As for me, it was a SuperYo Renegade that gave me the idea that yoyos could do a lot more than previously thought.
I realised that it could only get me so far, so my next yoyo was a YYF Speed Dial. At the time, I didn’t know where to look for tutorials so I gave up; I put my yoyos in a top drawer and left them for two years. Finally after such a long break, I found Highspeedyoyo.com because I wanted to see tricks in slow motion. From there I got sucked into Andre’s tutorials(thank you) and pretty soon yoyos became my main hobby.
There’s a similar thread to this geared towards more of what got us hooked. Since I’m too lazy to write out my long/rich history of yoyoing (yoyoing was a good chunk of my later childhood), I wrote an article a long while back on Retro Junk which has my yoyo history and the fad of the 90s.
There’s no references to online retailers in the article by the way, should be safe to link here.
The truth was that I started with Duncan. To me, Duncan was the only company, and Yomega a distance second. That’s how it was in 1978, but that didn’t go too well for me. Skip forward to 2011 and again, Duncan. A plastic Reflex and Imperial AND greater success than in 1978. What I consider to be my first Real yoyo is a YYJ DM2.
I have more YYJ than anything, then Duncan, CLYW, YYF, One Drop and then Yomega. Where I began and where I am hasn’t changed much. That DM2 is still my go-to throw. I guess something about old habits die hard?
Russell isn’t terribly well-known in the USA, mainly due to the dominance of Duncan, but Russell is probably the world’s biggest supplier of yo-yos. I believe they have sold something like half a billion yoyos over the last 60 odd years, running promotions in 95 countries.
Anyway, back in junior school I had a few Coca Cola Russell yoyos. I learnt some of the basics on these as a kid, and I moved onto other things as the yo-yos slowly broke or I lost interest. Fast forward 10 years and I found someone selling yo-yo string, so I bought a pack of 10 and found the last Russell I had that was still playable.
I played with it solidly for about 2 months before deciding to fork out some big moolah and I bought a Duncan Freehand. I learnt most of my modern tricks on that, everything from Braintwister right through to Rancid Milk, Buddha’s Revenge, Cold Fusion, even Lacerations (ouch!!!). About a year after that I got a Lyn Fury which introduced me to unresponsive play, and from there the flood gates opened
I have now been playing “modern” 1A for around 7 years and have been actively trying to get a scene going in South Africa for a few years.
I started with a Duncan Imperial which I found one day last March and spent hours trying to get it to sleep. I didn’t know anything about yoyos and so when I went to Walgreens the next day to try to find a yoyo I was amazed by the shape of the Duncan Butterfly. I got that and learned most of the basics.
Later I got a Yomega Raider which helped me progress a lot more. About one month after that I got the Duncan Metal Drifter. I learned sooooo much from that yoyo. Finally I was introduced to the world of unresponsiveness when I bought the Dark Magic 2 a few months later an that opened a new realm of possibilities that brought me here today.
I got an imperial for x-mas when i was like 7 or 8 and all I could do was make it go down and up. Then i got it out a few years later, did some research, got a flying squirrel and now we are here.
First when I was very young I had an original duncan butterfly and I could not even wind it up the right way and I didn’t do hardly anything with it but I loved rolling it over the floor and winding it up that way, hehe.
Then the first yoyo I got once I found this site was a dollar store yoyo and i started learning tricks. I then moved on to a duncan mosquito that I bought from walmart. Once the tricks were to difficult for that yoyo then I got a Dark Magic 1 and went all through the tricks thanks to André and his awesome tutorials. My next yoyo was an axiom and then a Primo but i allways went back to my dark magic in the end until I finished the tricks from this site.
When I started, I was a die-hard Yomega fanboy. This was because a toy store at my local mall only sold Yomega throws. I built my way up from up the Brain to the Maverick. After I couldn’t take any more responsiveness, I bought a Genesis. And after that I was a Yoyofactory fanboy. I got a Supernova (great throw by the way), a Protostar and all the good YYF throws. I finally got a One Drop and realized what I was missing. I now support small companies like Ten Yoyo and C3. That’s pretty much my whole journey.
I started on a yomega brain xp and was a huge yomega kid i pretty much got every yomega yoyo then i got a hectic fell in love with yyf and i still have to say yyf is my favorite brand but, i have gotten yoyos from CLYW, ten yoyo, recrev, and onedrop
Started off with a Bandai Hyper yoyo (F.A.S.T. 201 rebranded)
then I got a yomega power brain XP (only available in a shop near home and I needed the extra string, turned out not so bad and ended up practicing on this one rather than the F.A.S.T.)
then I ordered a Velocity and a Duncan reflex
2 weeks later, got my first metal, a yuuksta
then I had my “Onedrop era” (I still was throwing lots of other throws tho)
right now I’m loving YYF premium line, X3 and C3yoyodesign. didn’t test the latest ODs
Yeah I started out exactly the same with the Russell Coca-Cola YoYo at about the same time. I saw that they were holding competitons on our local shopping precint and decided to give it a go. I won the first ever competition they held by doing “Walk the dog” and about 3 “Loops” and won a Coca-Cola Walkman (which was a pretty awesome prize in those days), a Russell Pro YoYo and some strings.
I figured I could cash in on this and planned to win it every week…which I did but the other competitors began to get a bit better…after winning 3 more walkman’s (and selling them in school) the competition organisers decided I could no longer win any more top prizes and started awarding me the next prize down…
When the only prize I could win was Coca-Cola stickers, I stopped competing…and pretty much diddn’t touch a YoYo again…
Fast forward 20 years to December 2011…I saw a video on youTube for the Magic YoYo T9 “Dark Angel” and was totally blown away with the evolution of the tricks from when I was a kid…
I went online and found some decent YoYos but they would cost in excess of £60 + shipping to the UK…so I turned to my old friend ebay and actually found the T9 for under £15 with free shipping…
I now have 2 Magic YoYos, the T9 and T8 (and I just ordered the T5 and T6 today) and 3 Auldey YoYos…
I generally only get to practise while I am travelling to work, waiting for trains, about 20 mins a day, but getting better at “new style” tricks…I rarely leave the house these days without a YoYo…
started with the yomegas fireball
i played like a week and i played a LOT
it was pretty hard 2 do tricks like trapeze and others couse it was imperial shaped
and its pretty hard to do trapeze and similar
so after that i bought mine dark magic 2 that im still playing with him
and its really fun yoyoso now after a month and 3 days from the day i started 2 play
i can do METRIX,PLASTIC WHIP and others with no prob
