I loved violence when I was a kid. I thought Nintendo games were for babies from about 8 - 18.

Not really. 16/32 bit era "Mature" games tended to lean towards "immature", haha. Blood and crude humor for shock or "cool" factor tended to turn me off even as a kid.

My parents didn't care what I did. I watched A Nightmare On Elm Street when I was 5, so no. M rated games were just other games. There was no taboo for them.

Not really. Age restriction was never a thing for me. I taught RE was cool because it was RE, and it was pretty damn cool. My mother always had the mentality, that its better to explain a child what is over the top and why it is impossible, rather than ban it from the household, because she knew that if a kid really wants to play something he will, maybe at a friends place

No, because my mother never forbade me from playing them. I had full access to GTA since I was eight. I remember the coolest thing my friend and I liked about the game was puting in zero gravity cheats and running from the cops; the premise of being criminals was not some forbidden fruit of coolness forbus because our parents did nor care. Pokemon, Kingdom Hearts, Jak and Daxter, Final Fantasy, Crash Bandicoot, and a lot of other E/Teen games were a lot cooler in our opinions.

The first M game that I thought was really cool was God of War.

HAHAHAHA!! Yes!

As kid i played M-rated like Doom, Quake, Duke, Blood, Unreal, Half-Life and Mortal Kombat, i found them cool as hell cause it has bloodbath and gruesome, especially Blood(the game) you burn people to death! My parent didn't care about this stuff looool

As a kid about the only "M" rated game that existed was Leisure Suit Larry and really that was before games had ratings. but yeah it was a laugh back then.

I don't remember ever thinking that I want to play something because of the "cool factor". I just naturally gravitated towards mature titles as i matured myself. I've always loved good stories and only mature titles tend to provide those. Jumping on some arbitrary platforms and collecting arbitrary shiny things for no apparent reason has never been my thing. Mature doesn't automatically mean good, though. Shooters and the whole online multiplayer thing have the same problem for me. People running around on the same map for hours and shooting at each other and getting killed, and to what end? What's the story here? Why are we doing this, is this going somewhere? No. Just kill, die, kill, die, kill, die, kill, die, kill, die. Pointless. It's funny how many different takes there are on gaming, but that's what makes it great :)

I never really had a filter as kid for video games, so playing games like that were normal to me. I was the kid who watched The Exorcist when I was 7.

Most of my favourite games / series were m rated as a kid. I wasn't into platforms and kids games.

Appart from racers, the only T rated games I remember enjoying were Timesplitters 2 and the Splinter Cell games.