I am way late to the game, so here are my top 10 confessions to catch me up:
1) I wrote a game on the Vic20 in basic that was so big you had to press play on the data-cassette halfway through. I think it was just over 5k, lol. It was called "Maze of the Minotaur".
2) I spent an entire summer playing Ultima 4 on the Apple 2c, and at the culmination I got to the volcano, blew the horn... and nothing happened because of a bug in the game.
3) I got hooked on a MUD called Realmsmud in 1991, got kicked out of the computer lab for playing too much (I was a CS minor, sorta needed to be there for school), spent 20 hours a day on the game, slept during class, and ended up dropping my GPA to 2.85, which cut off my funding and forced me to drop out of college.
3a) I met a girl from California on that MUD, she ended up getting divorced because of the game (and because of me and some other guys). She racked up over $100 per month in long distance talking to me and a couple other players on the phone, and her husband ended up disconnecting her modem. I walked her through reconnecting it. Then he took away her internet access (through his office), and I found a local company providing internet at home (rare back then since there was no world wide web yet) which I found through usenet. I was planning to visit her at the end of the semester. I never did visit her because dropping out of college sort of forced me to get a job and all that stupid stuff.
4) The first time I played Diablo 2, I hated it, and Diablo was easily my favorite game ever at that point. A year later I got hooked on hardcore D2 and played for 2 years straight usually until 2am or later every night (worked at 8 am and had 2-3 kids), had 6 accounts just to mule all my loot, and in all that time I never had a single SoJ drop. I quit when the SoJ hack came out and it had become cheap currency, and I have not tried the game once since I stopped.
5) I didn't even know there was a screen after the first in DK..
6) I have spent money to play free to play games. A lot of money.
7) I have sold game accounts for money. A LOT of money.
The only game I have played on a console after SNES was DOA on x-box for a few hours. At PAX a couple years ago in Seattle I got in early with a handicapped friend and we were the first group through the Borderlands 2 booth and after the demo we got to play the game on the x-box for over a half hour (PAX hadn't opened yet and 50,000 people were waiting in line), but I was like the guy on The Office playing COD, I was stuck running into a wall while I got killed. It was like trying to play a first person shooter with a touchpad on a laptop.
9) In 1993, I got a hold of a pin number for a calling card for my dad's business so I could call long distance for "free". Then I got into pirate BBS's, which were all long distance for me. I pirated Mortal Kombat for the PC, which took many hours to download at 2400bps. A few months later I got caught though because that card was no longer in use by employees, and I had racked up $400 in long distance charges pirating games. Mortal Kombat still holds sentimental value for me because it cost me so much money.
10) (last one), I had a COD server at work hidden under my desk. We had a guild mostly made up of employees. I ended up changing internet providers for my company's VPN network but kept that old connection going as a failover, so it was exclusively used by the server. I forgot about it after we stopped playing though, and 3 years later I was cleaning out some storage and came across it. It was still running so I plugged it into my network to log in, but my password had been changed. Turned out it had been hacked by some German hacker and the drive was packed to the brim with pirated x-box roms and had been a pirate file sharing site for 3 years.
BTW, every time I bring up this hobby, I end up inadvertently selling another arcade to someone. Now I downplay it and change the subject because I am getting tired of building them for other people, lol. Oh, and my local arcade was ALSO an Alladdin's Castle.. And the line out the door to play dragon's lair was insane. I played it once when I went on a slow day, died in about 1.5 seconds, and never tried again.