I was five years old.

And you were already rocking BASIC?! When I was five, I drew some of the worst MSPaint comics you could possibly imagine. Even 4chan wouldn't be on my level.

I looked back on that when my kids were similar ages. I was more advanced than my kids were at those ages, but when I compare my kids to other families, I wonder how most of the human race actually survives. How can so many kids NOT read by that age? Some kids are reading chapters and doing math, others are learning about the existence of letters struggling to learn to count. When I learned the kindergarten's requirements that a child should know most of the letters and count to ten, public schools suddenly seemed like a home for the mentally impaired.

I've since learned outliers usually don't think of themselves as outliers.

QBASIC when I was in elementary school. I did work with gwbasic for a short time, but jumped ship when I saw it didn't have line numbers.
I had a little 3d wireframe maze thing going, and that was a lot of fun. In high school I wrote a lot of junky C, playing around with opengl on my voodoo 3. I still mostly just do that as a hobby, just on much better hardware, and with a lot cleaner code. I'm a software developer, but my job has nothing to do with games. Boring systems stuff. Actually systems stuff is quite fun.

I was five years old.

And you were already rocking BASIC?! When I was five, I drew some of the worst MSPaint comics you could possibly imagine. Even 4chan wouldn't be on my level.

I looked back on that when my kids were similar ages. I was more advanced than my kids were at those ages, but when I compare my kids to other families, I wonder how most of the human race actually survives. How can so many kids NOT read by that age? Some kids are reading chapters and doing math, others are learning about the existence of letters struggling to learn to count. When I learned the kindergarten's requirements that a child should know most of the letters and count to ten, public schools suddenly seemed like a home for the mentally impaired.

I've since learned outliers usually don't think of themselves as outliers.

Cant agree more, most adults really treat kids as retarded. Its a cultural thing that is really asking for some changes. Its a total lack of respect towards kids, and I feel most ppl keep treating kids as retarded as some kind of trauma or revenge because when they where kids was the same thing.

There are some Jaques Fresco videos where he talks about that, I think he nails the subject.

I started to get into game programming in the early 2000's at the age of 15, you know, during those days everyone wanted to make their own MMO, so did I. I messed around with C/C++, OGRE3D, Irrlicht3D, etc. and soon I realized MMO was too massive to be made. However, I didn't give up, I tried to make smaller games, some gets done and some are total failure. I learned a lot from all those mini game projects. 8 years later... I'm now making games for a living. :)

It was the mid-late 80s and my dad (a programmer working in the financial sector) decided to show me how BBC BASIC worked. I wrote my [10 print "Hello World!"] and I learned how to expand it to endlessly write that my little brother was a poo-head (I was only about 8 at the oldest) with GOTO statements, but I wanted more. Thanks to an advertisement in the local newspaper, I got the whole set of INPUT magazines in a collection of black folder-things and that got me started.

My first game set up targets at the top of the screen, then you moved left and right to shoot them and I think I even had the targets shooting back eventually.

A decade later, I taught myself how to make Doom levels in DoomEd, then moved on to making Quake levels with Worldcraft (what you know know as Hammer) and taught myself C++ via the QC language Quake used for its scripting, which was basically a simplified version of C++ by all accounts.

I studied a degree in games and software engineering as a mature student, learned 3ds Max, made a basic space-sim using DirectX, then more or less walked straight into a job as a level designer in 2006, switched to design and scripting in late 2007, was doing narrative design by August of 2008 (on the second anniversary of my first job, almost to the day).

Seven and a half years later, I am writing about development as much as doing it, but my daughter asked earlier this week if I could teach her how to make games, so maybe one day she'll be replying to a thread like this. I am not sure whether to be proud or scared for her...

Age of Empires 2's scenario editor. Not sure if it's counted as proper "game development" but that was my starting point ages ago.

EDIT: Before that I used to make my own board games when I didn't have a computer.

EDIT 2: Since everyone is talking about specifically programming, I started when I was 15 and realized that I had no choice but to learn c++ if I wanted to make my own custom weapons in half-life mods.

6 years ago, my friend brought to me RPG Maker 2000. i was impressed by the animation editor, yes, animation editor. i never ever could edit such an cool image like this. so i decided to build a game with it(actually RPG Maker XP i found later). and then, my first program written in RPG Maker XP. 2 year later, i go to college, and started to learn. now i'm going to join gameloft.