Oh man. That is delicious.

For my sister, I'm not sure if she just didn't much care for computers, or if I just depleted the oxygen in the "Interest in Computers" wing of the mansion of our childhood. I think she got more interested when she figured out she could talk to her friends on email/IM, but by then I had already annexed a corner of my parents' office and was running multiple workstations and servers.

Pre-Internet, though? Pre-Internet was a different story. I think it was... 96? 97? When we first got the Internet. Pretty sure I'd been watching my Dad, my grandfather, and my uncle play Sierra, Lucasarts, and other assorted adventure games since ~90. Watching playthroughs nowadays, I'm fairly sure I had no clue what was going on. Maybe that's why they let me watch them play Leisure Suit Larry until my incessant questions would drive them to madness.

As far as making our own games, though: X-COM and Daggerfall were the shit. We played a lot of some others (Heroes of Might and Magic comes to mind), but they didn't lend themselves nearly as well to emergent gameplay.

In X-COM you could create your team, give them the names of your friends and family, design your secret underwater base, organize and manage research and development to defeat the imminent alien invasion. A single player game, but you would look on with anxiety as an alien headshotted the one crew member named "Josh" from across the map. I didn't own the game, but my friends did, and until they got an N64/Goldeneye we would play X-COM from the time I went to my friends' house until their parents would come downstairs, exhausted looking, and tell us all to go to bed. Eventually, as we figured out that the game's difficulty would accelerate and make the game impossible after a few in-game weeks, we would just play to see how long we could survive. My friend would usually drive the mouse/keyboard, and inevitably we would always send in the characters named after our younger siblings first. There were many,many times somebody would leave the computer room crying over the outcome of a turn, or if they wouldn't go back to the last save when they were still alive. It didn't matter that you could just rename the new hire to replace the lost sibling. It was that you intentionally walked them into a nest of greys with plasma pistols rather than tactically eliminating them first.

Daggerfall was a bizarre game, but it was one of the first sandbox games and for the computers we had it was at an incredible scale. As a DOS / early Windows game, it contained ~15,000 towns with ~750,000 unique NPCs (not that they were all unique, most were just procedurally/randomly generated). I mean, you could follow the thin story missions, but they were boring, formulaic, and you had to read. Instead, it was much more fun to just roll a new character and pick a random town on the map to terrorize. We would roll characters, and see how long we could survive, or even get past a single dungeon. However, at some point we figured out the user interface for the character building screen was broken, such that even though the "increase stat" button would disappear when you couldn't "increase" it anymore, you could still click the button and it would increase your selected stat. With god-like abilities at level 1, the game was effectively broken as the game couldn't decide what level of difficulty you were at, or what random events you would be presented with that would try to drive the story. As such, rather than contend with the game, the game we made was to enter a town naked (it was one of the few games where stripping all items from your character would result in a nude avatar, male or female), and just go nuts. The first step was usually finding the brothels where the pixelated naked woman sprite would face you no matter where you were at in the room. After giggling at that and getting in a lot of trouble, you would just start pickpocketing. Eventually, despite your godhood, the guards would somehow catch wise of your ill deeds and chase after you. Either you killed wave after wave of guards with your bare hands, or, you paid the fine and/or served your time in jail (which would permanently effect your reputation). Once you're out, quick-travel to the next town, and start pickpocketing again. Or let the guards kill you, and start over.

I couldn't tell you where I got them, or when, but I still have X-COM and Daggerfall on CD.