What brand did you start on? And a little bit of your beginning history.

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.

http://www.retrojunk.com/details_articles/4681/
There’s no references to online retailers in the article by the way, should be safe to link here.

Depends on how I feel like answering it.

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?

I started on a Russell in the mid-1990s.

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 :wink:

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.

Then just kept going from there.

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…

The first I owned was a Duncan, but the one I really started practicing beginner tricks with was Yomega.

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 :slight_smile: