I have an older brother so I really can't remember the why and how, I know I played Atari and I think something else, but as long as I have cohese memories we had a NES in our house and eventually we picked up a SNES.
And that should be It, but to be honest I didn't actually were invested in playing games at the time, it was more of a group activity for me, just like playing with toys ir anything. So the games that I had more vested interest were multiplayer ones, or from IPs I enjoyed.
Funny histories about that time, our games were bought at Paraguay when my parents would go there to buy stuff for themselves, and we wouldn't always go with them. Once I asked for the X-Men SNES game and because my parents didn't know what that was, they bought me Megaman X, I did not know Megaman at the time so I was really disapointed when they got home with it, never would imagined that I am glad nowadays because it was such a better game. Also, in my pirated Mortal Kombat 2 game Baraka would fly... Just fly, his standing stance was one level above the other fighters, it took me years to discover that was just in my copy and not part of the character (you could do fatalities in any moment in the second round as well, but that I knew was something weird and wrong)
Also, in 2018 I saw and NES and was kind of confused about the size, so I asked my brother and he told me ours was not an original NES either.
Anyway, after that it felt natural for me to go after the N64, and in that generation I actually became a Nintendo fan when I played Ocarina of Time. Part of my english learning was playing that game, it was the first game I really wanted to play until the end and do everything I could.
Until then I played even singles games to have fun with friends, passing controllers when dying and stuff like that. But this game made me want to get better, overcome my challenges, and when I got to the end for the first time I played it till the end again, to see if I could. It made me understand the concept of playing single games and to find joy doing so.
In the GC generation I lapsed, I had moved cities twice in a small amount of time and was playing more mmos in my computer. Came back to consoles with the Wii, WiiU, 2ds and now just the Switch.