...It was only some time later I learned about loading pre-written programs (games) on it.
https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
But the reason I started coding in BASIC was because when we received a ZX Spectrum for Christmas one year the cassette player was broken - no preloaded games for us.
I was always more interested in programming, and hacking games for infinite lives than actually playing games!
Does make me wonder how kids of today just start coding, without having to fuss about dev environments. Listening to my young nephew talking about doing python at school sounded encouraging, but python is hardly "I want to learn to python, starting coding in python". Lots of fiddling about. Still he seems to enjoy it.