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.
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
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]
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.
