Sorry, I have a pathetic weakness for waxing nostalgic about this stuff. I feel like my gaming life is broken into three separate chapters.
When I was 3 years old, dad bought the family a Magnavox Odyssey. I have vague yet vivid memories of my two older sisters telling me "You're too little for this, just watch us play" and watching them swap out all the translucent TV screen overlays as they played all the games. Playing Simon Says on it with my mom at least a couple times, realizing that it controlled just like an etch-a-sketch. I was transfixed by the thing and became obsessed, but according to my family we only had it for about a month because the novelty wore off so fast and he sold it to a coworker. So the first phase of my video gaming career ended very prematurely.
Years later I saw my first Pong machine in a pizza parlor or something. I thought it was the game I remembered we used to have on our TV. Soon after that I found my first arcade in the local Anaheim Plaza mall, a Sega Time Out that was probably 75% pinball and other "analog" games and 25% video games like Tank, Breakout, Boot Hill, Desert Patrol, Blasto, etc. From then on I made sure I went to the mall every chance I got. Every time I went back it seemed there was less pinball and more video. I remember the first time I went in there and saw a huge crowd standing around some new game, a weird phenomenon I'd never seen happen before. I squeezed my way through the crowd and that was the first time I laid eyes on Space Invaders. The arcade was always way more crowded from that day on. IMO that was when the video game industry as we know it really kicked off. Most people credit Pong with being the one that started it all, but it had really come and gone by that point as far as being part of the mainstream public consciousness. I remained totally obsessed with video games up until about puberty. I lost interest around the same time I stopped getting up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons. Suddenly all I cared about was getting up at noon to listen to records and play guitar, the go out and party.
About seven years later, after I finished college I was working out how to become a "responsible adult" and one of the bullet points was establishing credit, which seemed impossible, a catch-22. Eventually the best advice I got was "Go to every electronics/appliance shop in town and apply for their store-only credit card. At least one of them will be desperate or stupid enough to give you one, since no credit is better than bad credit. Use it to buy something cheap but not too cheap, something you can pay off in less than a month. A cordless phone, an answering machine, a Nintendo, a nice ghetto blaster..." The only thing I didn't already have was a Nintendo. I had just recently been seeing commercials for the brand new Super Nintendo and a game called F-Zero. I wasn't really that interested, but it did look impressive. So I bought a SNES and F-Zero thinking I'd play with it for a couple hours and sell it. Sure enough, after I won 1st place in all of the races, I'd had a lot of fun but I was ready to disconnect the console and get rid of it. I opened the box and pulled out the styrofoam tray so I could put everything back, and I noticed the Super Mario World cartridge that came with it. "Ah, shit. I bought the damn thing, I might as well play it at least once." Two or three levels was all it took. "Holy shit, this is fucking awesome! Why did nobody tell me these Super Mario games were so rad???" I've never even considered stopping gaming since then. Sucks that I missed out on the whole 8-bit era, though. Around 1993 I started trying to go back and play the NES classics, but they were just too clunky for me to stomach.