I got to play games because I learned the magic of memmaker.exe, autoexec.bat, config.sys, and boot disks. And I was motivated to learn how to fix things back when they broke because I shared a PC with my dad, who used it for consulting work--and who did not take kindly to service outages.
That's exactly how I learned this stuff. The damn game wouldn't play, so I had to make a boot disk.
Then I learned to make a bootdisk with a menu system called from the autoexec.bat - cos I realized that several games had the same emm386 requirements. And now I program things.
