Gaming virginity loss.

[syntheticgerbil]

Hahaha, are all of those zeros on the wall supposed to be people's scrawled phone numbers?

[brkl]

I don't actually know.

[Chuckpebble]

I used to put the gun up to the screen to shoot the damned ducks and clay pigeons.

Ha, I think everyone has this anecdote, and there's nothing wrong with that, but has anyone else done the opposite?

I remember going to a friend's house once when I was young and his dad came to play Duck Hunt with us. We ended up pulling the console out from underneath the TV and rearranging the room to get back as far as possible and then taking turns to see who could get the furthest on clay pigeons. Awesome memories of a great man that died way too young.

Also, wtf is that pacman outline on the left side of that screenshot?

[monkeyarmada]

The first system I had at home was this bad boy...

Not the first game I played but definitely the first PC game I was addicted to was Lazarian on the C64.

Donkey Kong Jr was my first love though, and it's still close to hand, it lives on my book shelf.

S.

[Moelman]

The first I can remember is Sonic 2, but it's possible I played games elsewhere before I owned a console that I don't remember.

[Sleepdance]

One word: Ring:tdown: Also my first sirious addiction that influenced my life was AoE2.

[Kolzig]

My first gaming experience happened with this machine somewhere around 1987 when I was about 5 years old.

I have no idea which one was the first game though.

[Armchair General]

I have almost that exact same Commodore (minus the VIC sticker) sitting in my parent's loft for posterity. It also came with a separate tape deck. My first game was a horse racing programme written by the guy who I bought the computer game from.

Does anyone remember the dizzy series of games? The adventurous egg...

Andy

[toblix]

I think I've played every Dizzy game, and completed none. They were really brutal.

[LOPcagney]

Prince of Persia

and Power Pete

and a few other games including Spectre Supreme for my old PowerPC that I didn't play as often.

[LOPcagney]

And, of course, Lode Runner.

[infovore]

The graphics were all amazing shades of yellow, even though the stats on this particular ancient laptop say it had CGA capabilities. I always thought CGA was made by simultaneously running horrible shades of magenta and cyan along with white.

Both are correct; CGA only has four colours, but there are two potential palettes: white/cyan/magenta/black and black/red/yellow green. Here you go!

Anyhow: the first games I really recall playing were BBC ports on my cousins' Acorn Electron

.

We got a 286-10 in 1989, when I was 7, and the first proper games I devoted genuine amounts of time to would be

and

and many hours flying around Lake Michigan and the Bay Area in

Seriously. I was a total sim dork from an early age, and as I got older, got into less and less realistic sims - though 1942:PAW is the last great one I played, and Aces of the Deep will always be superb - and am now a die-hard console gamer. (I played on friends' consoles, but it would be years before I owned my own. I have played much catch-up since my teenage years).

[thorn]

And, of course, Lode Runner.

That game was brilliant.

Though I admit that at some point I got confused about the title so that when I watched Blade Runner I spent the whole time trying to work out how they'd made the game based on it.

[Tanukitsune]

My first gaming experience happened with this machine somewhere around 1987 when I was about 5 years old.

I have no idea which one was the first game though.

Ha ha, mine was a Vic-20 too! I only remember that it had some math game and some word search game... You typed a word and it took HOURS to see if it had it in it's memory or something like that....

I'm not sure what my first "real" game was... Probably something on the C-64¿

[miffy495]

If we're not counting "Snoopy vs the Red Baron: Teaches Spelling" on my dad's VIC20, then here's mine:

First off, I'm with Squid Division on console gaming. I was over at my friend Christina's house when I was 4 years old and she had this amazing thing that let you shoot the TV. Duck hunt for hours. Never owned my own NES until I got a cheap one used first year of Uni, but that memory stuck with me forever.

What really popped my gaming cherry though, was this:

Hugo's House of Horrors, bitches. That game's text parser taught me spelling and grammar when all the other kids my age were learning that square and round were not the same thing. I always got killed by the damn werewolf in the dining room, but fuck if I cared. I also had that sequel where Hugo's plane crash lands in the jungle and he stumbles upon some mystery, but House of Horrors was the shit.

[Armchair General]

Thinking about it, this...

and this...

...were the first games I genuinely tried to complete for the sake of doing so. I achieved neither but do you remember the size of the manual for Red Storm Rising!?

Dungeon master was made soo much better when the food and drink spell had been acquired.

Which was the first game you attempted to complete? (the next stage, post cherry popping)

Andy

Edited February 21, 2010 by Armchair General

[mikemariano]

Hugo's House of Horrors, bitches.

I was thinking about the Hugo games a few months ago and came across developer David P. Gray's website. He now makes jigsaw puzzle games for Windows.

He has a forum on his site and people have asked him to make another Hugo game, but he's not very interested because the development of a modern adventure game couldn't be a one-man operation.

I always got killed by the damn werewolf in the dining room, but fuck if I cared.

Gray has some advice for that:

Incidentally the secret to getting past the dog in the store room was to throw the chop to him. If you were typing commands you would start typing "Throw chop to dog" in the kitchen but don't press enter until you get to the store room. Otherwise you can't type it quick enough before the dog gets you...

That's what I did to get past the dog and I always felt like I was cheating. It's nice to have my methods blessed by the developer himself.

[Fuzzy Lobster]

Dangerous Dave! Woo!

Played it on my mom's Apple II that she had in her school classroom. Heck yeah. This screenshot looks much prettier than I remember it being, however.

Edited February 22, 2010 by Fuzzy Lobster

[elmuerte]

Don't know which was the first one. It's a bunch of games running in DOS on an 8086 PC.

It's one of:

• Alley Cat
  
• Striker
  
• Digger
  
• Spacewar
  
• Rogue
  
• Sopwith
  
• Wintergames
  
• Boulderdash
  
• ...
  

[Roderick]

Wow, Rodi, I didn't know anyone played on the MSX outside of Japan. I never even knew of it's existence until getting into the original Metal Gear games about 5 or 6 years ago.

I'm curious, do you remember which games you played on it?

Hilariously, the MSX was produced in the Netherlands by Phillips. It was popular in exactly two regions of the world: Japan and the Netherlands

The games I played on it were Zanac, the flight shmup I showed a picture from, the awesome Knightmare from I believe Konami (Check this out, must see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFbCz538ng0) and a slew of other games I unfortunately don't know the names of anymore. Mappy. Comic Bakery. Something with an Indian in a tree. Something in a dark castle. Something with a space knight and a kidnapped princess. Good times.

[Garple]

Probably not quite this one, but that's pretty near. Funny to think now that it's actually older than I am, but I never knew or noticed.

HOLYSHITIREMEMBERTHAT...Remember all those compilations of shareware dos and windows games that used to get released on retail discs and this game was one of them?

[Garple]

Actually the first game that blew my mind (ign.com) was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past...because it but an entire little world inside my tv. And does anybody remember the Legend of Mystical Ninja? You had to go to a travel agent to travel to the next level in the game and how much you paid determined what animated cutscene you'd see of your traveling arrangement. Also I will never forget the angry sound that played when you walked into a shop, declined to buy anything, and were asked to leave. Furthermore, it was my first exposure to minigames. I spent at least as much time playing two player air hockey in-game as I did bashing zombified villagers.

[Chuckpebble]

Actually the first game that blew my mind (ign.com) was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past...because it but an entire little world inside my tv. And does anybody remember the Legend of Mystical Ninja? You had to go to a travel agent to travel to the next level in the game and how much you paid determined what animated cutscene you'd see of your traveling arrangement. Also I will never forget the angry sound that played when you walked into a shop, declined to buy anything, and were asked to leave. Furthermore, it was my first exposure to minigames. I spent at least as much time playing two player air hockey in-game as I did bashing zombified villagers.

I know of that game, what was it on? SNES? I'm now sorry I missed that, sounds really cool.

[miffy495]

It's on the Wii now, actually. I have it for Virtual Console. Great game.

[Chuckpebble]

It's on the Wii now, actually. I have it for Virtual Console. Great game.

:clap:Oh sweet. There goes another 800 wii points. I wonder how much stuff is on there that I really want and I don't know about?