I grew up in the 70's & 80's. My first computer experience was the Atari Pong console, but my first real love was the Commodore 64. I would buy up all of the C64 magazines I could, especially if they had the game code article where you could type in the machine code to make a game. Machine code. I don't think I ever saw a BASIC game article; it was always machine code. I would spend days trying to get that code typed in correctly to play the game, and I'd usually be disappointed in it.
The first real game I became obsessed with was Telengard, a BASIC game I bought on C64 cassette that was a basic dungeon crawler kind of like the old mini computer game DND. I spent months figuring out how the game worked .. and then I spent months figuring out how the BASIC code worked and how to tweak it to give me a ton more treasure. I had tapes and tapes of modifications for that game, no DRM back then, and ended up with a modified game that I could waltz into and blast any bad guy away without even trying, then loot it for the most powerful items in the game.
I really want to try out some of the C64 games. I downloaded an emulator but I need to find some kind of beginner's guide. My first computer had DOS 6.2, so the C64 is just really alien for me despite not being much older than what I started out on.