I'm about to buy a new PC, this would be my 7th or so generation - My 26 years of PC gaming life.

Thanks for sharing OP. Your story is full f nostalgia it reminded me of my own history with PC gaming.

I used to game on a desktop around 1994. It was an old used computer that was on sale because its owner is relocating to another country. So my father took the bargain and brought it home so me and my brother could learn how to use computers. I'm really grateful for that gift he brought home. Not because it opened up a huge world of gaming for me. But because he actually used to struggle with using them at work at that time and felt that the ability to use computers is an essential competency for someone's professional career so he decided his children must start learning how to use it.

The computer was a very old Pentium running windows 3.1 and it had MS Excel in it. There was no MS Word so we used the excel for writing our school essays! It had no CD drive, no sound card and of course no speakers (yes I used to game with the internal PC speaker). The first game I played was Wolfenstein 3D which came with the PC. I didn't know at first that the game was there until I accidentally navigated to its folder. The feeling of discovering that you have a cool game on your computer is so sweet. Then later came other games like Doom, Doom II, Mortal Kombat, SkyRoads, Lotus, Hocus Pocus, Prince of Persia, Lemmings, Sensible Soccer, Flashback, and Zool. There was another platform game which I forgot the name of about a little boy walking in graveyard and hunting zombies with a slingshot.

Then in 1998 came a new Acer Aspire PC with a powerful 333MHz Pentium II with MMX support. That computer also had a CD drive, speakers, and a special upgrade of 17" monitor. It came with windows 98 pre-installed. It also had a free copy of Incoming game which was awesome for its time as it introduced me to playing with helicopters, alien warships and defense towers. Then followed several games like the first Thief, Tomb Rider, Heretic II, Turok 2, Descent, and the first two parts of Age of Empires. I played these last two games for hundreds of hours.

Later came an HP laptop which wasn't good enough to game with, a Dell desktop with integrated graphics and poor gaming performance, a Macbook that was barely good enough to run Braid. 3 years ago I discover /r/buildapc and ended up a year later with a proper i5 4670K + GTX 770 build. My last build made me feel like I've just became a PC gamer at the moment. But after reading your story and reflecting on my own history, heck! I'm a veteran PC gamer too! I've been gaming my whole life (even though it's always been on shitty PCs).

/r/pcgaming Thread