I have never in my life owned a console, handheld or otherwise.
Actually, my gaming experience is remarkably similar to that of Mongoose's
My parents were big into gaming when I was younger, we had several machines - compaq armada, gateway 2000, and another machine my father built.
Pentium II and III mostly. This was around 2001-2002. I think I still have some of the original 40GB IDE drives lying around somewhere in the basement...
Parents were big into Descent and would do LAN games together (course I didn't know what that was since I was maybe 6 years old
)
My first games were Frogger (1997 Hasbro version) Frogger 2, and Rayman. A year or so later I too, along with my brother, were playing Descent (and II and III).
Also started playing racing games, NFS Hot Pursuit and some Nascar game I can't remember. I soon found FS and FS2 and played those, I think when I was around 13-14 years old.
As I grew up, my parents upgraded our machines and we were soon playing BF 1942, 2, and 2142.
Around 2012 I found out about World of Tanks and proceeded to sink too much time into that....
And in 2013 I found you all here on HLP and got back into FS2 again.