PC Gamers, What Made You Join The PC Master Race?

TIMELESS · November 17, 2015

As the title says, what made you convert from console to the "PC master race"? :p

For me, it was TDU of course! Way back in 07 or 08 I bought it for my PS2, and a while after that I upgraded to a Xbox 360 and bought for that. After a while of sitting on here (known as TDU-Central back then) drooling over mods and G25s, I moved to PC... it's been glorious ever since.

So how about you?

Credit: Ryzza and Myk for the idea, no credit for their laziness though

superhyper · November 17, 2015

I used to play very little on my PC back in the TDU days, especially after I got myself an X360. But when X360 started slowly dying and the new consoles started coming out, I found myself wanting a proper gaming PC really hard. Nowadays I basically do half of my gaming on PC and the rest on my XB1 :nods:

killalldude · November 17, 2015

My parents never bought game systems when I was a child. So I just played video games on the home PC.

What has kept me using the PC is modding. And some of my favorite games, GTA and The Sims, are much better on the PC.

The Compensator · November 17, 2015

^this

mau92 · November 18, 2015

I only had 2 consoles, Family Game (or SNES, iirc) and PS1. By the time the PS2 came out I was the only person in my family who played (my dad bought an Atari when it was new and brother played on PS1) and I was doing it on PC. The very first game that made me want a gaming PC was the TOCA Race Driver 2, being Race Driver one of my favorites. Of course, I think, TDU was another big part. The first I played it was in a friend's house and I was amazed by the fact of having an island and a nice selection of supercars to do whatever you wanted, so I got it asap.

Pretty much from that moment I've never looked back into consoles, though nowadays I'd like to have a console and a gaming PC, because, why not?

Ryzza5 · November 19, 2015

I guess I've always been a PC gamer. Started with a Commodore 64 which some may call a console, but you had to type commands to launch your games and other software, and ours had a printer attached, so....

Then came the IBM 386 for the family and later my very own 486 running a dual OS of MS DOS, Win 3.11 and later Win 95. Racing games such as Stunts were popular, where you could build your own tracks.

Not too long later we upgraded to the amazing Pentium 1, followed by a Pentium 4 a few years later. These were what we played the early NFS games on. Windows 98 SE FTW.

Fast forward a few years to when I inherited an old SFF workstation running the pretty new Windows XP. By that stage most of our games were for the PS1 (which we inherited). Someone else later gave us their seldom-used Xbox, which we bought a few games for. Midtown Madness 3, obviously.

NFS Most Wanted (2005) didn't really run well on my workstation, so I had to buy my first dedicated graphics card - I think it was an ASUS ATi 9600? In any case the card wasn't SFF so I had to rest the case lid on top of it, no big deal.

What was a big deal however was Test Drive Unlimited. It wasn't marketed that much here (despite the delayed PC release I hadn't heard a great deal of it), but I remember looking at the box in a shop one day and checking out some YouTube videos and knew it was going to be good. Except that it ran like pants on my PC. I'm talking lowest of the low settings, 640x480 res with around 20 FPS. I was working 1 day a week while studying so plans were afoot to build a budget gaming PC (the base of which my younger brother still owns, I think). It did the job, but as the disposable income kept coming in I knew something bigger and better would be on the horizon (the base of which is used by one of my iRacing/GT6 league buddies). From then on it's always been about PC gaming.

I did buy a PS3 in December 2008 as well but it was seldom used beyond GT5. I purchased an Xbox 360 especially for Forza (and to cruise with the other staff here), both ending up being let downs. FH1 made up for it a little, and it's still used for it's media streaming functionality, but I'll think twenty times before buying another Xbox.

TIMELESS · November 20, 2015

I guess I've always been a PC gamer. Started with a Commodore 64 which some may call a console, but you had to type commands to launch your games and other software, and ours had a printer attached, so....
Then came the IBM 386 for the family and later my very own 486 running a dual OS of MS DOS, Win 3.11 and later Win 95. Racing games such as Stunts were popular, where you could build your own tracks.

Not too long later we upgraded to the amazing Pentium 1, followed by a Pentium 4 a few years later. These were what we played the early NFS games on. Windows 98 SE FTW.

Fast forward a few years to when I inherited an old SFF workstation running the pretty new Windows XP. By that stage most of our games were for the PS1 (which we inherited). Someone else later gave us their seldom-used Xbox, which we bought a few games for. Midtown Madness 3, obviously.

NFS Most Wanted (2005) didn't really run well on my workstation, so I had to buy my first dedicated graphics card - I think it was an ASUS ATi 9600? In any case the card wasn't SFF so I had to rest the case lid on top of it, no big deal.

What was a big deal however was Test Drive Unlimited. It wasn't marketed that much here (despite the delayed PC release I hadn't heard a great deal of it), but I remember looking at the box in a shop one day and checking out some YouTube videos and knew it was going to be good. Except that it ran like pants on my PC. I'm talking lowest of the low settings, 640x480 res with around 20 FPS. I was working 1 day a week while studying so plans were afoot to build a budget gaming PC (the base of which my younger brother still owns, I think). It did the job, but as the disposable income kept coming in I knew something bigger and better would be on the horizon (the base of which is used by one of my iRacing/GT6 league buddies). From then on it's always been about PC gaming.

I did buy a PS3 in December 2008 as well but it was seldom used beyond GT5. I purchased an Xbox 360 especially for Forza (and to cruise with the other staff here), both ending up being let downs. FH1 made up for it a little, and it's still used for it's media streaming functionality, but I'll think twenty times before buying another Xbox.

Wow, that brought back memories I completely forgot. Before TDU, waaaaaay before TDU, I used to play Midtown Madness 2 with my Microsoft Sidewinder steering wheel and pedals :lol: I guess it was MM2 that made me dream of a much bigger world to play in, I eventually found TDU. I don't ever remember seeing it advertised on TV or anything, I just found videos on Youtube and had to have it. Up to that point it was all about Gran Turismo on the PS1 :duck:

Ryzza5 · November 20, 2015

Yep, the original MM also had the car stereo feature (had to insert a proper CD-ROM in your PC).

A few friends and I may or may not have loaded the free MM2 demo on a bunch of school PCs and played over LAN. :)

ProDexorite · January 8, 2016

PC was the machine I rarely got to play on when I was a kid. We had a PlayStation and Nintendo 64 before my parents broke up, I got to play with those but when we moved with my sister and mother to her new husband, the PC was available for me for about 1 hour in a week. Needless to say I was pissed off by that, no great Counter-Strike matches were performed in that amount of time. And in addition, my little sister got to play way more with it.

A Year later from that I got the first Xbox as a Christmas present, but every game that was age restricted for more than I was by then (say goodbye to lalalala) were banned from me. Midtown Madness 3 was however amazing and I spent most of my game hours rolling the streets.

Going back for PC, I often visited my father to play on his PC he did not really use for anything. Continued my Counter-Strike career and bought few more games that I can't even remember right now. That was enjoyable. Then I got my first very own PC which was so crappy it did not even run the CS 1.6 on lowest graphics, so I kinda messed up by getting like literally over 500 000 viruses on that computer (they were disguised as font files, we scanned it and got to like "C" and we had that 500 000 infections counted up, aborted the mission and re-installed the whole thing over).

Nowdays, though I am playing more with Xbox One than I am with PC, I still have the huge collection of games for the master-race machine and I recently upgraded my graphics driver for GTX 970. I should get some spare cash at some point to get some more upgrades, since besides the power supply and graphics driver, the rig is 5 years old!