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Growing up, my older siblings had the NES, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo 64 all connected and that's what I played in my younger days. The first game I ever played was Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The N64 was what I played the most and my brother would always rent games for it since the Genesis and NES were outdated at this point and the video store didn't have games for those consoles. We also had our Windows '98 that I played Starcraft on.

Couple years went by and the PS2 was out. I went over to my cousin's house who had a PS2 and it blew my fuckin' mind on how good the graphics were compared to the N64. My older sister bought a PS2 some time later and we got Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and GTA 3 with the console. We had to keep the PS2 on because we didn't have a memory card yet. The PS2 was my console for a few years after this.

I was in 3rd grade now when my teacher brought his Xbox and Halo 2 to class the day it came out. I was amazed at this game because I had never seen a game that looked as good and was as fun to play as much as Halo 2. After bugging my parents to buy me an Xbox, I eventually got one for my birthday a few months later. I got Halo 2 and NFS: Underground 2. I didn't even touch my PS2 for the longest time after this.

The 6th grade came along and my PS2 at this point was broken and Blockbuster for some reason never had any good games to rent for the Xbox so I was bored as fuck at this point. Christmas came and I got an Xbox 360, Halo 3, and Call of Duty 4 which is still my favorite Christmas I've ever had. Playing on the Xbox 360 from 2007-2011 was my favorite time playing games. Wish I could go back.

Started with PS1 and went all the way to 360. Now on PC.

Got introduced to some of my favorite series through my parents playing them like FF's and Resident Evil's

My Dad had a PS1 that I played a bit on when I was a kid. I played Hercules and Small Soldiers on it. He later upgraded to a PS2 and then it just kinda went from there. I remember being so excited to get a GBA SP for my birthday and I played the shit out of Harry Potter CoS and FF Tactics Advance. I think the first proper console I owned myself was the Gamecube. I dabbled in my Mum's boyfriend's PS3 before getting a 360 for my birthday and spending a few years with that, until getting my own PS4 and sticking with that. I'm pretty much entirely a Sony dude now but I also love playing Pokemon on whatever Nintendo console the game is on.

Started with a PS One when I was around 5-6, so 2000-2001 ish. Played the shit out of Destruction Derby 2 and Wipeout 3 as well as the original Gran Turismo which was just a blob of pixels moving around a screen of static pixels. Safe to say I was definitely into my racing games as a child. Never played the "classics" associated with Sony like Final Fantasy or Spyro, though I did have a go at some game called Croc. I hated it because I was waaay to young to figure what I was supposed to do. While I stuck to mostly racing games and hated most other story-oriented puzzle/adventure games, I really got into Monsters Inc.; Scare Island - basically a training island where you play as Sully or Mike and scare the crap out of robots. At the time I thought it was weird that it was robots instead of children, but thinking on it now it was probably down to using robots as a loophole to lower the game's classification (For a 3+ game, you're probably not allowed to depict scaring or threatening of kids). I also had a go at Army Men with the "plastic" soldiers, but I never got further than the 3rd or 4th level because I didn't grasp the concept of saving progress on a memory card. I did later with Monsters Inc., which I think I finished, but before that I used to just play a game for however long I could to see if I could get as far as I can before I had to turn over the TV to someone else, as it was the only TV in the house.

Several years later (though I'm unsure exactly when), I got a silver fat PS2. Apparently the slim version came out in 2004, so it must've been that year or around then when I got it. I stuck with this console well until I moved to Wales sometime around 2007, so I had plenty of games to play. Sticking with old habits I had racing games, but with more destructive tendencies like Burnout 3 and Flatout 2. So similar they were in their theme of beating your competitors by racing or failing that, literally beating them, they even had similar soundtracks, some of which I swear copied the same songs. Think screamy/alternative/"emo" metal - that sorta teen angsty stuff, though some was pretty good to be fair. Somewhere along the way I got myself my first CoD, Finest Hour. A memory that sticks in my mind is the intro to the game as some lowly Russian Private being given the most passionate speech ever by a Commissar on a little dingy heading for Stalingrad, only to be stuck on a mounted MG42 on the same mission because there was no hint to tell you to get off it, and thinking the game was broken. Took me a week of playing it again and mashing buttons in rage until I figured out you were supposed to press the action button to get off it again and continue with the mission. One of my favourites apart from the other two racing games (and oh-so-many other racing games I had at the time, most unknowns that never had a sequel, they were so crap) was Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition. Racing with powerups, but with a focus on racing and showing off your ride rather than crushing your competition. I played that right until I moved in 2006, maybe for another year until I moved on to the '360.

After I moved here in 2006 I made friends with a guy and had sleepovers at his house often. He was the one to expose me to the Xbox 360 and online play around 2007/2008, being one of the early adopters with the god-awful original white 64GB console. Prone to overheating and breaking discs, it was a mechanical nightmare. But the games, jesus christ were they a step up from PS2. My friend had chipped his Xbox allowing him to play early pirate copies of GTA IV before anyone else, and I remember staying up until 6am with the lights off, with rapid flashes of Niko and an M4 mowing down fat cops and ragdolling NOOSE teams, minigunning and rotor-chopping pedestrians on Hove Beach, and constantly rejecting Roman Bellic's advances for family bonding via bowling.

2008 was a good year for me gaming wise. GTA IV, Fallout 3, and Call of Duty: World at War were all released (or thereabouts), I had gotten my first taste of online play in W@W and thinking "this is fucking magnificent". I had seen the online options for some games on PS2, but never being able to get onto it because I didn't understand the intricacies of attaching an ethernet cable to the back of the damn thing until it was too late for that console. Now here I was, shotgunning the legs off some Nazi 12-year old and being told I'm a massive fag for using bouncing betties and "hardscoping", whatever the fuck that was. Glorious. The Golden Age of Gaming continued with Red Dead Redemption, playing chicken with bears online in the forest before dynamiting bounty hunters, and Halo 3: ODST and eventually Reach getting me into the series and eventually Bungie.net, and finally here. During the "twilight stage" of the '360 I had upgraded my own to the black slim Elite edition as my own had died from the Red rings of Death, and got into the Battlefield Series with Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3.

And finally, we come to the present. I played the shit out my Xbox(es), dumped a bunch of my parents money on games and Xbox Live, and now I had enough my own to buy my own for once. I first bought the Destiny TTK edition Playstation 4 in 2015 as I started my 2nd year at Uni and as my friends by 2013-14 had started buying into the 8th Gen consoles. I ended up as a minority among my friends as after the initial terrible release of the XB1 I went back to Playstation whilst everyone else stayed on. It was only recently friends bought it also (personally I think that's a crazy thing to do when you already have one, but eh), but now everyone's that bit older that life gets in the way of playing together. University, jobs, serious girlfriends, wives, children, Australia, that sorta thing.

So this year, I moved to a more beefy PC for gaming. More of a laptop really, but enough to play GTA V, Fallout 4, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and whatever else that comes out soon for singleplayer games. A bit more portable than a console too, which is perfect when in between summers you're moving to different houses for studying and need to take notes at a lecture too.

To be honest, I miss the Golden Age. That time when I was 14-17, without much of a care in the world and a tonne of time to kill to play with friends.