We *had* consoles when I was growing up but I didn't get to use them much (as they either belonged to my stepbrother or my cousins). I really enjoyed them when I did get to play them (NES, SNES and Genesis), but PCs were always available to me so that's why I'm still mainly a PC gamer. The first console I myself owned was the PSX, and I think that's why I'm so damned attached to that console. :P

started out with the Atari 2600jr and nes but with a strange twist of fate we did not get any of the other consoles until ps1 and gameboy advance came out,by that time i had moved on with pc gaming on a 386,p1etc, got back into consoles recently by purchasing a ps3

I had consoles like the Atari 2600 and NES, but I wouldn't say I grew up on them. I also had an IBM-PC running MS-DOS and later an early Windows machine plus I hung out a lot at a friend's house who had an original Apple Macintosh. I probably played more Karateka and Choplifter on that thing that Mario on my NES.

I mostly grew up on NES and SNES myself then later moved on to Amiga, and finally too PC when a friend showed me DOOM and Alone in the Dark.

The classic consoles in general have a huge amount of great games so I'm glad I got to enjoy them.

Modern consoles seems to be pretty much like PC gaming the year 1993 when DOOM came out and I went ..."MULTIPLAYER DEATHMATCH WHOOOOHOO!!!!!!", only with shitty input devices and more boring realistic graphics ;)

i grew up with a mac playing Loom, Monkey Island
later on on the PC Alone in the Dark, Full Throttle
Also got a snes that still works =)

Here's my life timeline.

1988 - Birth
1990 - Sega Master System
1992 - Sega Genesis, Nintendo Entertainment System
1994 - PC
1996 - PlayStation
1999 - GameBoy Color
2002 - PlayStation 2
2007 - XBOX 360

This is remarkably similar to mine, save for myself starting 1 year earlier and not getting a pc until a year later.

But Vagabond...there can only be one...

Mine was something like this:

1) Get born
2) Learn to use computer at age of six
3) Learn to play games with it 5 minutes later
4) Game like crazy for 15 years
5) Switch to consoles
6) ???
7) PROFIT!

I'm not mad at all. I loved my NES, N64 and now PS2.

My parents only got a real pc in 2000 (a week before my 15th birthday). There was a Tandy from 1985 but aside from a golf game, it didn't run much. My best friend had his pc and I'd be over watching him play cool games like Age of Empires, Starcraft, Red Alert. I was quite jealous. He may only have had a 100Mhz machine and couldn't play Half-Life, but my consoles didn't have Red Alert of Age of Empires. Worms didn't appear on consoles until late 2000 or 2001.

I remember how great it was in 2000 where I got him back where he still had his 100 MHz MMX machine and I had a new 600MHz celeron which let me play Stracraft at full speed, Red Alert at full speed, Fighter's Anthology at full speed as well as being able to play Half-Life, Quake II/III, Rainbow Six and counter-strike. I always gave a little shot here about it. Seemed only fair.

Well, since i'm from Europe, where the consoles weren't THAT big until Playstation, obviously, i grew up on the what we now call "desktop computers" [since PC is now reserved for IBM systems], starting with the C64 at the age of 2 or 3 ['85/'86], and ocasionally switching to the IBM machine [XT] around '87/'88, never really fully switching though, i returned to the C64 as often as i could, and still do.
Most US users probably started with the TV systems and consoles, some having the luxury of having an Apple. I wonder how different my perception of gaming would be, if i wasn't born here.

My childhood was mostly consoles with some PC dotted in there.
The main one I remember is the Playstation, it’s not the first console I played but anything before that is a bit of a blur. I think my first console was the Sega Genesis, I just remember Sonic on it.

I shared consoles and games with my brothers when we where younger; the first console that I could call my own was the Gamecube.

I grew up with the SNES and the N64 and I don't have a problem with that cause now It is easier to play all the stuff I could have missed when I was a kid, Man one day there is going to be a time where you want to play a game and all it takes is some browsing through a list and picking it and that day can't come soon enough for me at least.

Yeah, me too.

I guess it depends on the era of gaming you're talking about. Up until the the late 80's or so, IBM pc clones were about the worst gaming machines you could choose. Consoles and Amigas totally owned them at action/ arcade type games. Amigas and 8bit computers got all the RPGs, Strategies, and Adventure games that console gamers missed out on but pc gamers could partake. Mutliplayer was hotseat.

Back then, PC games suffered from a different sort of lowest common denominator -- hardware. You may have had a firebreathing 386 with 2MB of RAM, 40MB harddrive, and a 256k turbo EGA video card but you'd consider yourself lucky if the game supported more than CGA graphics, 512KB RAM, PC speaker, and allowed installation to the hard drive. PCs had turbo buttons not to speed them up but to slow them down so that programs written to eek every last drop of performance out of a 4.77MHz 8088 wouldn't break on your 16MHz 32bit terror.

Oh, and the joys of tweaking your config.sys and autoexec.bat for every game you wanted to play! I'm sure many of us learned computers just to get our fscking games to play. ;D

IMHO, PCs weren't anything special for games until the common machine (years behind the cutting edge) was at least a 386sx16 with 1MB RAM, VGA graphics, Soundblaster sound, and a small hard drive. Only then did you started seeing impressive pc only titles like Ultima7, Wing Commander2, Xwing, Wolf3D, etc.

Started playing on ZX Spectrum when I was in primary school, but my first computer was C64. I had it until 1993 when I switched on PC. Console gaming never interested me. From hundreds games on PSX there are maybe 10 titles I would gladly play - with majority available also on PC (like G-Police, Wipeout, UFO, Dark Omen, Shadow of the Horned Rat).