My parents were about as far from nerdy as you could get, so they are often mystified how I turned out pretty far from them. My gateway to nerddom was literally Star Wars. I remember the first time I saw Star Wars was the year after Return of the Jedi came out. There was a drive in that was always doing double header movies and they did this July 4th weekend special with 3 movies and they showed all three Star Wars films.
Sci-fi in the form of cartoons, books, and movies pretty much dominated my preferences since then. Though I did expand my reading options while growing up. I had a 3rd-grade teacher concerned that a two-week book report I wanted to submit was on Tommyknockers by Stephen King - something that at the time was not on the recommended reading list for any child in our school district.
Then in early high school I got into tabletop gaming, joined the sci-fi club, the computer club, and all sorts of related things that were not what my parents would have preferred but it kept me out of trouble and away from the rising gang culture in our school, so they were not going to be too put out about it.
But it always came back to Star Wars. Novels, figures, comics - the movies. I consumed everything about that one topic and became so knowledgeable that I knew minutia that most people who called them 'superfans' did not know or remember. I have absolutely 0 friends today that will play the Trivial Pursuit Star Wars edition with me because of this. I even applied at Lucasfilm to be part of the continuity department that handled all of the Star Wars media - from books to comics to cartoons - when I was 20, on the hope that I could turn that love of everything Star Wars into a job. But alas there is always a bigger fish.
I have since tempered my Star Wars love into an expanse of love for other things as a whole. Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar, Red Dwarf, and so on - the whole theme of space opera or things like it just hit my sweet spot for science fiction.
Then my enjoyment of video games came from my grandmother. She bought all the consoles I had as a kid growing up, mostly because she liked watching us play them - but also because she liked playing them herself. She loved RPGs and she played the hell out of every version of Final Fantasy that the U.S. had for NES and SNES. She loved the Phantasy Star series from Sega more though and at the time when 'call in for tips' hotlines for both companies were prevalent she was so well known at the Sega tip line that a lot of the helpline guys got to know her, enamored that some 60-year-old woman was so interested in the games. She became so well known to them that someone sent her a whole printed out 80-page booklet complete with maps for the Sega Master System version of Phantasy Star so she could find the secret ending to the game. When Phantasy Star II was released for the Genesis, someone from the company sent her a copy of the game with a handwritten dedication to her signed by Yuki Naka one of the lead developers, inside the strategy book that came with the game.
From there, things just progressed until I am where I am today.
