Personally, I’ve always loved the process of taking things apart, understanding how they work and putting them back together. I turned that into a degree in mechanical engineering and eventually a career in power plant operations. Couldn’t be happier with my work than I currently am. Its WORK but I don’t hate it and I feel like I’m doing something important.
Basically because of video games.
It first started with doing some admin work for a very early online StarCraft tournament. Keeping the roster/grid up-to-date and posting results … by literally editing the html file. Started out helping out more and eventually got into PHP code of this early tournament software and helped with that.
Then later it turned into writing scripts and addons for World of Warcraft, as well as just hosting the general infrastructure like forums, dkp systems and voice chat servers you need for a large guild. Even later external online tools for EvE Online (D-scan parsing, wormhole mapping).
Then I just got lucky and while telling someone all of these “qualifications” they basically just hired me. Even funnier, over a decade later an old WoW guildmate approached me with a programming issue … and after solving it he offered me a much better job. That’s were I work now.
This but it started with pirating video games.
I certainly remember the age of “key-gens” when you still had keys on the back of the CDs that you bought. But the internet wasn’t quite up for actually downloading entire games, yet (it would take weeks or months. Heck, mp3s took days back then).
Yeah, I’m kind of old.
I downloaded a ton of games from warez sites over 28.8 and 56 using a download agent