I also started 22 years ago.
I was 14, and I went into a Blockbuster to look at new movies. We had only recently gotten a PC because my mother needed to write her master's thesis (she did her bachelor's on a mechanical typewriter, it was horrible). But we mostly owned a few games for smaller kids, like the Disney's Hercules game and such, which I helped my younger siblings play.
In the Blockbuster, I saw a game called The Sims. I loved stuff like SimPark which was also by Maxis, so I was immediately interested. So I walked all the way home and asked my mom if I could buy it, she said yes, I went all the way back to get it, and when I came home, my mom told me off because she had misheard me and thought only cost half as much. But she let me keep it. And I played it ALL THE TIME, whenever I could get the computer to myself. I also bought the first expansion, but our PC couldn't run it, so I had to uninstall and only play the base game. I would sometimes lie in bed and read the manual at night (in my defense, the manual was really funny, very tongue-in-cheek)
A year or two later I got a better PC and I bought every expansion after that. The Sims 2 came out, and I got every single expansion again. I still have them all in a box in a closet.
By the time The Sims 3 came out, I was pretty invested in World of Warcraft so I only got a few expansions, and it never grabbed me the way Sims 1+2 did. And when The Sims 4 came out, I was pretty underwhelmed at first. No toddlers, no pools? I played it for a few hours, then stopped.
A few years later I gave it another chance, because a lot of stuff had been patched in, and I was immediately hooked and I've been playing it since, got most of the expansions and like 800 mods to get things JUST how I want them. And then I recently started blogging stories.
