Hey gamer 16 - nobody wrote you because is a very convoluted topic, I will try to give you some of what I know, but is very thin' so let's get started in Romania before 1989 (the communist regime fall) was very "sensitive" to have any "western" influence, you could have gone to jail if somebody reported you to secret police, and the collaboration with the secret police was 1/3 people. So mostly the "entertainment" was by using the home computers (some local brands like HC family or CIP03 that were clones of Sinclair) very rare few (celebrities, some families who receive goods from abroad and the very few that travel abroad) had access to video game consoles, I know a few folks that had NES consoles before 1989.

After revolution the first wave of consoles were the Atari clones from china, multi consoles that had anywhere from 100 games to 9999-in-1 of course in reality there were just about 100 anyway but with a different pallet swap. I remember I got my first clone in 1990-1991, called Sally game, it was built in Siria (yeah a I know .. funny thing) and it was a Atari Junior clone, the good thing was that this clone had a working cartrige slot (in general the slot was just a dummy) and I managed to buy 1 extra game from a consignment store ( locally called "Consignatie" ).

In the same period there were a wide spread a small electronic games (sprite based) that were swapped by the youngsters in schools (classes 1-8) or high-schools (classes 9-12). Basically those were single games or multigame based.

First "official' consoles that I remember, were Sega Mastersystem that were sold in stores and you just drool over the graphic on the "newer" color televisions.

My first console was an original Gameboy (I still love this "small" console to death) that was broght to me by my father from abroad (I would say it was 1990 / 1992) with few games (I know for sure that I had initially Tetris, Super Mario Land and Tiny toons)

In the years 1994 and up .. there was a big boom of computers ... so I can just tell you that the majority of youngsters were playing PC games, I remember all the time in my university I was only focused on PC's. The biggest PC game distributor in Romania was "BEST distribution/BEST computers" that were selling computer games, and they had a big catalog, having contracts with EA, Activision etc.

Coming back to game consoles I just heard stories about the consignment stores from "Unirea" super-store (mall) that were selling, renting or swapping games,and I remember that a console game was extremely expensive, and folks there prefer to rent the game for a few days or swap an old game for a new one.

The next official console that I bought was a PS2, that I bought was from a big computer chain called "Flamingo" with the specific desire to play a little game called "God of War" ... it was a self birthday present and I was super super excited for it, unfortunately when I bought it, they didn't had memory cards, so instead turning off the console, I was just let it run until the next day when I finished the game ... couple of days later I got the memory card and I played the game again, from begining. (I still have my original console) is the first one I have bought with my own money, new from the store.

There were a few SONY stores in the city center of Bucuresti (capital city of Romania) that were selling Playstation (original) games and accessories (but not in abundance).

The next console I have bought from store was a PS3 - original 60 GB model, that was backward compatible with PS2.

... there was a forum called computergames.ro where a lot of ppl provided the story of "how they become a gamer" with cool historical data, but unfortunately it doesn't exist anymore, not sure if somebody has an arhive of that. (and of course is in Romanian language )

Also on our forum there is a similar thread ... here

PS: some of the dates are from memory so I cannot be 100 % of the accuracy as it was a very long time ago, and is not documented with pictures or videos, that would have made things easy(er).