As I mentioned in my last post, I was really about to get into gaming via the new PC my father bought.
After trying the games he bought, I started to get informed about the new releases myself. In late 1999 I bought my fist gaming magazine. At the same time, I started buying used games at a shop in the nearest city and I also liked to install and try demos from game magazine discs.
Very soon it became clear to my father that it was not the optimal solution to have me tinkering around his PC which he also used for many things. I should mention that I had the 386 25 MHz machine in my room at this point, as we had the "policy" of handing down the obsolete PCs to my brothers room and then to my room. It was nice to have this PC all for myself so I could play the ****c PC games (Prince of Persia being my favorite) and I also learned a lot about computers this way (MS DOS commands anyone?), but it was not enough for me anymore.
It took only a few months until my father bought me a cheap used PC for my birthday. It was a 333 MHz Celeron with 128 MB RAM and a Riva 128 GPU. Not the best PC around, but it was a nice start. Over time I upgraded this machine with a 400 MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM and a Savage4 GPU which was later upgraded to a GeForce 2 MX. This way, I learned about the basics of building PCs. I also got the chance of playing some new games, and when the newest games did not run anymore on this machine, I started catching up on some older titles which were very cheap at this time. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Red Faction (after getting the GeForce 2) were the last new titles I got for this system.
The same machine was also used in the first LAN party I attended at a friends house. We only played Empire Earth in the beginning, but we expanded to other games in no time. I might go into this tradition which we cultivate to this day in a separate post.
In late 2002, I finally bought a contemporary machine for the first time (2.53 GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 TI-4200), marking the beginning of a long period of owning a decent gaming machine I'm still in. The first game I got for this system was No One Lives Forever 2, nice choice I guess.
Right now I own a Core2Quad Q6600 @3GHz, 4 GB RAM and a Radeon 5850, the GPU being the newest component by far. I guess this closes the chapter about how I got into PC gaming. I think I have to go into when and how I got into console gaming later on.