Same, as well as many of my friends. I started off by trying to make simple games, then playing with game engines, then playing with the internals of game engines (physics engines are so freaking cool!), which lead to just playing with those pieces of code/math, sans any game.

Basically "I want to make a badass action game" eventually turned into "I want to make a badass graph-traversal algorithm"

Same here. My first attempts at programming were using basic to make a Zork-like game and then also, a failed, attempt at making a BBS from scratch. Ten year olds shouldn't be writing login authentications btw. Clear-text passwords in a bunch of IF statements are probably a bad idea.

I don't think most people appreciate how much kids want to not only emulate people in their lives, but also build things in their lives. I love that its so easy to google help for making things. Want to make a longboard or a full-size R2D2 model? There's so much documentation out there. If anything, we're in the golden age of DIY and things like videogames and other "distractions" are actually motivators for creative kids.

Likewise! From 12-18 years of age I spent hours making custom games in warcraft III. Much of this involved the use of the trigger editor, which was a kind of scratch like system.

It was through this that I learned how to program. While I did spend some time with python and other languages, programming in a video game was far, far more fun, and thus I spent hours doing it.

Due to it, today I have a great job, and in my spare time, I make my own games.

Same, The first program I ever wrote was a counter-strike script to automatically buy weapons. Due to network latency, I added artificial 50ms wait() calls and immediately fell in love with automating things. I thought I was so pro figuring out the wait() hack. Later on I would learn that what I did was called programming, and here I am, a decade later, working at a CDN trying to solve the very same issue.

My interest in CS/programming came from the Internet but my interest in the Internet came as a direct result of gaming.

Me too. I played tons of xbox in high school (Halo 2/3 CoD 4), but when I went to college my gaming time went essentially to zero. However I decided to pick up CS because I thought it would be really cool to understand how computers and game systems worked.

I just recently graduated and picked up the new xbox since I have some free time now. I ran into an issue playing Halo 5 where I kept getting disconnected from the game, and it turns out it is a bug in the networking software in combination with the "instant on" feature that was causing it. My networks class gave me a decent enough background where I can actually understand the bug is. I thought that was pretty cool!

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=931438

Big thanks to John Carmack (and team) for Quake1 modding and replying to my emails. It was a gateway drug.

Ditto. My curiosity grew out of the computer games I was playing, and my first "game" was "Guess the Number" written in TI-BASIC for my TI-83 calculator.

I feel the same way! Or, I ended up attempting to teach myself C# because of it.