jneeriem

First game you remember playing

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So here's a question I was turning over in my head today:

What is the first game you remember playing as a kid (or adult if you were a late bloomer to the video game addiction)?

So to kick things off, I'll give mine. Now I remember vaguely in pre-school days playing (or trying to) some Sesame Street variant game off a 5 1/4" disk, but not clearly enough for that to really by my first. Plus I was 3 or 4 then. What I do remember is from when I was 7 (had to be because I've fact checked my memories). Sometime around when I was 7 my mom had bought a dell tower, I want to say the model line back then was Optiplex but then again it might have been Precision. Wiki is of no use on Dells this old. It was a first generation 486, I'm pretty sure of that because my mom was all excited that it wasn't a 386. It had Dos and my mom installed about 8-10 games (all the shareware versions though) for me and put a startup batch script on it where when you turned the machine on a menu loaded with numbered options. All I had to do was choose my game and it ran. The game that really defines that time period for me was Wolfenstein 3-D. I remember playing those 9 levels over and over until one day someone told me about the 10th level and I had a whole new reason to play that game. There were other games, but that was really the defining game. What is funny to think about is the game came with a "ratings" warning, it was called PC-13 for blood and violence. I was 7...

Anyways, that also leads me to the why I like Dells. In the mid 2000's I got kinda nostalgic about this stuff, and my mom still owned the tower. I plugged it in, found a compatible keyboard and mouse (remember PS/2), hooked up a monitor and voila! It still ran. So at one time, at least, Dells were pretty fucking beast. I think she gave that computer to someone a few years ago who just needed to do really simple stuff. So in theory, that computer has been working for 17-20 years now...

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Some Robotron games. One was a turn based text-based thing where you were P (or some other letter) and were chased by X-s in a playing field and randomly O-s (holes) appeared so you tried to move so that the X-s stepped into holes.

Maybe it wasn't robotron, could have been some weird russian computer.

Then in another place were some actual robotron games (some helicopter game; maybe lode runner or something like that; frogger? don't remember them all)

The first graphical games I played were Alley Cat & Prince of Persia.

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Some Robotron games. One was a turn based text-based thing where you were P (or some other letter) and were chased by X-s in a playing field and randomly O-s (holes) appeared so you tried to move so that the X-s stepped into holes.

Maybe it wasn't robotron, could have been some weird russian computer

That reminds me of a secondary question. Did you ever get interested in any kind of "development" enough to make a game. I created this game once on a TI-83 where you controlled a random letter and were chased by another letter. I make the other letter "smart" but with randomness... Anywho moving on from that geeky memory...

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I remember an Apple 2e game where you have to remember the pattern of lilipads for a frog to jump on then you give it the entire sequence (from memory) and watch it hop in the directions you give it, hopefully not hopping into the water if your memory was right.

I also remember galaga in the pizza place we'd go to.

even before that, i remember playing games on the Intellivision my dad got us. Basketball where the dudes were way too skinny, some racing game where I learned what "accelerator" meant, Frogger, Burgertime, and Dungeons and Dragons where the awesome dragon looked a lot like a cobra.

The first game I remember having any real control over buying or playing was Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego on my dad's Wang 386. Awesome times.

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Difficult one...

I think it's one of the following: Winter Games, Alley Cat, Digger, Paratrooper, Sopwith, Striker, etc.

Some game on the IBM XT

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The first awesome memory I have of playing a video game is Rick Dangerous 2 on the Amiga at the store. My dad took us there to see if it would make a good present for me and my brother, but I was so enthralled by the awesome graphics and gameplay of Rick Dangerous 2 to even ask the question of why out Dad would take us to a store like this.

When we got the Amiga later I remembered the game, but not what it was called, and I had no way of finding out either. Luckily I found it later at a store in London by recognizing a shot on the back of the box. So awesome. That game still looks fantastic.

1297-1.jpgRick_dangerous2_01.png

Oh, I had forgotten how awesome and non-related game covers could be back then.

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My parents won an old NES (late 95 or 6). We couldn't afford anything new and I didn't know about the SNES or other Video game things back then. That first night I played "Gargoyle's Quest II", Contra, FF1, and Monsters in my Pocket. No idea which one I played first, but I consider all of those my "first" games.

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I have great memories of playing the original King's Quest with my dad, and branching out to Space Quest.

My first experience though was playing the various games available on the Atari 2600 with my uncles. Particularly Combat.

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I remember playing some Atari football game at a family friend's place, or at least watching it, not long after we moved to Canada. Not long after that I remember playing some shooter well into the night at another friend's place which, later, I would recall to be River Raid.

But my first real solid memory of a Video game, one that I played on my own, was a "Jackal" arcade machine. That game was so good. Still is.

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Kickman on Commodore 64, complete with unlicensed floating Pac-Men and Pac-Ghosts:

qEbq82gV9F0

EDIT: Oh, I guess Bally/Midway made this after all, the resolution is so low on this game that the copyright notice gets cut off. Thanks for the clarification, internet!

Edited by Horticulture Tycoon

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My first game was probably either Citadel of Chaos on the BBC or Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga. These two after Delux Paint of course ;) The reason I remember Shadow of the Beast the most is because it scared the crap out of me! Did this happen to anyone else? Terrifying stuff.

Citadel_Of_Chaos_ingame.gifsbeast.jpg

I think the first game I REALLY played all the way through (like, to completion) was Toonstruck, an awesome game which doesn't seem to get half the recognition it deserves. Graphics and humour that blew my mind back in 1997 or whatever, and puzzles which took me like a year and a few calls to the helpline (damn games were harder before the internet) to get through.

toonstruck_03.jpg

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Now I remember vaguely in pre-school days playing (or trying to) some Sesame Street variant game off a 5 1/4" disk, but not clearly enough for that to really by my first. Plus I was 3 or 4 then.

I may have played similar... I can't really recall what was going on or what game it was. I remember Grover in some kind of space station or observatory. It was played on my dad's portable computer from his work, Data General. Everything was in shades of yellow. I guess this computer wasn't a big hit, since this is the only webpage I can find on the PC: http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~csclub/museum/items/data_general_1.html

Other than that my other earliest remembered game may have been some weird boxing game involving a white man, a black man, and a kangaroo with gloves. It was all in yellow on the same computer as well.

It would help if I knew what the hell games I was talking about here, but you did say first game.

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Pole Position on an Atari. I think I was about 4.

After that, Bruce Lee on the Amstrad CPC 464. Annoying my brother by blowing the Green man's horn instead of helping him defeat the ninja was one of my favorite things at that age


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I don't remember what the first actual game I played was, but I think the first software I ever used was WordPerfect, in the days of white text on a blue background and bold or italic being represented by different-colored text.

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The first games i remember playing were Air Raid (or River Raid), and SimCity on a friends dads Commodore 64. My friends dad was showing off his new computer to my dad, who was utterly uninterested and bewildered. I was looking over their shoulders totally fascinated. After they went off to do something else, my friend and i snuck on and played some but we eventually got shooed off because 'the computer is for grown-ups'.

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It freaks me out a bit that for some of you peeps the earliest memories of games fall in the late nineties. For me, the earliest game I remember seeing played by my father is Manic Miner on the Spectrum... never played it though.

The earliest game I do clearly remember playing was tetris on a 286. It even had a color monitor and everything! It took me a long time to figure out, pathetic as this may be, what the point of the game was. I don't remember how I realized how to start this game without knowing what the point of it was. I think I heard my father talk about tetris, and then when he was not home I fired the computer up and typed tetris in the dos prompt and it just launched. I spent a long time just making weird abstract compositions, until I accidentally cleared a line and got the hang of it.

The first games I remember pwning joyously were the first three Commander Keen games and Indiana Jones 3. I basically learned English with the latter.

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My dad had a Commodore 64 in his home office. I would sneak in towards the end of his work day and hang out with him while loading up some edutainment games from a stack of 5.5'' disks that were next to the machine. I have very vivid memories of Snoopy and the Red Baron Spelling for some reason.

After that, he upgraded to a 286 and I spent many an hour playing the hell out of Hugo's House of Horrors and that other one in the jungle. Thus began my lifelong love of adventure games.

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My dad had a Commodore 64 in his home office. I would sneak in towards the end of his work day and hang out with him while loading up some edutainment games from a stack of 5.5'' disks that were next to the machine.

Yes, sir. The Commodore 64 was awesome.

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Looking back, first game I remember playing was an old Apogee game, Crystal Caves, on DOS. First game I remember ENJOYING was good ol' Earthworm Jim.

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My first memories are of watching my brother play Space Quest I, King's Quest 3 and the original Prince of Persia when I was about 5 and he refused to let me touch the computer. When I finally got a chance to play them for myself, I never ended up getting very far before getting stuck or bored. I think that at that time I liked the concept of computer games more than the actual games that were available to me.

In the following years I played various low-graphics arcade style dos-ish games. I think the first real game I played from start to finish would have been Sam & Max Hit The Road, in my early teens.

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Batman (the isometric one) on the Spectrum.

Strangely enough it was the only game that worked on the 128k+ we got for Christmas, even the games that came with it didn't work.

A fun trip to Curry's followed a couple of days after!

I'll never forget Christmas the following year where as a naive child, I left a copy of Crash open on my desk with the review of Turtles open hoping that Santa would bring it me. Awwwwwwww!

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First game: one of the games on Super Mario All-Stars (I think it was Mario 3). My dad had taste!

First game that blew my mind: Curse of Monkey Island.

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My memories aren't sorted in a chronological order but I'd think the first game I played was either Tetris on some device or a bird quiz of some sort on a computer or a black and white game where you shot Saddam Hussein's giant face with a tank going left and right at the bottom of the screen.

The first games I remember playing a lot were Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, Golden Axe and a boulder dash clone with a computer hardware theme as well as various NES games I played at my friends house such as Duck Hunt, Super Mario, Captain Planet and that game with frustrating controls where you had to find parts for your spaceship.

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It's either Monkey Island or Fantasy World Dizzy — can't remember which, but those are my earliest gaming memories. :)

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The first game I remember playing was a sketchy Hansel and Gretel game my Dad bought for our ZX Spectrum. I can't recall much about it (I was too young to really understand what was happening anyway I think) other than the feeling of intense dread I felt when I played it. That was some scary shit.

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