My very first yoyo was a bootleg NED brain. Then a long time after I got a Dark Magic II (which started my yoyoing path)
Yomega Fireball, from a Yoyo demonstrator at my middle school in 1992 or '93… and a ended up with a Brain as well by the end of the week! Had years of fun with those… and still have them! ;D
Fast forward to '09 and bought my first unresponsive YoyoFactory 888 (see profile pic) 
In November 2013 I bought an orange/red Butterfly XT which some time later broke because I overtightened it. Then I had a blue one that was originally a christmas present for my brother. Because of this i got a light-up FHZ for him and also a duncan wheels for myself. And if you’re wondering he gave it to me shortly making it my 4th (the 3rd one was a metal drifter). The XT is missing a half, the wheels still works, the metal drifter’s bearing seat got messed up, and I gave the FHZ to a friend for his birthday in february 2014.
YYF neon grind machine.
YYF Black one, then a protostar, then a genesis then I stopped for a year. Ever since I came back I starting buying stuff like crazy
I started like many others. Maroon Duncan Butterfly and a black/whited fade Tom Kuhn were my first yoyos I remember. That was back in the 90’s when I was a wee lad. For Christmas that year my parents bought me this “state of the art” yoyo. It was yellow with bearing balls in the rims for extended sleep times, and a transaxle. According to me, it would sleep “forever.” I had a lot of fun in those days and eventually lost them, as kids do from time to time.
Fast forward a bit over a decade and a half, all the way to 2014…I bought a YYF Fast 201 at Toys R Us because I got a wild hair. Loved it so much (I think also due to overall quality), I burned through both strings to the snapping point in about an hour. Exchanged it back to TRU the next day for a black/green Velocity.
Within a couple weeks I had purchased a Metal Drifter, the Yomega 3 pack (brain, fireball, raider) and had decided it was time to get “serious.” Got a Ghost Edition DMII for my birthday because I had never seen a yoyo wih metal rims, and this one had Nickel ones! Haven’t looked back since, and haven’t lost my love for that “space age” nickel look. Haha!
some great stories here.
Coca Cola promotional yoyo circa 1988… I am that old.
I could do a sleeper, walk the dog, rock the baby etc at the time and there was a contest they put together in my school… it was pretty cool.
Butterflies, Imperials later, pretty much a Duncan fanboy until I discovered the High End side of 1A about a year ago (CLYW, OneDrop, Werrd, 2Sick). Threw responsive and simply for 25 years on and off. Started doing all of the tricks in the tutorials around June/July and am getting ready to graduate to my own stuff and past the “Expert” stuff.
Good times, great hobby.
Well, since people are going ALL the way back, the quoted post was Dec. 2014, when I started really throwing
my FIRST yoyo was probably some free thing, then in about 4th grade (2001) The Duncan promo guys came to my school to show us yoyos and stuff, and I wanted one very badly, and oddly enough I think I wanted the yoyo glove even more since it gave the presenters the elite look. My parents couldn’t afford it at the time, so I missed out on that, and later that year, for Christmas, they bought me a Tiger E-Yo (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91qTwmVO0oL._SL1500_.jpg) and I used the heck out of that thing! This picture I found gives me the biggest rush of nostalgia I’ve had in a while actually… I might end up buying this…
Anyway, lost it and lost interest like any other kid would do. Fast forward to Christmas 2014, and I see the Duncan display at Toys’R’Us and I get that nostalgia rush from 4th grade, and well, the quoted post takes over from there
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I had a red, fixed-axle wooden yoyo when I was a kid … no idea what it was. Fast forward to this past Christmas, and I received a little Yomega Maverick from my mother (who has just gotten into unresponsive yoyos … she’s 70, by the way : ) to try to cultivate my interest again. The Yomega didn’t do much for me, but after a trip to Chico, CA to visit family a couple months ago, where I saw my 8yo nephew shedding on his YYF Cyborg, I took an interest (he was my mother’s inspiration too). While out there, we went to Bird in Hand, I met Gentry Stein (who works there, and is one of the instructors at their free weekly yoyo club), and I picked up a Chico Yoyo Company Bulldog 225. Before I flew back home, my nephew helped me learn my first 10 tricks, and get “signed off” on Bird in Hand’s level one card - earned a free level one t-shirt, too. 8)
Now I’m hooked …
The first yo-yo I had was a Playmaxx ProYo that my dad bought in ~1997. He showed me tricks like Rock The Baby and Walk The Dog and while I was impressed, I didn’t really get hooked.
Fast forward to ~2002, there was a really popular anime called Super Yo-yo that aired on TV. A yo-yo fad began. During this period I acquired a Yomega Brain, a Yomega RBII and a Hyper Dragon Aqua (had to google that, couldn’t remember the name). This was the time I learned more advanced tricks like Double Or Nothing, Loops, Braintwister etc was truly the time when I got into this hobby. When the yo-yo fad ended and many of my friends stopped playing, I did too but would always come back to it eventually. I’ve a fleeting relationship with yo-yos. I could go for months without throwing one then look through my drawers, accidentally finding a random yo-yo and go back to playing it for weeks before forgetting about it again. This has been happening for the past 10 years haha.
Metal: One Drop M1.
Thanks for everything OD. 
Plastic: Yomega Lancer.
Duncan Metal Drifter
I hated the thing. Still do. Still have it. size a bearing? wth is that
bah!
My first throw was a promotional giveaway from a computer show my father attended. It was a smiley face butterfly yoyo with a website domain name on the back. I threw it around for a while and then dropped it in favor of some other hobby. There were a bunch of them, and if I looked hard enough, I could probably find one in my basement, gunky string and all.
A wooden fixie that was common at toy and convenience stores in Canada in the 80’s. It said “Canada Games Olympic” on it, and had a symbol of the Olympic torch. Along with the famously trademarked-in-Canada YO-YO wordmark.
http://kwos.ca/yoyo-reviews/reviews-yoyo-canadaolympic.htm
I bought several, stripped the paint, and re-painted them in the style of Eddie Van Halen or as a faux marble or whatever. I did not know you could buy replacement strings, so when they all finally “went” on me, that was the end of it. I got far enough to learn a mean Rock the Baby, forward pass + single inside loop, and Walk the Dog.
Many years later (almost 3 years ago), I decided to grab a yoyo from Toys R Us and they had a Yomega Brain Wing XT or something like that. Hadn’t forgotten anything, but was eager to finally learn other tricks like UFO (which I could never figure out from instruction books). I could go to YouTube instead of trying to decipher the illustrations and accompanying text… and then I found modern yoyo shortly thereafter.
First “modern” yoyo was the YYF New Velocity, followed shortly by a Dark Magic II. First all-metals were a Kyo DNS and a C3 Capless.
Had a lot of random butterflys and stuff growing up. I think my first “real” yoyo was the old yyf velocity. Bought the dmII shortly after.
Mine was a generic russell that was given to me when i was a kid…
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… That i eventually broke after a few weeks. 
I got myself a yyf counterattack, which is what i consider my first real yoyo.
Completely agree to this.
My first throw was a Duncan Pro Z, than I decided to get the metal drifter. My first metal yoyo. Bad choice.
Now I am Throwing a Yyj Surge, and I love it.
Green yyj classic and pink speed maker
I loved my metal drifter! That’s the yoyo I finally got the trapeze on!
First throw ever was a Yomega Fireball during the yoyo craze at school. Got an X-Brain soon after and felt like an absolute boss. Dem spin times…
As far as modern yoyoing goes (and from when I got back into it), I ordered a YYF Protostar and Superstar from YYE, but then decided I was too excited to wait the week or so to receive them, so I went online to a store in the UK and bought a DM2 with next day delivery. When it came I felt like a kid in a candy store. ;D