How did you lose your gaming virginity ?

[Karimi]

My first time was when I sat down to play Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. I was a wee one, inexperienced , immature, and optimistic (not much has changed). Indy was a seasoned veteran. It was a bit awkward but enjoyable , and at the end of a long fruitful journey the result was one of my favorite gaming memories.

How bout you guys ?

[Chris]

Well it definitely wasn't the game that got me into games in general, but the one that really made me a true <i>gamer</i> was also Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. From that point on, I played a shitload of games. I played pretty much all of the LucasArts adventure games that existed at the time and many of the Sierra ones then branched out from there.

[Karimi]

Well it definitely wasn't the game that got me into games in general, but the one that really made me a true <i>gamer</i> was also Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. From that point on, I played a shitload of games. I played pretty much all of the LucasArts adventure games that existed at the time and many of the Sierra ones then branched out from there.

Well I played Magic School Bus and Mario before, but it was FoA that got me into gaming . After playing it I played monkey island , then that got me to play games like Grim Fandango , and along the way I stumbled onto the gaming scene. So , like you said , FoA wasn't my first game but it was the one that determined my gaming future. Had I played Halflife years later then I would probably be a more mainstream guy , I would probably never visit this site...

To be specific, losing your viriginity pretty much means two things :

1- A game that got you into gaming , doesn't have to be your first ; but it should be the game that really got you started.

2- A game that shaped your future as a gamer , not necessarily by influencing you in any meaningful way , but just made you go into a certain genre of gaming or favor a certain genre.

[Metalmickey]

The first game I remember playing was probably a game called Artillery on the commodore pet. A blocky, green screen, tanks precurser where you typed in the angle of your turrent and number of bags of gun powder, then confirmed yes to shoot and watched as the shell slowly arced across the screen towards your human opponent's tank. I played it against my dad probably around the age of 3, which would have been in about 1981.

My next couple of most memorable games would have been 'Tron deadly disks' on my dad's Atari Intellivision, and 'Pyjamarama' with Wally Weak on my dad's Amstrad CPC 664.

I guess you could say I was raised playing games by my dad years before I knew any friends/peers who had their own gaming platforms.

[jokemaster]

First game: Sonic the Hedgehog.

First ADVENTURE game: Fate of Atlantis (again), I remember I was at a friend's house, and we were looking for something to play, and we were looking through his older brother's games when we found an indiana jones game. So we put it on and played it. I had never seen a game like that, and it impressed me so much that I vowed that I'd find out what exactly it was and if there were others like it. I was 5 at the time, BTW.

And so I grew, until suddenly, one day, back in 1998ish, we got the internet. And I found the company that makes Star Wars games had a website! So I got on, visited, and saw that they had demos. Most were too big, so I ownly downloaded one: Curse of Monkey Island. I was so happy I'd finally found another game like it, so from there on slowly I started finding out more and more about adventure games, usually having to hunt them down in stores, and leter EBAY.

[Moosferatu]

Hot Coffee

That or King's Quest.

[Dingo Chavez]

The first game I played was probably Hang On on the Master System. My brother loved it, but I always found it to be frustrating (I don't remember correctly how I felt about it back then, I was about 2 years old).

Super Mario Bros. 3 made me love video games, but I only started being interested in who made them when I played Super Mario 64. Not because it was 3D - I like Mario Bros. 3 more than Mario 64, but because it came in the right time when I was in a highly influential state of 10 years of age. Really traveling in worlds, meeting silly characters, seeing sights and exploring in the developers imagination. That's really what I love about games... well that and them being fun.

[Knar]

Castlevania. I remember watching my cousin play this game on the SNES. Everytime the hero would jump, i would physically move too.

[MrChlorophyll]

Pharaoh's Revenge. Man, I was like 4 at the time. If I beat the first level, it was quite the accomplishment.

[Redwall]

FoA, again. (Along with DOTT. As I mentioned in another thread, they came with my first computer. But I thought DOTT was just fucked up for quite a few years before I got around to actually playing it.)

FoA was also the game that really got me into gaming, because after years of trying to beat the damn thing (I was young) I got internet access and learned of "walkthroughs".

[General Fuzzy McBitty]

Sierra's Robin Hood and Quest for Glory 2.

[MrHoatzin]

I think in my case it was either Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail or Commander Keen 1. The very first game that I ever played was Tetris, however, and I sucked so very badly. I remember I turned on my father's computer when he wasn't around and typed tetris in the command line (which I saw my father do earlier). I didn't really understand what the point of the game was, so I spent all my time creating nice colourful arrangements that were covered with a line of "game over" very quickly. I cleared my first line entirely by accident and it took me a few more plays to realize clearing the falling clutter was the point of the game.

[Aussie Ben]

The first game I remember playing was a CGA game for our Amstrad (with HARD DRIVE!) called "Donkey". You had to drive along an endless road, and not hit the donkeys that appeared on either side of the road. You couldn't quit the game once you'd loaded it, either - you had to turn off the computer.

[Jayel]

Penguin Adventure!!

Pretty good game.

I recently played it again and memories of my childhood flooded back

http://screenmania.retrogames.com/msx/01/msx_0003.html

This game explains my lifelong obsession with drawing cute fat birds.

[Jake]

It was probably Moon Patrol.

[Trithemius]

Ultima VI: The False Prophet.

I'd played other Ultima games a little bit before it, but Ultima VI wa that one that pwned me and made me want to go back and play the others more.

I think the first game I played that was not on a ZX81 (ahahaha "games") was probably Karateka on a friend's IBM clone (which was what we called them in the day, on account of the Kaiser... ).

[Steve]

This one's kind of tough. My dad bought me a Commodore 64 when I was born, so I've been playing games since before I can remember. Some seminal gaming touchstones over the years:

• Loving Godzilla movies, then playing the Godzilla game on C64; mindblowing!
  
• My dad upgrading the IBM's monitor from monochrome to CGA; seeing Carmen Sandiego in full color for the first time
  
• Beating Double Dragon in the arcade using $5 in quarters
  
• River City Ransom, SMB2, Mega Man 2
  
• Playing through Maniac Mansion to multiple endings on the NES (the NES, I say!); unknowingly falling in love with Lucasarts adventures
  
• Seeing Sub-Zero's fatality in the first Mortal Kombat from the back of a huge crowd in the local arcade
  
• Being re-introduced to adventure games on the PC through the VGA versions of Space Quest, Quest for Glory, and moving on to Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Full Throttle, etc.
  
• My dad buying a cd-rom drive for our PC, and installing my first cd-based game (Doom 2)
  
• Getting up an hour early before school for weeks to maximize my playtime of Chrono Trigger
  
• Borrowing my friend's Origin sampler disc, featuring Syndicate (Syndicate!!!); death and destruction ensue
  

By this point I was hooked for life. A few other moments that stand out in more recent years: Having to stay with a friend for his entire playthrough of System Shock 2 to keep him from getting too scared; Black & White whispering my name at 2 am; Innumerable replays of the restaurant and hotel levels in Hitman: Codename 47; Renting a PS2 and playing GTA3 for 16 hours straight without getting out of the chair; Similarly, staying up til 5 30 am to finish NOLF2 in one sitting because it was so goddamn good. Oh, and half the stuff in the first Thief game, which I didn't play til years after its initial release.

:(why did this post get so long and insane sorry

[b0b]

Good thread

First game /ever/ (excuse the fuzziness here, I'm pretty sure I was about 3 at the time...) would either have been on an old Atari 2600-type thing at my Gran's house (see Thumb photos!), closely followed by my cousin's C64. The C64 had Ghostbusters, and a text adventure called "Zim Zala Bim" which we never got anywhere in, and the 2600 (or 2600-analogue) had, urr, variations on a theme of Pong. And twiddly controllers.

After that (1985) I got bought an Amstrad CPC6128, and I seem to remember that somehow arriving complete with Moon Buggy, Knight Lore, Pyjamarama, a "Defender" knockoff called "Guardian" and an asteroids clone.

And that was all she wrote

[miffy495]

Thank God my family is so damn nerdy. We have a fucking Timex PC for god's sake! I used to play nothing but thinking games back in the day, starting with a spelling game based off of Snoopy and the Red Baron for the C64. Good fun, that (for a two year old). Then came the graphic adventures. The thought of fitting the puzzles into a narrative intrigued my dad, and he bought a copy of Hugo's House of Horrors. I was three. I played it. I never got more than 15 minutes into a game before I was killed by a werewolf (always that damn werewolf!!!) but I was hooked on adventures as a result. It wasn't until I saw a friend's brother playing Monkey Island that I realized that controls could be more elegant than typing "walk to door," but despite being really brought in by the LA adventures, Hugo was my first.

[Salka]

First game I ever played was Dizzy on the spectrum...

First game that made me a real gamer, I guess... either Monkey Island or The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes...

[Kolzig]

Now I'm pretty sure that my first game was Romik Software's Space Fortress for Vic-20. I'm guessing that the game was made in 1983, because teh internet told me so. I'm fairly sure that I didn't play the game at launch because I was one year old then. More likely is that I played the game when I was three or four.

The game that made *a real gamer™*, hmmm... It might one of those hundreds of games that my brother had for our Commodore 128. Possibly some Summer challenge by Epyx. Oh man, I really knew how to throw that javelin. Or maybe I'm not *a real gamer™* yet, I don't know. How can you tell if you are *a real gamer™*?

Heh, I just dug up the old Vic-20 box from my closet, it's been a while since I've looked through this stuff. The story for Space Fortress is gold.

"Whilst cruising through space, a computer malfunction throws you off course, where you encounter the evil Sistorian space fortress. First you must battle with it's various deadly defence forces, then destroy the fortress before it puts up it's shield and disappears into hyperspace."

I remember that the game was something like Space Invaders, but it had that boss fortress that Space Invaders didn't have. Hmmm, inside the C-cassette box cover reads "Look out for the sequel to Space Fortress coming soon!" I wonder if it was ever released?

[Simon]

I think the original Prince Of Persia was the first game I played, but I can't remember at what point we got our NES. It's possible Super Mario Bros was the one. It's all hazy.

But Monkey Island was definitely the one that made me a gamer. It rocked my little world more than anything else I was into at the time, and made me want more, lots more.

[baconian]

Duck Hunt, I think. I still don't really understand how the light gun worked. I just didn't buy it at the time, it seemed like it was breaking all sorts of laws of physics. Which I didn't know anything about at the time, but it was some sort of breakthrough with the realisation that the TV wasn't just a one-way thing.

[vimes]

I think that the first game I ever played was Pong on one of those antique console that only featured one game.Then, the next memory linked to video games is Double Dragon which I played with at friend's house I only saw once a year in Corsica.

I think he game that made me a gamer is "Carmen San Diego"... it is also the game that convinced my parents that Video game could be intelligent.

I also fantasized years on an article about Monkey Island, without having the computer to run it... and I remember that getting Jedi Knight and Curse of Monkey Island were... you know, I was really moved when I first opened their box and smelled the wonderful of 'brand-new-game'.

[TMCB]

First game I played was either Granny's Garden or Yie Ar Kung Fu on the BBC micro computer.

I remember thinking that I was never going to stop playing computer games during a 4 hour caning session of Arcadians on th BBC when I was about 6.

But the first game to make me gush was probably Snow Brothers in the arcades of a water slide park.

Everyone was out on the slides or swimming, I spent the entire time trying to get past the first Boss... I tried to get an import copy of Snow Bros on the Megadrive but it was 80 quid!