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Of course many of us started down the dark path of collecting too many miniatures with games like Dungeons and Dragons first.
But what was the first thing that comes to mind when you first started that really hooked you...what sold you into the hobby??..

For me being a long time Games Workshop fan it was at Command Con in (1989??) and there was a group playing Space Hulk.. I had messed
around with 40k just a little but that was the game that sold me. Tons of Cool miniatures, cardboard hallways and descent rules
Years later I still love the game... don't matter the version.

Lord of the Rings....

Because I liked the film so much, I got loads of the GW figures (as well as non GW LOTR products) but never played until my step-dad took over a internet cafe/gaming centre in 2008 that had a wargames night on Thursdays. One of the regulars had LOTR stuff, so we played a few games then I got 40k stuff because thats what pretty much everyone else played. We've moved on to a different location now because the internet cafe had to shut down.

I got into wargaming in general through my dad; I'd play historical and sci-fi miniatures games with him (some rulesets he designed!) growing up, and we'd go to Historicon every year from when I was about 6 to 18. Around 12 years old I started picking up 40k figures from the flea market, and a couple years later I went from just being into miniatures wargames to being into The Hobby as GW defines it.

The person who dragged me into wargaming was the sister of a friend of mine, she played Mordor and offerd to help me build a Easterling force. After that I was sold and moved on to 40k later, but LOTR and WHFB have always been my preferd games

I was really into the first Dawn of War computer game. I had heard of warhammer before that, but knew nothing of it. I was hooked! After reading up on almost everything on Lexicanum I couldn't get enough. Finally I got into the miniature aspect of it.

Star wars miniatures was my first foree into wargaming then i saw someone reading a codex, so i decided to check it out after i got bored with Star wars miniatures.

Myself and my friend were looking for a new minis game to get into... we'd known about 40k for a long time but never actually made the jump until a little over 3 years ago when we split on a starter box of AoBR. A month later we split on a second
I've kept the Orkz from the beginning and he's tried a bit of everything & since then we've been hooked and havent looked back... even got most of our fellow gamers into playing which has grown into a full on game club.
A few of them had even played back in the days of 2nd & 3rd and came back to the hobby when we started playing
Good times with many more to come!

Started playing RPGs in 1987. Just saw the Star Wars books on the shelves and thought they looked interesting. Would buy my Star Wars, Shadowrun & Judge Dredd books from my FLGS... which was, and still is, the same Games Workshop. That then got me interested in Space Hulk & WFRP. Played RPGs & Board games for many years but didn't really play miniatures until Star Wars minis in 2004. From there I played D&D Miniatures and then started with 40K a couple of years ago.

40K is now my main interest but I do still play Board Games, Star Wars minis, and recently Heroclix.

Necrons, man....

I thought the old Warriors went together like legos...

I looked them up on the old GW site and I fell in love...

Now I am the proud owner of soon to be five armies.

Space Crusade.

Dad randomly said I'd like it one day and got me some of it. I've spent much time wandering if he knew what he was doing or could just get a lot of it off the back of a truck as it were. That was pre-puberty, when I stopped.

Post-puberty I discovered a friend had the same guilty pleasure as I did and I got back into the hobby. I've never played it that much, always been more a collector/painter

One of the few people that AoBR worked for, a friend of mine bought it, and we started playing it, really complex, but after research I realised that it was cheaper to do 40k than to keep up with MTG and its various tournaments

My granddad played napoleonics.

Some guys I met years later played WW2 in HO scale (model railway scale, roughly 20mm) and this led onto "moderns" in the same scale (where I came into it).

Then I saw the RTB001 SM box and rules for 40k. (1987)
Then saw some guys playing it at a tourney (late 87) and started playing with some mates.

Then we found Space Hulk.

It was a long downward spiral after that.

TheSecretSquig wrote:Space Crusade.

Me too! That, and White Dwarf 127 (the 'Eldar Issue'), it all seemed so evocative and mysterious back then! Opening that magazine felt like entering a different world at the time..

The Wargame by Charles Grant - I read the campaign to rescue the prisoners of war I just had to use my Airfix soldiers for more than just marble fodder.

MechWarrior 2. I friggin' loved the MechWarrior 2 series, it was, and still is, one of my favorite series of PC games of all time. I then learned it was based on something called Battletech (which I was dimly aware of as a cartoon that I had rarely seen since it was on about an hour before I got up to go to school), and I read a few of the novels (despite being a bit too young for them, IIRC).

I then learned it had all started as a what I thought was a board game. I got the Battletech boxed set for my birthday one year, tried to figure out how to play it and decided it was really complicated. I invited some friends over to see if we could figure it out together, and then after about five minutes, on of my friends says "Why don't you just play Warhammer [40,000]?" and that was that. I may not play Warhammer anymore but that was the tipping point where tabletop wargaming became one of my main hobbies.

Battlefleet Gothic.

While I was in the Navy's nuclear power training pipeline, a friend of mine convinced me to go in with him on a BFG starter box; I took the Imperial side, he took the Chaos side. I was hooked after that! A few years later, I took up 40k mainly because I was tired of not being able to find people to play BFG with. Space naval combat games are still my first love, though .

My old hobby was a 1974 Jeep CJ5. I decided it would be fun to learn how to work on old cars, and it was until the day I turned on the ignition and a short in the wiring harness (original from '74) caused a fire. I got out without injury thanks to having no roof or doors and put it out, but the damage was too much for my wallet.

That night, I went to work and announced to my coworkers that I was in the market for a new hobby. Long story short, one of the guys was really into Flames of War and invited me to attend his gaming group. I was mildly interested in the game, but really fascinated by the guys who were painting 5 o'clock shadows on 15mm soldiers. I was immediately hooked and, much to my friend's dismay, proceeded to buy some DKoK models for 40k because I wanted total creative freedom to paint however I wanted. For the record, they came out grey like most Krieg armies do.

Painting minis has been my primary means of stress relief ever since.

Those right there. I wandered in to a game/comic store and saw them. I thought they looked brutal and awesome, and I wanted to play whatever game made them possible.

Incidentally my first army ended up being Empire, but that was due to a 50% off store closing sale at Wizards of the Coast, and the new Empire battalion box was there for only $40.

Those models to this day are some of my favorite ones.

Bought a White Dwarf in '96, right around the time of 5th edition fantasy. Good times.

I started off when my best mate loaned me his copy of the Rogue Trader book and I never looked back...except for when I was at Uni and too cool for wargaming...but I came back to the one I loved eventually...

My Ultramarines...!

I got into wargaming as a hobby in around 1980. I was in Cub Scouts (precursor to Boy Scouts for non-US readers) and my copy of the BSA's "Boys Life" magazine one issue had an article on wargaming. About two pages long with three pictures: some GHQ micro-armor, a picture of what I thought was an old guy wearing a turtleneck & tweed sportcoat pushing some ancients around (truth be told he was probably about as old then as I am now), and a picture of some old Heritage Miniatures Lord of the Rings figures IIRC. I read that article over & over and was hooked. I then went to my local library and found wargaming books by Featherstone & Grant among others and after re-reading those many times over, I located a game store in my city that carried 'wargame figures.' Several months of begging paid off when my dad had to go to an electrical supply shop a few blocks away from it and I rapidly spent all my saved-up paper route money on figures.

After a few years of pushing WWII micro-armor around and doing some other historical things, the local fantasy miniatures group, which up til now had been using Ral Partha figures and some home-brew rules stumbled across what turned out to be the 2nd Edition of Warhammer. I picked up that box set and ever since then I've always had a fascination with the GW rules & Citadel figures even though I never played too much of it. I've bought & sold several versions of WHFB & 40K, along with Warmaster & Epic, but haven't started painting for the games again until now with the release of 6th edition 40K.

Now that I'm a little older and have more time & cash to burn again, I'm getting back into it and taking my time to paint the figures properly this time.

As well as playing 40k, I also used to race nitro RC; In 2001, I was in sixth grade, when I was at a local HobbyTownUSA race day, I saw a few people inside playing 40k. I asked them if I could watch and he offered me one better and let me play in his place and taught me how to play in the process. I was hooked and I bought my first box of Khorne Berserkers that day. I've since retired retired from racing RCs as it was waaay too expensive and still play 40k in its place.

Battletech.

I got my first AD&D books when I was 10, and my first mini about a year later. It was a tiny (by today's standards)dragon, with an even tinier rider. I must have painted and re-painted it ten times. It's still in a bitz box in the closet.

When I started high school, a good friend of mine showed me his WHFB 2nd edition books, and I was inspired to pick up a Skeleton Horde. I still have them, as well.

For Christmas '87, I got the Rogue Trader rulebook, a box of marines, and a variety of blister packs. Ever since then, I've been steadily adding miniatures, even though I have more than I can ever paint. I like to think of them as my son's inheritance.

The Dawn of War video games.

Compared to a lot of the other users here, I'm still brand new.

I had already known about Warhammer 40k & Fantasy through BL, DoW and Warhammer Online. I was already in love with the universe and its lore. However, I had never played a single tabletop game that was not a TCG.

I started in tabletop gaming with DnD 3.5 via a friend of mine in my AP Calculus class about 3 years ago. We spent more time writing character sheets and doing rules explanations rather than actually playing since it was hard for us to settle a time that worked for all parties involved. When college swung around, I met another guy that was a fairly sophisticated DnD player since his family were also sophiscated DnD players. I joined him and his family in their weekly game at one of my FLGSs.

While this was going on, I picked up Yu-Gi-Oh! again since there were tons of people playing it in the area where I still hang out to this day (basically where all of the gamers hang out in my university). I quickly jumped from Yu-Gi-Oh! to MTG since I was absolutely sick of the focus on the card economy and terrible gameplay. I fell in love with MTG, became a regular at the same FLGS where I played DnD, and eventually stopped playing DnD to focus soley on MTG. I became a strong player and always played aggressive decks. Being in the top 4 of the weekly tournaments (FNMs for those with MTG knowledge) was quite common for me. This is where my sense of tactics and strategy in tabletop gaming came from.

While I was playing MTG, I was starting to consider getting into 40k that year (this is late '09, funny how I make a huge change from early '09 to being DnD focused to TCG focused), but at the time it didn't feel like the right moment. I postponed it for the time being.

In 2010, I pulled out of MTG. I was fed up with the everchanging meta and the need of having to completely change decks and spend more money whenever a new set came out. I sold everything that I had of value. After this happened, I decided it was time to get into 40k. I told another friend (Who is also on this board, Red Comet) of mine my intentions, and we both agreed to get AOBR for Christmas. He wanted to start with Blood Angels, while I would have both Space Marines and Orks.

The rest is basically history. I am very pleased with how this hobby encompasses all types of people, and I love the painting aspect.

To be perfecty honest, at first my younger brother and a few of his freinds were playing it (in 2010), then i bought a single little Leman Russ tank out of curiosity. WHen i found you could create everything about your army down to the smallest detail i got hooked as it let my imagination run free.

went through several itterations of my regiment fluff (but the paint job and the basic nature never changed) until i finnaly came to the version i have now.

I was shopping in Perth for something for my family and found a little shop tucked into the corner of nowhere with a yellow sign saying Games Workshop and then I saw the amazing little dwarves sitting in this glass cabinet, facing some vile little green things in robes. Those dwarves, armoured in silver and gold armour and carrying axes and shields is what caught me. And still to this day I play those midget warriors.
40k came about 6 months later when I was planning to buy Vanilla Marines, but just before I started painting my first SM, I saw these robed, dark figures on bikes and these bone white terminators and green armoured things and I was like; awsome. So I bought a pot of Dark Angels Green and got painting. I haven't stopped since.

Peer pressure.