Copying C-64 basic snippets from borrowed copies of a magazine. Then "hacking" (breaking) games to do silly things, as a kid is wont to do. I don't think I actually programmed anything meaningful or useful until I got my Amiga 500, and even then nothing serious until high school and the PC.

Well, it was a long time ago in a far far away land known as the very early 2000s there was this kid who wanted to make an Age of Empires: RoR online clan website so he went searching through the scary interwebs and bumped into a website that told him about something called a geocities account.

He had to complete a mission first though, filling out forms and data to be able to achieve the goal of earning this geocities account.

Once he had obtained this glorious account he went on his way searching through the web to learn what this mystery language was and how to speak it.

Spending hours and days of searching he finally got a grasp on this mysterious language, the gods called it "HTML". He spoke to the gods of the internet and found more information regarding this language and he learned how to start making his own website.

He would spend hours and days just studying this mysterious language to make his website.

Eventually he was able to make his website, but as he grew older he lost interest in it and moved on.

Sadly this also meant all the work and time he put into that website was also wasted as it has since vanished from the mysterious interwebs.

QBasic on MS-DOS !
...around 1995, 10yrs old

I started programming when I realized that actually coding functionality would give me much more control over game development than the no-coding-required game development systems way back then. So, I asked my dad to teach me how to make programs and he gave me his old Visual Basic (2005) CD and showed me some examples and I basically taught myself with the help of YouTube video tutorials. Eventually I got bored of VB and decided I wanted more control and learned Pascal and when I got into Linux I started learning Python, then C and Java and even some Assembly. Funnily enough I haven't actually done much game development during these years.

I got started around 1986 when my father bought a second hand Sharp MZ-721 from a colleague. The darn thing was one of the most baren things after "boot" it had just a "monitor" everything had to be loaded after that, from tapes.
Apart from that slow start to get to something resembling a program it was also very unknown by everybody around me.
So with only a few games on it I decided that learn how to make games on it. For days I sat with both a manual and a dictionary (I was around 8 and didn't really speak english) step by step I got things "going" on the darn thing. This was all in basic though. The games never really happened and the best thing I wrote in those days was a drawing program. To clarify this thing had NO graphics mode but did have graphical characters that would help.
A few years later we bought the MZ-800 from someone. And faces with the same problem as before I wanted to make games again. But this time I started with "basiccode" versions 1 and 2 depending on the radiostation transmitting it and lending MSX / C64 books from friends and trying to make the listings work on my system.
In retrospect I was a porter before I knew what that was.

So lack of games made me become a programmer in the end..... Maybe I should start porting games to linux, before it's not a niche gaming platform anymore :)

I learned Programming Logic at 15's in a free government course. After that, I learned a bit of C++, Java and other languages with free tutorials on the internet.

But, I really started programming games with Game Maker 6, since it made things much easier than with the classic programming methods. =)

Well, I'm a little on the young side compared to y'all, but here's my story.

It all started in 2007, when a group of my friends and I started a FIRST Lego League team (http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll. I quickly got hooked on the drag-and-drop NXT-G programming, and that was my first experience programming. After that, I dabbled in some text-based languages for the NXT, and then took up learning HTML and Java through books and online research.

Since then, I've done mostly regular application programming in Java, and Rich Internet Applications in HTML/Javascript, as well as working as a website administrator.

I have repeatedly tried to program games, but none of the projects I've started have gained much traction and all kinda died out. My main problem is focusing on/learning an engine; I've dabbled with dozens, and I can't make up my mind.

It was a warm summer evening in 1982. Or was it a cold winter afternoon in 1983? It was a while back when dad bought a PC and me, a curious kid, started checking it out. Three games and a basic book where all that was there. Eventually my dad grew tired of me using his PC, so he bought an extra MSX machine. On that did more basic and jumped over to assembly.

So many of you guys got into it back in what I would consider to be the golden age for learning to program at home. The barrier to entry was far lower for tinkerers then than today. But what would I know?, I didn't even exist in the 80s.

For me, it was because I wanted to automate my backups with a batch script using robocopy. And the script got more and more complex as I added creature comforts. Then I switched to Linux and so had to "port" the script to Bash. Finally took some formal education in Python and C++. I'm not great at it but my initial learning experience has left me in love with interpreted languages.

I started making crappy HTML websites for no good reason around the age of 13 (early 2000's) and later started using phpBB forums. They taught me the basics of LAMP servers; installing MODs let me see how PHP worked and what it could do, and I got used to the structure and logic of PHP that way. Can't remember if I jumped straight into it, but I think I first added a few dynamic elements to my websites copy-pasting code from various tutorials, then started making simple browser-based "games" with PHP. Eventually I started working several hours a week on an asynchronous fighting/RPG game to replace one that had closed down that my friends and I had loved. I learned a lot and made some actually complex stuff, and got it to a playable state, but had to give up eventually because I developed something similar to RSI and I already work at a computer for my actual job so I had to cut keyboard use somewhere.

Since then I haven't gotten a chance to use PHP for much other than server-side operations on mostly static websites, but I jump on chances to write a bit of code, and I've gotten much more familiar with CSS and a little more comfortable with JavaScript. It annoys me a bit that I never learned anything that I could put to good use in actual software, to contribute to Linux with more than translations. Being able to look under the hood and submit my own patches would be great. (I know it's never too late, but I have several other priorities now and I would need to start at the very beginning.)