As a toddler, I use to screw around with my dad's 2600, so technically that's my first foray into gaming. But years later, after having tried this brand new thing called a Nintendo at a friend's house, my mom rushed out to the store and bought me the action set, using money she didn't have (I believe it was for the water bill) because she saw the joy it brought me. Not long after, when I managed to beat the first castle in SMB, I ran into her room, all hysterical and screaming with joy, because I thought I had beaten the game (pre-internet, kids; it was a different time). When she came out into the living room, and I enthusiastically pointed at the TV to show her my crowning achievement, it was toad telling us that the princess was in a another castle. It was the first time I had ever been trolled. And it was glorious.

It started kind of late, in the second half of the 90s, when I turned 15, my dad gifted me a PC, before that I had very very little episodic experience with pc/console gaming. The new generations can't understand it but in the 90s PC was mindblowing and it was the same price as a good used car lol and every peripheral/component cost at least 10x more than today.

For me it started when I borrowed my cousins NES. Shortly afterwards I had one of the big yellow Gameboys.

My parents had an Atari 2600 and a DOS PC. Though, I don't remember playing the 2600 as a toddler. My earliest memories of gaming would be the original Doom, the Sega Genesis Sonic games, and some DOS isometric shooter where you are a plane that I can't recall the title of.

Cool to see so many stories from folks before my time; I started with the SNES on Christmas 1994, so I missed the 70s/80s.

I often feel like the "old man" at work as a lot of my colleagues are early 20s, so it's nice that I'm not the oldest here haha

Arcade cabinets at either the grocery store or the actual arcade at the mall. Then I got a 2600 one Christmas. After that was the deluxe NES set. Lots of good memories with that one. ROB was a little unwieldy (or perhaps I was just unskilled) so I would talk my mom into playing ROB's part of Gyromite. She would also help me map out the dungeons in Zelda using graph paper. I remember us joking about the dungeons in the second quest spelling out "Eat at Joes"

My first one, scary enough to say, was the Telstar Pong console! Yeah a bit old school here!! We got it for Christmas and played the heck out of that thing! Man our Atari 2600 later on was such an amazing jump!!!

Apparently, when I was three, I saw my mom playing Solitaire on the Windows 3.1 computer she had for work, and went on the computer to play it myself when she wasn't looking. 

I had played my cousin's Atari 2600 but I never really loved it that much. I dunno it just didn't click with me, controlling  the games felt stiff and like I wanted to break the joystick on the controller. 

Then slowly but surely something called "Nintendo" arrived in the West and Super Mario Brothers became more and more what all the kids were talking about.

So we ended up getting an NES and the rest is history.

As primarily Amiga fan, I became somewhat interested in PC gaming around 1990, about the time I first saw 80486 PC at my friends, but there wasn't really much that Amiga didn't have at the time...that and next Amiga was looking promising on paper, so I was leaning toward that for the future.

But in '92 I just knew where the future (3D at that) is - Amiga 1200 was somewhat of a disappointment, and PC in the same year had Ultima Underworld, Wolfenstein 3D and Comanche: Maximum Overkill, with 1993 cementing that view with DOOM and Star Wars: X-Wing (along with MYST that was new type of experience). It took me until '95 to actually get one (I wanted Pentium) and it cost ~2000DEM (equivalent of ~$3000USD these days)...and that's without any 3D GPU, which weren't a thing at that point in time. Truth be told, those CPUs were running software renderers, so Tomb Raider ran at 640x480 without problems (PS1 ran it at 320x240 with 3D accelerators hardware), so they were quite powerful for their time, not needing 3D cards for a few years.

So yeah, they cost pretty penny back then, though allure was not in "better visuals/higher res/frame rate", but in completely new experiences PC offered in 90s.