I grew up in the 70's & 80's. My first computer experience was the Atari Pong console, but my first real love was the Commodore 64. I would buy up all of the C64 magazines I could, especially if they had the game code article where you could type in the machine code to make a game. Machine code. I don't think I ever saw a BASIC game article; it was always machine code. I would spend days trying to get that code typed in correctly to play the game, and I'd usually be disappointed in it.
The first real game I became obsessed with was Telengard, a BASIC game I bought on C64 cassette that was a basic dungeon crawler kind of like the old mini computer game DND. I spent months figuring out how the game worked .. and then I spent months figuring out how the BASIC code worked and how to tweak it to give me a ton more treasure. I had tapes and tapes of modifications for that game, no DRM back then, and ended up with a modified game that I could waltz into and blast any bad guy away without even trying, then loot it for the most powerful items in the game.
I knew a couple of other kids with C64s and we used to trade game disks. Half or more of the games on the disks wouldn't work or would be completely incomprehensible but there were some real gems hidden in there. I remember my mom spending hours typing in the machine code for me, as I was quite young at the time. Eventually I taught myself BASIC and made a few choose your own adventure style games that where nothing but a series of if, then, goto statements
Compute! magazine was everything :-)
Yeah we got that one and also Ahoy! Magazine