15, Got Tactics II from Avalon Hill as a gift. But, the big hit that year with the family was Speed Circuit.
16, My brother has seen D&D being played in the school library, described it, and we wrote our own d66 based dungeon crawler game. Later that summer, we got the Holmes edition of D&D Basic. So yes, I was a RPG game designer before I was a D&D player. :-)