I've been interested in making games for as long as I can remember. As a kid I checked out BASIC programming books from the library, which sometimes included simple games. I couldn't always get these to work, since I was too young to be very good at debugging. Later I was obsessed with GameMaker for DOS (no relation to GameMaker Studio), which was frustratingly simplistic even back then, and a few years after that the much more powerful Klik n' Play. I used both to make a few small games. Later still I published some custom script suites for Neverwinter Nights, and worked for a while on a module that I never finished.
So I've been messing around with making games for a long time, but I think the games that really shaped my current ambitions were Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge and Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. I didn't play them until long after they came out, but they changed the way I look at roleplaying games and helped me uncover what I'm really passionate about creating.