My favorite game-making experiences as a kid (early 90s) were:

- borrowing a BASIC game-making book from the library and hand-typing programs into QBASIC on my uncle's computer, trying to figure out how to translate the slightly-different BASIC dialect in the book on the fly

- making my own ZZT[0] games for an audience of one: myself. When I discovered the web later and learned that there was a huge community of ZZT makers out there, I was floored.

I have made several games as an adult, but none of those experiences has really been as much fun as those early ones.

[0] https://museumofzzt.com/