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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

I would go further and state that many probably owe gaming for their tech career. In the dark ages, installing and running a game could take significant technical effort. Scouring forums and looking for magical configuration or patches that could make it work. That technical knowledge builds upon itself.

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when games were far more open to supporting mods and had big communities around it, its where I first cut my teeth programming in earnest without even realizing it.

At some point, the programming became more fun than the playing for me

now kids are modding roblox and minecraft

My programming journey started in like 2013ish with making guns on roblox which eventually turned into working on Minecraft mods.

It’s actually really cool (to me) the irony that both of these games are over a decade old — ancient in the computing timeframe, I would argue — and so widely appealing to all age ranges.

Roblox released in 2006 [0]

Minecraft officially was released in 2011, with a public testing release in 2009 [1]

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft

Agree! What got me into programming was building/running my own Counter-Strike server and corresponding stats website. Now with companies running their own servers internally, that isn't nearly as common.

I'm old enough to remember trying to get IRQs and DMAs set, and trying to figure out whether I should use Tandy or EGA mode.

Some even disassembled their games to modify them ;)

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