This one is very personal, you’ve been warned.
My programming career started when I was still an adolescent and knew absolutely nothing about making games. It was summer 2007 and I was playing Ultima Online on VenuS, the biggest grey shard in Italy with more than 400 players online on average. I am now quite sure it wasn’t strictly legal to use an euphemism, but i was young and naive, and I got into it to play with my closest friends. And besides, an MMO at that time was still a new thing! After many years of playing my interest shifted from playing to helping the staff, I was more interested in writing compelling stories than playing, and I formally applied to become a Game Master!
We had a pretty strict application process, as they wanted to avoid accidents by giving too much power to the wrong person. Among other duties, such as answering pages and creating quests, I also learned how to code to make my own quests. We had a lead scripter who desperately needed a hand, and with a bit of patience I got to the point where I could not only write my own stuff, but help him write game scripts as well. I spent many years working on that game, learning that weird (but in hindsight innovative) language that the POL95 was using, and I helped the shard move forward in time.
Like all good things, even our Shard came to an end at some point around 2015, but it was a great experience, and it helped me understand how much I loved making games! I can safely say that without my decade long sting on Ultima Online, I wouldn’t be a game dev today.
