Agreed, I was very late to the game and was forced to learn VBA for excel sheets and that is how I finally broke into programming.

When I was a pre-teen I stumbled upon CD-rom hacking guide to bypass disc requirements on games, I remember opening up the file and the screen being filled with HEX code. I was so overwhelmed I just closed it and never touched programming after that for 15 years. My life would have been totally different if I had embraced the unknown instead of retreating.

This was my introduction, too, but with Counter-Strike cheats.

It was Quake World for me