been full of shit and have dumb takes. That is what I believe.

@BassMan: Nah, you can't change the narrative now. You actually believed I've only played Solitaire on PC 🤣