I don't know exactly, but I got into gaming through my brother. He was born in the early 80s. My mum's financial situation was good around that time (80s-90s), so she bought quite a few systems for him, including a NES clone, a Mega Drive (Genesis), SNES and others. Here in South America most consoles are imported but at the time we also had local manufacturers making clones or bringing consoles over to Brazil.
My first gaming experiences were probably around the age of 3-4 years old. I remember playing beat 'em ups with my brother such as one of the TMNT games, River City Ransom, Battletoads and others.
I remember the game Urban Champion which took me almost 20 years to find, because I would confuse it with River City Ransom, and in my mind the colour palette was completely different.
My mother always liked the Mario games and they were basically the only thing that she would play.
I also recall my brother and one of my relatives playing and discussing Sonic The Hedgehog.
I had some experiences in the computer lab at school, and I thought that it was all so neat, so I asked Santa for a computer. At school they had Rayman, an Aladdin CD-ROM game, and other stuff that I don't know anymore.
Soon enough, Santa gifted me a PC and we immediately got internet access. That must have been in late 2004. Although my memories and old files are all from 2005 and beyond.
My brother already knew about emulation through gaming magazines, so the first thing he did after setting up the computer, was download emulators for me to play. I spent a lot of time with GBA emulation specifically, even though my English skills were non-existent, and sometimes we would play together.
I also got into virtual worlds and MMOGs in late 2005 or so... but that's a story for another day.