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I'd been a Star Wars fan since a kid, then in87 I saw the Star Wars RPG for sale, bought it, played it, and my gaming took off from there. Space Hulk, Buck Rogers, WFRP and Shadowrun were the first games I branched off to, but I play a lot more nowadays.

I started 40K about 4 years ago. Friends at my games club were playing and I thought it would be fun to join in. It was, and 40K is now may favourite game.

Nice article from the Beeb on model trains. Obviously not wargaming but another definite influence on modelling and interest therein.
Cant link the text due to pictures.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30793868

Went out the back of Castlecourt shopping centre in Belfast, looking for the old Talisman comic shop. Found this strange model shop called Games Workshop too. Flicked through the 'Warhammer 40,000' rulebook and saw photos of these 'genestealer' things that I remembered from an old computer game magazine. The idea of pushing armies of these over a modelled landscape hooked me.

If I hadn't discovered that, I might well be pushing model trains over a modelled landscape instead.

I think I got an SPI game in the mail in 1974/75, along with an issue of Strategy and Tactics.

The magazine had an ad for a store in Dallas that sold miniatures and games.

Around 1978, I discovered a gaming club at a local Junior College, and one of the professors discovered that I could paint miniatures.

The availability of miniatures was pretty sparse, but in 1980, I discovered Ral Partha, and in 1982 I discovered Citadel.

And due to being pretty good at painting, before too long people were giving me miniatures right and left.

It took me forever (maybe five years) for me to paint my first army, but after that, it would only take a few months to complete an army.

And I still don't have most of the miniatures I wanted (even with all the ones I have since lost).

MB

Playing Tactics II and Blitzkrieg with my parents. They had a bunch of the old Avalon Hill bookcase games, and not just wargames. That really was the kind of game that interested me first, and I remember how excited I got when we found a bunch more board games at a garage sale (a Gettysburg game, 1776, Waterloo, Source of the Nile... it was amazing).

The problem I always had was that I didn't know anyone else who had any interest in board games.

Didn't get into miniatures until probably 1998/1999. That was the first I even heard of Warhammer, much less anything else.

At first they were like, "Hey man, why don't you try this, everyone else is doing it and it'll make you cool."
I was only 9 and impressionable at the time so I gave it a shot, I bought some Marauder Ogres and a copy of Dragon magazine. It WAS fun at first, entering a magical land where I could escape from the everyday pressures that all 9 year-old kids have, my worries about having to eat my greens, getting a ball stuck on the roof and being told when bedtime was just melted away and were replaced by fire breathing dragons, laser-eyed robots and epic starship battles. What nobody told me was that this was only the tip of the iceberg.
Soon I was on to much harder things, models became more expensive and bigger and better and there was always something new just around the corner. Needless to say, my piggy bank was soon empty, I took a paper round and started washing cars just to try and keep up with the relentless monthly release schedules but it was no good. The more I earned the more I wanted to buy, and I did! Looking back, I was out of control and I had more models than I could paint, they were wild times. We'd stay up playing til early in the morning, sometimes proxying or even playing with unpainted models just to get that fix. This was a train heading for the broken bridge with no way of stopping, a shuttle on its way past the moon, an infinite frenzied stampede....."

Excerpt from, "My Small War: an addiction" by Alex Kolodotschko.

 toasteroven wrote:
Playing Tactics II and Blitzkrieg with my parents. They had a bunch of the old Avalon Hill bookcase games, and not just wargames. That really was the kind of game that interested me first, and I remember how excited I got when we found a bunch more board games at a garage sale (a Gettysburg game, 1776, Waterloo, Source of the Nile... it was amazing).

The problem I always had was that I didn't know anyone else who had any interest in board games.

Didn't get into miniatures until probably 1998/1999. That was the first I even heard of Warhammer, much less anything else.

Blitzkrieg was the second game I ever played, and the first for which I created miniatures (GHQ micro-armor on tiles with the unit stats printed on it).

I even made my own map at school (we had a lot of screen printing stuff, so I made resists for a map, and silk screened it at about 150% size to accommodate the minis).

I never got enough miniatures to play the whole game (just a couple of introductory scenarios.

Boy was that game a bitch to set up, and it was made and released before they had decent counter-trays, so that each deployment unit could go into its own tray (saving time sorting counters for set-up).

MB

Was in a mall and purchased a game called Divine Right from a company called TSR. I think I was maybe 12 or so. Been hooked since then


I am pleasantly surprised at the veteran gamers answering this thread.

GW sent me a free army. Really.

my cousin giving me my first models, + dawn of war.

Mine was when I was about seven and my dad took me to GW to get some lord of the rings stuff. I got hooked with the 40k matches I saw there, and decided to create an army

I bought a few Grenadier, RAFM, Ral Partha figures, then saw the Citadel stuff. Bought an issue of WD and found out that there were mass battle rules for fantasy which really scratched my Tolkien-loving itch.

A few details left out, but thats the nuts and bolts.

A friend of mine came to my house and brought Space crusade with him, hell of a night and my love of Eldar was born (it existed before this from White Dwarf but was sealed with SC)

I've built model cars, planes and tanks for years. Was kinda burned out/ bored with it when I noticed the wall full of 40k at my local comic shop. At the same time, a guy at work lent me the first Soul Drinkers omnibus and a plastic crack head was born. Bought a Space Marine Commander the day after I started the book.

Hero Quest and Airfix Napoleonics, then got the 2nd Ed 40K box set for Christmas after convincing my parents I would actually paint them all.

I first started when my older brother got the.... I think it was 4th edition WHFB box set - the one with the Brettonians and Lizardmen in it. After he left I languished until by chance I found a copy of 'The Loathsome Ratmen and all there Vile Kin' in my local library. I read it through several times. A few weeks later we took a trip to York and my father - whom was a Dwarf collector - happened to stop in by the local GW. I found the Skaven section and persuaded them to let me get a Warlord blister, whilst my little brother got a Squig Hopper blister. That Yule I got the Skaven Battalion box set, a Clanrat unit and a Moulder box, whilst my little brother got The Battle of Skull Valley and we each got an army book. I never looked back.