Back in the days there were a bunch of computer magazines that came out on a monthly basis. These magazines (in my case for the 6502) had always a game review in the front, detailing the mechanics and what you could do with it.
In the last couple pages, there was the source code. So kids like me always went on to modify the source code, implementing better weapons, modifying health bars, gravity values and stuff like that to have more fun with the games.
When I bought my first computer, I also heard about the "Savegame Editor Construction Kit" which was basically a tool that allowed to intelligently search for symbols, functions and addresses and their values in live-memory. So you could build trainers, hacks, even cracks and serial generators very easily with it.
Through this I naturally learned about SoftICE debugger even before I actually learned how to use "real" programming languages. Around 8 years later I saw a colleague debugging his C program, and I realized that I can understand assembler very easily.
My theory is that there's a very high chance that if you owned an Amiga or C64 as a kid, you'd excel in pentesting and malware analysis.
What I see nowadays even in my role as a tutor in University is that a lot of kids these days never made these "low level" experiences. They never had to debug a mainboard to replace a burnt out transistor. They most of the time don't even know what a filesystem is, because they only owned smartphones and never had a laptop.
All this knowledge is important to our trade, and I wish there were more efforts to preserve these kind of things.