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What Was Your First Gaming Experience?
Stephen Totilo, at the MTV Multiplayer blog, recently put up a piece that asked a number of notable games industry folks all about their first time gaming. Several had some unique answers, with Peter Molyneux (Black and White, Fable) probably taking the cake: "It would have to be the original Pong. I can clearly remember seeing it in a shop window on Guildford High Street and being utterly transfixed - I had never wanted anything so much - in fact I stole money from my grandmother's purse to buy it. I got it home, took it apart, and never got it to work again - but from that moment on I was hooked on all things to do with computer games." What was your first experience with gaming? d20s on a kitchen table? A Nintendo Entertainment System under the Christmas tree?
It was in the back of the van. It was painful and awkward, and I'd rather not talk about it.
I bought one when they first came out. Before that, it was chess.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
1978, MIT, Zork ~ yay for the DMG! I nearly failed out of school figuring out the carousel room. i had such an elaborate map. ZORK STILL RULZ! :)~
. . . was when I was three and my dad still liked going to arcades (games were simpler then, so he could still enjoy them). I would stand on a stool or box or whatever they had provided for kids to use to reach the controls on arcade machines and try playing PacMan, though I was only messing with the controls during the game's demo. Eventually I figured out that the game did something different if you put a quarter in it, so I'd beg quarters off my dad and then plunk them in, only to spend the entire game eating power pellets to turn the ghosts blue. It was a long time before I ever cleared the first stage.
ASCII games on an IBM PC.. I believe the original Compaq "Portable", which my dad used to bring home from work occasionally.
Can I preemptively tell anyone thinking of writing a post that contains the name "Playstation" to just not do it? Please? I'm feeling old enough today...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Candyland, natch.
Queen Frostine was the bee's knees.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
on a friend's apple II. also played lode runner, and castle wolfenstein
Probably Carnival or Tanks or one of those old Atari 2600 games. My parents had an original wood box Atari that we used to play when I was little. My grandparents had one too that we played when we were over there, but they had more games.
Hmmm, well my first gaming experience was when I was about 3 years old. This was a dawn of a new era in my little simple life. My Uncle first brought a Nintendo. I was hooked for hours playing Ninja Gaiden, Super Mario Brothers, and Super Punch Out. My first REAL, gaming experience was when I was 9, and got to play Doom II. WOW, that got me hooked into PC's, let alone PC gaming. Thank you ID Software for turning on to PC's and getting into coding/networking/support. If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have a job right out of high school banking money without certs ;)
For me it was this weird spelling game for MS-DOS where you had a mouse and this maze and little cat heads chased you around and dog heads were there that would temporarily protect you if you spelled a word right. Mazes got harder and more evil cat heads as the game went on. I used to play that game a lot as a little kid... I have no idea what it was called though.
Weaksauce as they say...
Gertrude's Chase on a monochrome Apple IIGS
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros./World Class Track Meet Bundle as well as Rad Racer in all its "3D" glory. A few months later I got Wheel of Fortune and Operation Neptune for my IBM, mmmm DOS games.
Anyone used Galacta, http://takegame.com/shooter/htm/galacta.htm? I loved this game.
Dunno if it's sad or not but it's either Pole Position or Combat, not sure which though since I quickly hit the can't remember anything past that point save for quick flashes of images.
Christmas at the age of 5, a shiny new Nintendo sitting under the Christmas tree, the bundle that included the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo, complete with gun. To this day, I can still imagine the smell of the styrofoam and plastic it was housed in, which never fails to remind me of that Christmas when I smell something similar.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
DK on the Colecovision. I wanted to play as the monkey. This was a great system to grow up on, ton of fun games and great graphics. The one thing that I seems so strange now is that we only played for an hour or two (tops) at a time! We still played outside. I wonder if that is because of the pickup and play nature of those games versus the new games which take 50 hours to complete and completely envelope the person...
Looking back, its hard to remember in my new found "old" age. While maybe not exactly right, I do remember a game called Crossbows and Catapults. I doubt that game would have been sold in 20 years due to our new nanny state were everything that can put out an eye is banned.
As for video games, I would think Atarti 2600 probably. I remember switching the RF switch box and firing it up while listening to whatever tapes I recorded off the radio! [I am sure someone will tell me thats nothing, they stuck transitors in potatos while walking uphill both ways to get music.] Oddly enough, I got my Atari 400 and 800 many years after my first systems (2600, 7800, Odyssey, NES, etc).
Computers, um...I know I died many times on the Oregon Trail. However, what covered wagon was I in? Tandy something or other, or Commodore 64? Apple 2 maybe at my elementary school's library perhaps.
A commodore 64, in which my dad was playing a wrestling game (I THINK it was called Bebop Wrestling, or something like that). He let me take control of the keyboard, and thus my obsession with gaming had begun (I was 4 at the time)
Living With a Nerd
I was probably the first kid to ever play a game on a computer. My father worked for IBM, and I played hangman. In those days there were no monitors, so every time you chose a letter it would print up the picture all over again.
I was born in 1980 and at some point in my childhood, we got a colecovision. I must have been pretty young because I don't remember a lot of it, but I think I remember playing Donkey Kong, Mouse Trap and Qbert. I more vividly remember my NES with SMB/Duck Hunt, Zelda and Final Fantasy.
My first video game experience was NES playing super Mario brothers on the cartridge that had SMB/Duck Hunt/Track and Field. Before that it was various little kid board games but what really got me interested in games was my older brother teaching me chess.. To this day I still love the challenge of the game and a good match between him and I. Thinking moves ahead of the other players and trying to respond in your predictions where wrong. Other games that deserve mention:
1)Online gaming: MUDs
2)TTRPG: AD&D at a friends house playing a psyonic Dwarf... Badly...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I remember spending hours playing against my brother in Ice Hockey. I cant imagine people today thinking the graphics and gameplay would be remotely acceptable.
//, PCs, etc. Hell, I think somewhere in that mix there was a game or two we bought on tape from Radio Shack and loaded into a TRS-80. Then later came the Sega Master system and the beginning of the modern age, with the occasional oddball device like the lynx (which I brought on a trip and loved), turbographix 16, mega drive, and the Jaguar.
Then there was the disappointment with ET. Not only was it bad it was pretty damn hard for a 8 year old.
Then there was the disappointment with the Atari 5200. I think they had 5 games for it. The controllers fell apart too.
Then the big move to Apple
TI994A!
My first gaming experience was the 3 lane car racing game on my watch. The screen would scroll 1 pace toward you every time you moved left are right. You would have to avoid cars coming at you.
This was back in probably 1985-87ish.
On an old p/s2 computer running does 5.x I think.
Ahhh, a simpler time.
You mad
Vanguard on the Atari 800XL
I think I drove my parents insane with that square-wave theme song when I was 4.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
did I even spell it right? I remember the crappy keyboard and the old school joystick more than the games (actually, I can't even remember the exact games we had, but that box is still packed away in my father's attic somewhere.)
My Sig Sucks
First Video Game? Pong, In a hotel in Wales. I must have been 7 or 8 years old.
Then nothing more until we moved house several years later and I discovered Space Invaders and Asteroids at the local inland holiday resort :-) of Stourport on Severn.
From that point on I wanted a home computer. I got a VIC-20 and learned 6502 and wrote a joystick controller (whoopee doo!). After the a C64 and wrote many games, plus games for a prototype Commodore C-16 (provided by Commodore via a game company with no manuals, nothing - we had to find the joystick, video and sound hardware by disassembling the BASIC ROM and a lot of guessing what bits did what in which register), Atari 400s, Acorn Electron, BBC Model B, Atari ST, IBM PC-AT, all in assembler.
Best game ever? Defender (Williams, Arcade), closely followed by Robotron (Williams, Arcade) and Sheep in Space (Llamasoft, Commodore C64).
where were the rest of you in the late 70's?
I was... two or three years old and played Space Invaders on the 2600 with my dad. This must have been 1981 or 1982.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I think it was either Pac-man, Combat, or Frogger... not sure which. I was about 6 maybe at the time...
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I haven't had a "first gaming experience" yet. I'm still waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to come out!
Star Fleet Battles: Designer's Edition, when I was 10 back in 1983. Expansion 3 (WYN Star Cluster) just came out.
Sure, there were lots of rules, but they just made sense. Kind of like computers back then, too, before we let losers program them because they work cheap.
CAPTCHA: hexagon. Heh.
My first memory in life. I was 3 years old, and "helping" my brother and sister rake leaves so they could earn money to buy an Odyssey 2000. Pick Axe Pete was awesome!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I guess that's revealing my age.
Pong then Space Invaders, Atari2600, Leisure Suite Larry in CGA graphics.
We didn't worry about frames per seconds.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
It was 1976 or '77, and I was six years old. My friend's dad was a comp-sci professor at UNLV. He had a teletype and a dial in account to the university PDP 10. He would dial in and set up a restricted shell for us, basically a menu of games. Colossal Cave Adventures was the best, but we also played Lunar Lander, Hunt the Wumpus, and other simple games, wasting reams of paper. That was what got me into computers. Been hooked ever since.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I think the experience i had playing that game and console overall may be better than any game experience you can get today. Then again we didn't have high hopes for what technology could do back then...
It was Simple, Easy, and Fun.....what more could a guy ask for!
We're in college now. There's girls here. They do stuff....
Amiga 500+ with Lemmings, Captain planet and Bart Simpson vs the space mutants.
Soon after that someone gave me a pirate copy of monkey island. Arrrggg
The C64 came with a demo disk which had that game on it. There's a big frog on the left side of the screen. The player presses numbers to control how high the frog "jumps" to catch flies which move about on the right side of the screen. http://home.freeuk.net/markk/CBM/C64_DEMODISKETTE.tar.gz
I mean your mom.
I found the laptop my parents had bought before I was born, and wanted to play a game with it. My parents gave me a book of source code for applications that could be put on the Model 100. I looked for a short one, and started typing it in. (It was a space invaders type game)
Also my first experience with programming.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
My dad brought home one of those TTY keyboards with built-in modem (looked like a typewriter with mutant ears growing out of it for the phone) to do some weekend work. He showed me the game they had (ASCII, definitely) called Star Trek. Think it was `75...
Happily, he didn't have much work to do over the weekend and I could play it for hours at a crack.
When I got to college, it was ADVEN...
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
When I was about 6 or 7, I used to go with my brother and my father to a family friend who had a computer built in my country similar as performance with a Commodore. We loaded games from tapes and played while we were there. That guy sold the computer and with the money started a radio station.
A few months later, there was a shop at the lowest floor of my flat and I used to peek through the window and was amazed by the game Supaplex. It was a computer/tv repair shop and the owner was staying after schedule and playing.
After that, we convinced our father to take us with him at the chemistry lab at his work place (he worked in chemistry) and used to play on the computers Heretic2 and Mario (those were Compaq's 486 at 66Mhz - this is about 8-10 years ago).
At this time I was still in highschool... one of the guys used to own a Nintendo Gameboy and the guys in the classroom used to borrow it one day at a time... have good memories about that game, used to eat 12-16 batteries each day until I used a pocket calculator ac/dc adapter to feed the Gameboy power.
Then the first computer came (an AMD K6-2 at 333Mhz) and managed to find Supaplex, Prince of Persia... Half-Life was the most played though.
We had the single-use pong console...upgraded to a 2600 a year or two later...I figured out you could fly in the clouds in Defender without being harmed so you could continue your game the next day. I rolled the score over doing that.
First PC game: probably ASCII D&D in the late 80s on my brother-in-law's old (I believe) 80186. (late bloomer on computers obviously). We used to make cheesey little BASIC programs like Party Quest (modeled after some freeware quest game he had) where you had to find the weed, trade it for keg taps, ask the bum for directions to the pawn shop, sell your belt buckle, fill the keg, etc...fun learning experience. Super-cheese ASCII graphics of the mulletted hero "Dude" walking around the city.
Best game memories: Myst was mind-blowing, and Metroid on the SNES was always one of my favorites, although after months of trying I could never stay on the platform to kill the Mother Brain.
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
I helped my grandma. She had polio and was paralyzed from the neck down. She was in an adjustable bed. My aunt and uncle would come by with my mom and dad. I'd stand on the platform next to her bed where she had a tray with slots for cards. I'd put the cards in the tray and she'd tell me which ones to discard.
I played Rack-o and that was the first game that I owned that I was careful about collecting cards and making sure it was all back in place before putting the game away.
Battle ship, monopoly, chess.
Then Outdoor Survival. I picked up more A/H games like Richthofen's War, and Wooden Ships & Iron Men which were my favorites.
From there it was original D&D.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I got laid for the first time while waiting for the fucking tape drive to load the game. Less Joyful, more Silent.
But the bosses kept uninstalling it because it could crash the mainframe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(text_game)
There were these pieces of printed cardboard paper called 'cards'. They look similar to the images in Windows "Solitaire", but we called the game "Klondike", as there were many forms of "Solitaire". We also used these 'cards' for "Go Fish", "Rummy", "Cribbage", and many other games.
Pong in a bar in Costa Mesa, CA. I got creamed in my first game.
Apple Trek in glorious ASCII! And before dad got the Disk II's, we would wait what seemed like a whole half hour for Little Brick Out to load from the cassette tape.
On a TRS-80 that was black and white text display. The game was a text graphic based dungeon crawler
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
My father was lent a Pong unit. Ugly black and brown console, two rheostats. Semi-crappy B&W display on the tube TV. And that's about all. Looked like a rejected sci-fi prop.
And it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
Roll forward a few years (past the Atari 2600, which was much like the Pong console, in retrospect). I walk by a computer store, and they're selling Apple II's. Every machine on display had a game running on it, and a line of kids waiting for their turn. It was at that moment that I knew that computers would be a pretty big thing in my life.
Not that I knew at the time that it would lead to a career in IT. But it was games that did it.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy.
Tag, I think. Then cowboys and indians and army.
Seriously, we had some console that basically had variations on pong, plus a pistol/rifle attachment that you could do clay pigeon shooting with. I don't remember the name.
We than had an Atari 2600. Must see about getting an emulator, I'd love to play Adventure again and kill that sodding bat!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Arcades were pretty much all that I was allowed to do when I was 5.
When I was 13 my parents bought me a full set of AD&D manuals.
How did they know the perfect gift, when I didn't know myself?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
My first computer gaming experience was the ASCII game Startrek on an HP2000.
At the local Woolworths. Or maybe SpaceWars at the Melbourne FL Airport in the mid seventies.
First game system was Atari Pinball. It was so cool it had pinball and breakout and was a lot cheaper then the Atari 2600.
From there I got an Atari 2600, then a C64, ColecoVision, and an Amiga.
Now I have an N64, Dreamcast, XBox, PS2, Wii, Gamecube, and an atari retro arcade system.
On my PC I play with Fliight Simulator. Like I did on my C64, and my Amiga.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Hi, my name is John Titor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor
I remember my first gaming experience with Duke Nukem Forever... it was wonderful
The graphics were better than anything I have ever seen, the fully enclosing sound made everything completely lifelike and the user interface... well goodness let's just say it revolutionized the industry. It's too bad the world ended.
Tabletop asteroids at the local pizza joint. Monocrome vector graphics. Joystick to turn and thrust, button to fire. Can't remember if that rig had a shield button or not. To this day, it still doesn't seem quite right to have a game without spaceships.
while not strictly my first gaming experience (my brother's friend had an atari), the hidden gun shop that my brother assured me was down the last pit of the first level of super mario bros. is my most memorable. my brother has always been able to convey a sense of wisdom and honor when explaining things to people, and the subsequent enjoyment of watching him dupe all of our other friends into jumping into that hole is easily one of the highlights of my childhood.
no dude, really. guns. down the hole. you'll be sorry later if you don't.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Oddly enough (or not) it was Space Wars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Wars
For the life of me I can't recall where. A pizza parlor or something.
I remember the best strategy was "tap the buttons at random". It kept the enemy confused.
I was 4 when I first played Frogger! It's still fun :)
But best video game ever, for me: surely SQ3!
Roger Wilco FTW!
I can't remember when, but I'd guess I was 4 or 5 (1984/85) at the latest. My parents picked one up after the prices hit rock bottom. I can remember going to Toys R us and they would rummage through the bargain bins when the games were dirt cheap. From there it was on to a Ti 99 (loved Alpiner), then the system that sealed my love of gaming forever...the NES. Sometime after that we got an Apple IIE...but it really only got any play because it was different. Almost 25 years later and I'm still gaming...and they thought I'd grow out of it!
I really feel sorry for a bunch of people who will post here. I mean, what can you say to someone whose first video game experience was "Super Mario Brothers 3"? You lose so much by that. There are so many great games out there that don't require rote memorization or tens of hours of playing. Once upon a time, you could play a complete game in 5-10 minutes, and then let your friend take a turn. And there were no alternate endings, or fatalities, or secret moves that you could only find on the internet...heck, a lot of times, there were no endings at all. The game simply got harder and harder, and demanded more pure skill and downright innovation from you, until you saw your last man get destroyed, probably in a grossly unfair fashion, and then the inevitable "GAME OVER" appeared. No hacks, no save games, no shooting prostitutes in a spray of blood, no choosing Oddjob and gaining an unfair advantage.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The first time I can remember playing a video game was in the early 80's. I was just maybe 4 or 5 years old, I was over at my Grandpa's house and he owned a TI 994/A. Of course most people who bought these ended up with Parsec, I think it was bundled with some of the base units. I remember thinking how incredible it was that I was using a computer to play games on a TV screen. I ended up getting my own TI 994/A as a present several years later, and this was my start into the professional computing world. Of course now I am much older and have become a big time h4x0r. But I still like to pull out the 994/A and play Parsec and Blasto with friends! ;)
My dad brought a computer home from work when I was very very young. He taught us to use DOS and I don't really remember a time when I didn't know how to use it. Along with my brother, we browsed his computer-related possessions and amidst the office and CAD software there were a couple of 5.25 floppies that contained the original Hack, Space Quest 1 and the first Larry. Of these, Hack was too hard and believe it or not, I think I was too young to appreciate Larry (we played it, but not until later), but Space Quest was a hit. I remember browsing an english dictionary (not my native language) and inputting words that seemed to fit. It would take a long long time and some hints from older people to actually finish the game, but we really enjoyed it nonetheless. The first games we bought must have been Star Control and Wing Commander. Damn those were good, even though Origin space sim required our father to purchase a little more ram to run it properly.
"Hunt the Wumpus", on a 300bps dial-up and a Teletype ASR-33.
I still have the Teletype.
Video game: Combat! on the Atari 2600, christmas morning, I was probably 8.
Other: Candyland or maybe go fish/old maid/slap jack somewhere in the 4-6 age range.
Oh and don't forget patty cake.
I remember playing pong and a shoot the square game on a b&w TV at home.
Also playing Space Invaders at the Corner Bar. A thin green piece of plastic was stuck over half of the screen, making it look like it was in color.
I don't remember which one of these came first, though.
Pong, of course.
However, after my father brought home the Commodore Pet/CPM with a whopping 64K of RAM my interest turned toward "Dungeon Of Death" or, simply, "Dungeon".
*That* game got me interested in not only gaming but programming and changed my life, in a positive way, forever.
Colecovision! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColecoVision
And shortly after that an IBM PC Jr. Loderunner was way too much fun.
Somewhere back in 1988 (naturally on PC). It featured ega or was it cga craphics and nice beeper sounds. And lots of entertainment and addictive action. Wow, they have a wiki on it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostages_(video_game)
My dad's Atari 2600 in 1983. I couldn't play it well until I was five, but it cleared the trail for a long list of consoles I would later play. Yar's Revenge is STILL my favorite game.
:3
As for PC gaming, my dad let me play casino gmaes on an Apple IIe. I liked watching the ANSI (dunno what else to call it) horses run.
Ludo thats a board game? yeah, but I guess we are talking electronic gaming here, so that would be the Lakeside Computer Perfection which I got in 1979 and recently got one on ebay for 4 quid for ol' times sake.
My first computer gaming experience was some 'move this pixel towards that pixel' £1.99 on the Sinclair ZX81 from W.H.Smiths.
I don't remember much else about it. We played it on a PC-Junior... everything had to be loaded from 5.25" floppies.
My first game experience on a hard drive that I can still distinctly remember was probably The Secret of Monkey Island, which I just got done playing again while on a plane.
Other game experiences... Baldur's Gate totally sucked me in, it was amazing, I'd never played anything D&D before. I loved it. Probably one of my favourite game memories.
My first gaming experience would either have been watching some older kids play Metroid on the NES, back when it was new, or myself and my sister playing Q-bert, Track & Field and a few other games on a computer my father loaned from work. I can't remember which was first..
I had an Atari 2600 and my father knew someone who could *ahem* acquire *ahem* tons of games for us. The two that stick in my mind were:
;-) ). At the end you got a ranking. I don't think I ever ranked above "Garbage Collector" (or something like that), but it was always quite fun.
1 - Star Raiders. A 3D space simulator back in the days of blocky blobs representing people. You would plan your route on a map, guide your spaceship through hyperspace, fight enemy warships, and defend and refuel at space stations (sometimes blowing them up for fun
2 - Abuse. This was a text based "game" in which you typed insulting phrases into the computer and it responded with its own insults. I quickly found out that typing nice things really got the computer upset. Oh, and typing in curse words while my dad was anywhere in sight range of the computer was a no-no.
After the 2600, I remember getting the original NES system and looking at the Super Mario Brothers graphics in amazement. Still, the 2600 holds a special place in my heart. (I still have it too, though I haven't hooked it up in over a decade.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I can remember being 3-4 and playing on someone's Pong they had for an Atari or something but I think the very first true game I played was Zork for an IBM/PC compatible that my Dad had. No graphics so at the age of 6-7 I wasn't totally engrossed but I can remember playing it and being like, "WTF?"
Shortly after that Paperboy and the Ancient Art of War at Sea left good impressions on me.
When I was a kid, my mom, dad, and I used to go to the arcade almost every weekend. Before I was old enough to play any video games, my mom and I would play skee ball. I remember being so proud when I was finally able to get the ball all the way down the lane. I didn't realize until much later that I wasn't scoring any points. I used to think I must've sucked pretty badly back then until I realized that most of today's skee ball lanes are much shorter than what I was playing on. (They also didn't have 100pt holes but my firm belief that 100pt holes are utter blasphemy doesn't belong in this conversation.)
The night before my 6th birthday, after I had gone to bed, I could hear my parents and sister talking downstairs. Their voices were too hushed to hear what they were saying, but all of a sudden I heard my sister say really loudly, "A TV...!" So I was convinced I was getting a TV.
The next morning I ripped open my presents. None of the packages looked big enough to hold a TV, which was kind of surprising. But I did get this weird black box with knobs that looked cool. When I asked where was the TV for my room to hook it up, my parents didn't know what I was talking about. It finally turned out my sister had started to say "A TV game!" but my parents clapped their hands over her mouth before she finished. I wasn't really disappointed, the "TV game" was much cooler than a TV would've been (and knowing my sister was jealous was cool too).
Man, I loved that thing. Three different versions of the same damn game, but I could play for hours. I was pretty sad years later when our pet bunny chewed through all the wires and it shorted out (but at least that helped build the case for an Atari 2600).
Paperboy at age 3-4 on my brother's C64, or maybe Asteroids on the Atari. Don't remember which came first but I know it was before I was 3-1/2.
but back in the old days, my first memory of gaming is of me and a friend typing in some Battleship game on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX81. We had no cassette recorder (or at least didn't know we could hook up a standard one, as they claim on the Wiki-page), so we had to type it in every time we wanted to start a gaming session. Still was fun, though :)
My first ever gaming experience was playing the original Oregon Trail and Civil War on Teletype 33, two of them would come to our school for two weeks each year. I clearly remember sitting in an empty room with the two teletanks clanking away, trying to type "BANG" as quickly as I could. Civil War was much more fun, though, being a strategic warfare logistics game.
For my first video game experience I was extremely lucky as a kid to get to spend a day playing Empire on PLATO. Holy crap, I still can't believe that game. I think I spent more time designing my ships than actually trying to conquer the galaxy, but damn it was a lot of fun.
Moving the dial, watching the paddle move, just hooked me right there. At 9 or so, the idea of the TV being something interactive was really compelling.
After a time, got a VCS, play it to this day. (Yeah, baby! KABOOM! is always good for a quick run or two to wake a person up!)
Blogging because I can...
I wrote my first game... it was a 2 player ASCII sword fighting game on my VIC-20 and played it with my younger siblings. Player 1 used AS for foward back, EDC for shield elevation(leg/chest/head), RFV for sword elevation. Player 2 was similar, but on the right hand side of the keyboard, and we had to scrunch together by the keyboard. I would have been six or seven years old, I guess.
Though I was playing monopoly and cards and whatnot before that, so it may not count.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
My first gaming experience was on the PCjr. I remember sitting in the car with my mother while my father was at the IBM store picking up the computer.
I remember the computer came with some sort of hangman game. My father got a Pacman clone shortly after we got the compuwe. We had a 300 baud modem and now I can't recall now how I figured out how to log onto a BBS, but I downloaded a Space Invaders clone called Space Commanders.
At about that time we got our first commercial game, King's Quest. That was a great game and problem one that I have the most fond memories of. Then there were those old computer magazines which included the code for all kinds of BASIC games.
I guess that's technically more than my first gaming experience. But these experiences all blend together to me. It was more the experience of having a computer than playing any one game.
It was cool having a computer capable of 16 colors and 3-voice audio when the Apple 2's at school were stuck in monochrome and were barely capable of much more than beeps and buzzes.
Of course the Amigas and Ataris changed that. I remember flipping through magazines and seeing the impressive, colorful images those computers were capable of. And it was frustrating to have a computer capable of producing graphics essentially identical to EGA but not being compatible with it at all. Of course most developers weren't going to bother with developing for the PCjr/Tandy, so I was often stuck with 4-color CGA.
Regardless, those were good times...
It was back in 1977-78-79 somewhere back then.
There was this really cool star trek game written by Lance Micklus (spelling might be wrong)
Man it took foreever to load it from a cassette tape, but man it was fun.
I'd still like to play that one again.
Ahh.. the memories
that was good stuff. last day of school in 3rd grade, mom picks me and the sister up from school and had it in the back of the station wagon. man, those were the days...
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
During an open house in the Physics Department at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, I was given the chance to play "Lunar Lander" on a PDP 8. The input device was a light-pen and the display was a small raster display. The light pen was used to adjust thrust and attitude so that you could control your descent onto the lunar surface. It was bloody tough.
However, the first *real* game I played was Adventur (truncated to 8 characters due to filesystem limitations) on a PDP-11/V03 running RT-11. This was in 1978. Mind you the game was already old at that point because it had, I believe, been originally written on a US Navy Burroughs. [You have to drop the magazines in Witt's End to get the final 350th point.]
Atari Stunt Cycle was my first gaming experience.
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/dedicated/stuntcycle.html
It came out in 1977. It was a single-game console where you jumped a motorcycle over some buses. Over and over. And over.
A friend of mine got Pong - and we spent a whole week playing all the variations of the game until we were sick of it, and his mom was sick of us, booting us out of the house. After that it got boring, and we'd trundle the console out only when we had nothing better to do. Thank God for Asteroids and Pac Man - the staple of my early teenage years, and the bane of my bank account.
First memory was a friend of mine getting an Atari 2600 for Christmas, and playing Yar's Revenge, and some dumb racing game. It was a great novelty but it didn't last long, because my friend also had a giant star wars collection. I swear he was spoiled.
The memory of my first intense gaming experience is playing Ultima IV at school after hours. It was the first computer thing I actually OWNED. By owning, I meant that I bought some floppies from a store, punched the side to make them double sided, and then I got a friend to copy the game for me. (Like a kid my age could have ever afforded to buy a real copy.)
I remembering staring at these 5-1/4" disks and marvelling at how the could contain an entire world inside, that was set up just for me to explore. I was hooked. Ever since then, I've been trying to recreate that high. Oblivion almost did it, but it got old quickly.
First video game - Pong in a bowling alley - when they first came out
First owned video game - family got an Atari 2600 that year
First RPG - D&D Jan 1978 as a freshman in college
First game like chess - well, I have a photo of me playing chess with my Dad from 1964, but I was probably playing it before that.
First computer? IBM 360, followed by a DEC PDP 8/e/ IBM Pcs were not available until AFTER I graduated from college.
Boy do I feel old now.
Links included for reminiscing goodness at the expense of first post karma.
Looking for info on one game I found this little nugget. YMMV.
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/classic-game-programmers.list
My first PC program was 'Vegas Johnny's Draw Poker' ver 1.01 by John Comeau 1989 (Top Score Software). This is basic poker trainer that simulates a Draw game with eight players. It gives advice and odds on each hand.
What a fantastic program! I used it until the 486 era when the internal math co-processor caused it to not run on PCs (I believe that this is the case). For fifteen years I could only run it on a very old, barely working 386 laptop. Then I found DOS BOX program that simulates very old PCs and allows 1980's programs to run on modern machines. I still play it often.
Video games are fun, but, sooner or later, YOU ALWAYS LOSE. With accurate and *unforgiving* casino simulations you can develop skills that will allow you to actually make real money in the real world. The difficult part is to find simulations that are accurate and fast. I can win millions of dollars on Video Poker simulation programs and lose $100 in a half hour on a real Video Poker game in a bar. You want a program that shows you what you are doing wrong and simulates high-level master opponents. You want to master the game before you actually step into the casino.
The only first person shooter that I liked was Wolfenstein, probably because of the cartoon-like graphics. DOOM was too creepy and weird. When you live in an American city, you don't need a game to get daily exposure to weirdness and dangerous violence. Only people in protected and sheltered suburbs actually seek out this kind of experience. In the real world, this kind of experience seeks out you.
My first gaming experience began with arcades in the cornner when I was 8. I was absolutely addicted to Karnov and Rush 'n' Attack. Since the corner arcade was not a good place for a kid to being hanging out, my parents bought me an Atari 2600. However, it was my first Nintendo that finally wrested me from that den.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Unique? I guess I'm a "Dino" or whatever. I still remember the day my father brought home PONG. He was all excited and talking about electronics and stuff I didn't understand at the time. He was an engineer working Top Secret stuff for the government and was all into this. He was going on about miniaturization and that this would have taken a computer with "tubes" the size of a building before... All I wanted to do was was play it.
You had to "hard wire" it to the antenna screws on the back of the TV and change the channel to 3. It was a box about half the size of a VCR player with two hard wired joy stick knobs. It had two slide switches one for 1-2 players and another 3 or 4 position switch for the game(s). Regular pong, advanced (small paddles), I think maybe a "break out" kind of version.
The "ball" just went "boink" and returned after hitting something. You could put "spin" on it by turning the paddle at the same time the ball hit and it escalated in speed the longer you played. That was it. But it sure was fun! Especially the "boink" irritating my mother to the point of yelling at us to "turn than damn thing off and go outside and play" (back in the days that was still safe). Isn't sending your kid out to play now considered child abuse? [sarcasm] Ahhh... the good 'ol days
My first gaming experience is also my second earliest memory; my dad holding me up to reach the controls of a Moon Patrol arcade cabinet. He would work the speed up / slow down controls and I would shoot. =)
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
That depends on what you mean by a "game"... any game, a video game, a PC game?
The first game (of any sort) I remember playing - War (the card game).
The first video game, A Qix variant played on an Emerson Arcadia (or Odyssey 2? Not 100% sure about which, what with it 25+ years ago).
My first PC game, A cheesy text-based poker game. My first real PC game, Might & Magic (the original one).
My first online game, a pre-Circle-3 variant, of which I no longer remember the site name.
My first game was Pong. I had a guy from junior high whose father led our Boy Scout troop and was some electronics engineer - he had a full arcade version of Pong in his garage. This would have been 1983/4 or so.
After that, I played some Atari 2600 games, but didn't really pay much attention to games until Star Control 2 and Dune 2 many years later.
Magnavox Odyssey... I think my grandparents bought it for my family. I was pretty young (about 6) when we got it. Pong was the most fun for us, but I remember playing Haunted House with the plasic screen overlay too!
in The Land of the Lounge Lizards. In 1989. I was born in 1982.
My first computer game was Lemonade Stand on the Apple II, followed by lode runner.
Now I'm deeply into Tabula Rasa, but had the normal run of games between then and now. I remember how excited I was when I got my Atari 2600, playing around on a friend's C64 (my Dad bought a z80 based Toshiba computer forcing me at age 12 into my programming career as it was almost immediate discontinued), another friend's Atari 5200, and of course the TRS-80. All had some neat games, and we spent countless hours typing to tape the code for other games found in Byte magazine.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Got bored with it and all it's variations after a few years haven't felt the need to get back into it since
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Pong. Yep.. I'm an old geezer. We thought Pong was the best thing since TV. Can't tell you how many hours we sat and played until the controllers wore out. Second was an Atari with about 30 games and 40 joysticks. I ended up hacking a joystick together with some aluminum scrap just so that stupid plastic ring wouldn't break anymore.
Homo homini lupus
I don't remember exactly, but I think it was the original Space Invaders arcade game. My dad liked to play it, and would lift me up to use the controls. I remember seeing a poster at McDonald's that they were giving away Atari home computer systems - I thought it was the coolest thing in the world - being able to play space invaders at home. My parent's got me a really cheap all-in-one LCD "computer" that had a few basic spelling and music games. Then they got me the Timex Sinclair 1000 with flight simulator and the 16k expansion pack. THEN came the VIC-20, where I started to learn basic. I really got hooked on computers, though, when they took me to the local Hudson's, that had an enormous computer department. Everything from TI99/4s to Ataris to Commodores to Apple IIs, to a sweet demonstration IBM PC with a lucite case, to a Lisa. Lisa was the most insanely high tech thing I had ever seen - and got me hooked on Apples ever since.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I think you read that headline wrong.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In any event, I was hooked. I wonder if he ever realized what an effect this would have on me, the first time I used a computer (I think, anyways) and he was probably just looking for a way to get me out of his hair. I'll have to mention it to him sometime
or that rabbit in the maze game on the Apple II.. /old
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
Around the SE, possibly a Plus, but if it was a Plus it was from where my Dad worked. We owned a SE though. I can remember Dark Castle, Crystal Quest, Might and Magic, SimCity, SimEarth. Not all of those were in '86 but others were.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It was either the Magnavox Oddyssey 3000 pong clone or a game called "Duck" on my Dad's Osborne 1.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
"Lunar Lander" on a high-end HP calculator in '75. This was the version where the only UI was a changing number on the display. (My uncle worked for HP.)
The cake is a pie
Spacewar at an MIT Open House around 1970 or '71. It was running on a megapixel resolution black-and-white monitor. The students playing it were using handmade controllers consisting of buttons sandwiched between two rectangular pieces of clear plastic - possibly the first gamepads ever.
My first game was Legend of Zelda for the NES. That game was awesome and I beat it before my uncle could have a chance. My first computer game would be RuneScape. After that, I was hooked on games and computer games since then
Number Munchers on an Apple IIGS. The only game. All other are merely pretenders.
We had a TI computer. Along with BASIC we got to play such classics as Munch-man (a pac-man clone), Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus. Then there was the one really big game that had to be loaded from audio tape. That was fun listening to random electronic noise for 15 minutes while the game loaded.
I think my actual first was PacMac on an old TI cartridge-based computer system you plugged into the TV (can't remember the model number), then space invaders and some game involving the Kool-aid guy on Atari.
But, the two earliest games I played the most were definitely Wolfenstein 3D and Tank Wars. Our home PC at the time did not have enough RAM to be able to run Wolfenstein 3D and have both the mouse driver and the sound card driver loaded in memory. So, I sadly had to play it without sound.
I will not admit to anything involving a d20.
My first computer was a slide rule, you insensitive clod! Not many games you can play on a slide rule.
I was a beta tester for dirt. They never did get all the bugs out.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I don't remember the name as I was surly under age 6, but I certainly remember some form of above view track game. It wasn't atari Lemans as I remember very well that you could cut across the track which seemed like a good thing to do as a child. Whatever it was I know it was pre-asteroids.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I can't remember what came first..
Are we talking home or Arcade?
For the Arcade it was either playing Tank or Asteroids
For home gaming I'm up in the air..
It was either playing pong on my friends home Atari or Starblaze 100 on the COCO II Model 80 at home.
One thing I definitely remember was coding in Snail Invaders from Rainbow Magazine.. The program never worked perfectly but we got it close. I found out later that the original code from the magazine has some major bugs.
Anyone remember the program records in Rainbow Magazine? record them to audo tape and load in to the COCO.
I was so pumped when I got a 5 1/4" floppy drive.. I thought I'd never fill that thing up.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
...and lo in my parent's friend basement wes yon purple box marked Dungeons and Dragons. I was given this and I hath not looked back since... Kill me.
I was at University, walking around the computer lab looking for somewhere to sit down and do some work. These guys were playing DOOM on the computers. Enthralled, I sat down at a warm seat just vacated by one and proceeded to get motion sickness. It was great, I couldn't stop! The 3D interface was amazing!
My homework never got done but I did discover something great and of course its all history after that.
My first experience with games was with a trs80 dad had at home. I was about 3 or 4. I can remember playing Chicken, Attack Force and Robot Attack. I also remember perfectly the odd noise made by the disk drive when games were loading.
Thinking today, trs80 is far from the best way to meet games, but at least dad had lots and this Robot Attack is actually a fine game, with synthetic voices and smooth gameplay.
I remember it being sold at a radio shack. I had seen it on the way to and from school for a few weeks. I think it was 19.95 for the system. We quickly progressed to an atari 2600 when it made it's debut a few years later.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
When I was about three, we had a game called Maze Craze on the Atari VCS. I loved that game, but I was hooked when we went to a local arcade and found a copy of Donkey Kong.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
But my parents always seemed to be one or two steps behind when it came to technology of any kind. We only got an atari 2600 once all my friends had NES.
I guess the guy we got the 2600 from was some sort of electrical engineer or something. One of the games we got was pinball, and this guy had modded one controller to have left and right momentary on button switches. I soon figured out that these buttons were basically just hardwired into the left and right switches on the joystick. It didn't take long to use them for other games. Once, while playing Pac-man, I hit both of them at once. (This, in effect, was the same as moving the joystick to the left and the right simultaneously, something that's impossible with just the joystick.)
All of a sudden, Pac-man went left, through all the walls, and then got stuck in one of them. all the dots disappeared, and I moved to the next level. That led to me challenging my sister to games of Pac-man, as long as I got the pinball modded joystick.
I was 13, my first computer a shiny MSX Philips with 516KB RAM. The MSX Basic interpreter with row numbers is to blame for what i become.
:wq!
Ah, the simpler times when standing around playing a Coleco handheld football game still brought excitment! I remember that I got jealous when my friend got one that had the "K/P" or Kick / Pass option.
I also remeber going over to my friends house and playing Miner 2049 on his Commodore 64. He also had Pickaxe Pete, a Loadrunner knockoff.
Parents bought us the Coleco Telstar for Christmas in I think 1976(age 14). Around 1978 and I found a copy of "Strategy & Tactics" (wargame within a magazine) at a book store and got into wargaming. Around 1980 or 1981 I saw my first Trash-80 computer at college. Some people playing a text adventure game and decided right there I wanted to 'program' computers. I've been doing that ever since but I've yet to write a computer game!
I grew up near a small college in Texas which had terminals that connected to the infant internet. When I was about 15 (late 1970s), my friend's older brother was a math major and had access. We were able to get into the lab late at night and on weekends and connect to a mainframe computer at some distant state university. We played the classic text-mode Star Trek game which was probably written in Fortran. I'm now recalling that we played this on a teletype machine, so we had these tremendously long printouts of gaming sessions. A few years later, another friend and I reverse-engineered the game in TRS-80 Basic. Initially we did this in 4k RAM with cassette storage (50 baud!), then later in 16k RAM with floppies. (That friend has continued game programming to this day; he now works for Bioware.)
On a Univac 1230 or IBM 360, not sure which.
Otherwise, about '76, Bought a console game to connect to the TV, black and white breakout, pong, or tennis depending on how the dips were arranged.
I used to mess around with my parent Apple IIe when I was a kid. I found one of the many floppy discs that had no label but a length of random text handwritten on the front of it. I plugged it in and turned on the system and it just came up with a prompt: "] " After a long time I figure out I could just type in the text written on the front of the disc and it loaded up a strip poker game. I think i was like 8 or 9 at the time. This game taught me about how to play poker and that the reward is usually a naked woman. I was sadly disappointed when I realized this wasn't how it really worked out.
Parsec on the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. And we had a cassette deck for the system so my Dad + I could save the BASIC programs we wrote. Good times.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Playing pinball back in the 90's back when games on site all over the place and they where kept in good working condition also I also played all of the MK arcade games even the very rare Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wave Net. I also played alot of the ticket games and had alot of there but the arcade shut down before I was able to use them.
I know of 3-4+ good arcades that have been shut down some of them where game test sites.
"What was your first experience with gaming? d20s on a kitchen table? A Nintendo Entertainment System under the Christmas tree?"
Magnavox Odyssey.
My first video game was Pong at a local (Minnetonka, MN) Shakey's Pizza Parlor. That was such a cool game!! Or not. But it *was* fun at the time. I paid money to play it. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Atari - Pac-Man
Nintendo - Pro Wrestling (yes, I played that one before super mario brothers)
PC - Space Quest I(CGA version-yes!)
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
1983 was an awesome year, I was 6 and my parents took me out to a place that was so magically 80s it hurt. Imagine neon and glass blocks everywhere. Imagine drinking a Shirley Temple for the first time, but even better, imagine the first time seeing, touching, PLAYING a video game.
The place had arcade machines everywhere and I cut my teeth on Pac-Man. From there on in I was hooked.
In 1984 I received a Commodore 64 and I had a few games for it (on cassette), that was the end of normal life for me. From then on in I've been a nerd.
No regrets!
crazy dynamite monkey
After that, but before the Atari 2600, I played some desktop HP calculator Moon Landing game, which numerically showed your Altitude, Velocity, Fuel level, flashed a 3 count, you entered a fuel amount to burn, GOTO TOP. If your altitude was 0 and your velocity was sufficiently low enough, you won. If not, it gave some indication. LOL!!! It should have said, 030707 and make you turn it upside-down.
And yes, you could get to depths lower than 0
They let me win.
My first gaming experience was on University Ave in Gainesville across from the stadium playing pinball circa 1972, about the time the microprocessor was invented -- so it was not a computer game. Oops, dating myself -- back to work
I played Pong in the basement of the Sears building in San Jose back in the 1970s when pinball machines were still king. That bit of trivia freaked out the younger co-workers when I was a video game tester at Atari (the French version) since they didn't believe that video games existed before the Playstation. When I introduced them to another co-worker who tested pen-and-paper games during the 1970's, they really freaked out.
My first experience was on a TI-99/4A, the chrome/black model (later we replaced it with the brown/beige model, I liked the feel of that one much better) and the game was 'Adventure'. I remember sitting at my kitchen table for hours and hours, trying to open that big sapphire door.
It was quickly followed by a game called 'Bigfoot', which was really a Donkey-Kong type game, where the bigfoot was at the summit of this mountain throwing rocks down, which you had to dodge as you climbed to the top. (My brother and I quickly made our own version by gathering all the shoes in the house and rolling them down the steps as the other one tried to slowly climb up.)
Ahhhh, the memories.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Gamer since birth. I was born in 1979, and it wasn't long after that Mom & Dad bought an Atari 2600 for us kids. So my earliest memories are of me playing 4-player Warlords with my siblings. Almost 30 years later, it's still one of my favorite games.
Tic-Tac-Toe and Quadra-Doodle on the Fairchild Channel F, after my father and uncle removed the candy corn my 1-year-old cousin had inserted in the cartridge slot.
Not the greatest system in the world, but the controllers were unique and wonderful (until the wires broke a month later).
As I recall, my mom was getting her second degree when I was a wee one, and as this second degree was computer science, we owned an IBM PC that ran some version of MS-DOS. My first "game" was a program she wrote that made trails of ASCII characters on the screen. You could press the space bar to change the character (one of the smiling faces was my favorite) and then press the arrow keys to draw on the screen in an etch-a-sketch-esque fashion.
After that my dad got an NES, and it was Pac-Man, Mario, and Duck Hunt.
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
This signature is typed manually.
I'll always remember the Christmas where our family got an Apple][+.
It came with two games. Castle Wolfenstein (the original), and RobotWars. Now that I think back, those were probably the best combination of games that could get me "into" computers.
Castle Wolfenstein was a great, visceral game that immediately grabbed my attention. Shooting Nazis, running from SS, and escaping the castle with The Plans! What fun.
RobotWars, however, was almost immediately shelved. However, after a while, I dusted it off and started playing around with it, and even though I was only 6 or 7 at the time, began actually programming my own robot. It was my first programming experience, and a great way to break into it, since it had very visual and rewarding feedback.
Good memories.
My first game was Flimbo's quest on the commodore 64, I think.. I started playing so long ago it was either an OLD atari game like pac man/Pong or it was Flimbo's quest, I can't remember a time when I wasn't into games, so I probably have games I played before my memory became of any use.
I like muppets.
My dad would log me into Compuserve (I wasn't allowed to gave any account info) and I'd get on British Legends which was just simply "MUD" in the UK - I think it ran on a DECsystem-10.
Actually - I just looked, looks like there is a version of the game still online at british-legends.com.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Hockey, Tennis, Squash, and another game, which were all essentially the same pong clone but with different color screens. 4 games in one console! Today you're lucky if they throw in 2 games.;)
loaded from FSK cassette
. . . evidence suggests that few on Slashdot will have heard of it.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Pirates, a text based game that required the proper responses to continue to the next move, played from a 5 1/2 floppy with 16kb of memory, really cooking speed. Wrong input meant you were dead and there were no cheats for it. Next came the original Leisure Suit Larry.
My father brought home the Coleco Telstar Arcade when I was probably about 5 or 6. It was my first real video game. The games were basically three types - Pong-based sports games that used the two paddle knobs (the only difference between some of them was the color of the background), a driving game, and shooting games where you had to use the light gun to shoot a white square or some other blob that appeared briefly on the tv screen. I think we had 3 of the 4 cartridges. I bet my parents still have the console too. It was actually a lot of fun, especially the pong-varients. My sister and I used to waste a lot of time playing, although it was kind of a pain in the butt to set up and attach to the TV - we were too short and so we had to have Dad set it up for us.
Space Invaders, and the cool thing is that still whenever I hear the sound effects from that game, my heart starts pounding HARD. They say that fear of snakes is inborn, but few things cause such an intense involuntary reaction for me as the sound of space invaders.
I don't remember which Atari system it was, but the game was FROGGER.
Which is still one of my all time favorite games.
30+ years ago the boys in my Grade 6 class went on a trip to Northern Telecom - no girls of course that sciencey stuff being too hard for their pretty little heads. Our teacher's wife worked there in HR so we got the "backstage tour". One of the techs showed us an enormous monitor - must have been 30" easy which they used to display and work on chip masks. Naturally chip masks are pretty boring to look at so the tech threw up a picture of a steam locomotive and proceeded to zoom in showing how it was detailed down to the last rivet. While we're ooohing and aaahing over the choo choo train, our teacher says he's off to go talk to his wife. Once he leaves, the tech asks what grade we're all in then pops up a picture of ... A Nekkid Woman! and proceeds to zoom in and out on all the good bits. Believe me a 30" aerola is pretty un-nerving to a pack of 12 year olds.
Yes folks, my first pron was raster driven, server based full frontal nudity.
Now get off my lawn!
was a flight simulator I played on my Vic-20. Found the program in a Commodore Computing magazine, and had to type it in myself.
Once I realized that I had typed that in, and made that blocky stick move up and down on the screen, I was hooked.
Although I may have played with someones Nintendo Game & Watch before, my first computer game was Atic Attack for the ZX-Spectrum. Notable games that left an impression:
Elite for the ZX-Spectrum - An open ended game, with 3D graphics and a huge world all in 48k!
Second Reality from Future Crew (a demo, not a game, but still it had amazing 3D graphics)
Doom
A MUD (Multi User Dungeon), (don't remember which one though)
Tomb Raider I, in particular on the valley where a T-Rex charges at you, wow!
The Half Life series. For me HL2:Episode 2 reached the point where games and movies merge.
Eventually my brother made it through and found out he actually had three kidneys. Pretty cool, really. After that my parents picked up a Commador 64, and eventually a Nintendo for Christmas in 1988.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
West of House.
Your are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
I remember being a little kid (little enough that I did not have the motor skills to actually play myself) and "playing" The Legend of Zelda and The Adventures of Lolo on the NES. It was all downhill from there!
If it wasn't board games or card games, then the old Nintendo Game & Watch hand held games were the first for me. My cousins had bought some in the late 70's early 80's that I use to play. The one I remember had mickey mouse and four chickens that would lay eggs. You would get 1 point for every egg you caught in mickey's basket. On the console side, it was either an atari 2600 or a nintendo entertainment system. I don't particularly remember which I came across first even though the atari is older.
Boardgame - D&D, Adventures in Greyhawk, later I learned to enjoy Battletech with miniatures and finally Battlelords of the 23rd century
.... this could go on a while....
Atari 2600 - Combat
Commodore 64 - Wizard (and a little F-19 Stealth Fighter)
PC - Zork until I got the latest CGA card then it was Test Drive until I got the latest EGA card then it was Maniac Mansion
Full Size Arcade Machine - hmm....can't remember what the first was, but some favorites were Cobra Command, Gauntlet, Battlezone, Star Wars, Spy Hunter, Pacman, Galaga, Donkey Kong & DK Jr.,
You know, Custer had a plan.
Hall of the Mountain King on a 300 baud plunger modem connected to a teletype.
Unfashionable as it may be, I went and read the article. The /. entry doesn't make it clear, but they are in fact talking about video games. (This makes Zonk's question of "What was your first experience with gaming? d20s on a kitchen table?" totally irrelevant.)
:-) We also had pong (or something like) on that system. About the same time, we also had lunar lander, printed out to a teletype. Can't remember what the computer was, though.
So mine was probably older than almost anyone's here: Billiards on a 6" oscilloscope screen, hooked up to a Nicolet NIC-80 computer, programmed by paper tape.
After that, my grandparents were quick to buy the very first home Pong system. Endless hours of fun there. By the time Space Invaders hit the arcade, my brother and I were 'seasoned gamers' indeed.
But still, it's billiards on that little 'scope display that I remember the most. That and Triple Action pinball.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If you don't count text games on an old type 33 Teletype (Lunar Lander, BattleShip), then for me it was the original Mazewar on the old Imlac PDS terminals back around 1975. It was also the world's first multiplayer game.
My first arcade game was Space Wars the next summer, which cost a quarter.
I'm only 22, so my first game was probably on the NES. I say probablly because I actually started playing videogames before the point in history that I can recall. I still play way too many games, but I play pretty much exclusively PC titles, so the cost of upgrading keeps me from buying all the new stuff. That and the wife. And the job. *sigh* 'funny' related story: My mom used to play Super Mario Brothers with me. She really blew, but every time she would attempt to jump over a pit, she would 'jump' the controller up and towards the direction she was jumping. I repeatedly told her it wouldn't do any good, but she always did it.... the other day I was playing Wii Bowling, and I remembered the old controller jump. Maybe it's that the systems aren't intuitive enough? My mom would probablly love the Wii.
The first video game I ever played was Pong in a bar. Later, Breakout and Pacman and the usual arcade suspects.
The first computer game I had that let you play against another remote player was called Modem Wars. It was similar to Stratego. You could dial up another player's modem and duke it out. We used a local BBS to set up matches. Great fun.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
My first gaming experience was punching and kicking my older brother over the Nintendo controller when I was a baby. My parents had to tell him to fight back and stop letting me act like a... spoiled baby!
(FYI, I heard this from, of course, my Mom while she was on an "embarrassing baby story" marathon)
First game I really remember was Stratego. I started making my own pieces, extending the game but don't really remember too much of that. I got D&D in the white box/three brown books. Still have the books. Couldn't really explain how to play it to my friend or sister so I spent a couple years just making dungeons and such. I'd already been making maps based off of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Finally, once the dragon picture box showed up, I was able to get some others playing. Turned out I didn't really like gaming; either DM'ing or as a player. Just liked making worlds and such.
For computers, the rich kid in our neighborhood had a TRS-80 and the Sears Pong game. We all hated him but sucked up in order to get time on his stuff.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I think it was Pong on my cousin's TV.
Followed up by Lunar Lander on a Radio Shack TRS-80 a few years later. Then lots of Adventure on a DEC PDP-8 at school.
My high school experience was basically writing games for the PDP-8. We even wrote a (simple) version of Defender.
My first video game experience was on a Coleco Gemini, which I played until it's innards fried. This was replaced with an Atari 2600 (which I also played to death), followed by a Nintendo (dead), a Super Nintendo (broken) and a PlayStation (still kicking). Then it was PC games for quite some time, but now that I am a Mac zealot with an underpowered video card I'm gravitating towards Guitar Hero games on consoles once again...
:-)
The death of the Gemini was also my first of many encounters with the mysterious blue smoke of fried electronics
That's right, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath baby!. It wasn't really my first gaming experience, that having been asteroids, but it was my first ever full fledged indulgence with a pc game.
once more into the breach
My first gaming experience was playing Colossal Cave on a teletype machine that was connected via acoustic coupler modem to a timeshare service while in High School.
;-)
Every time I would input my move, it would print out on the "endless" roll of paper what I saw - and for good measure, it also recorded the output on a roll of paper tape.
Since the timeshare service cost the school big $$$ - we were told to strictly use it for programming purposes, but an upper classman showed me the game once - and of course, I had to try it for myself.
After being banned from using that machine, I invested in a Model 1 TRS-80 which allowed me to play a variation of the game titled "Pyramid 2000", which was quite similar to Colossal Cave - and allowed me to continue where I had "left off".
Soon after Pyramid I discovered "Scott Adams" Adventure games - and the holy grail of gaming (at that time) an editor that allowed you to write your own Adventures - and to alter Scotts! (not that I would ever do such a thing)
My Adventure games were similar to later "Sierra Online" games, in that the simplest mistake would get you killed
Ah, memories - 16k worth...
First they burn books, then they burn people.
Mee too - I played first on an Atari 2600.
Martin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600
Lets see, there was chutes and ladders, monopoly. Then when I was a bit older Pong came out.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
LOL! I adored pinball and played Pong til the cows came home. The cows didn't like Pong, but eventually learned to love early Nintendo! :) My favorite video game ever was Dr. Mario....
TI-994a. then "Parsec" (with the speech synthesizer) then "Adventure" (Say: "Yoho") then "Tunnels of Doom" "Pitfall" on the Atari "B17 Bomber" on the Intellivision.
My first gaming experience was with a computer given to us by our neighbor. It was just a DOS machine (actually just command.com). The only thing included on the system was ZZT, the classic text-based game made by Tim Sweeney back in '91. I grew up on ZZT, and it was even my first steps into programming (with the internal programming language ZZT-OOP). Good times.
I believe the first video game I played was Space Invaders in a roller skating rink. I don't have anything interesting to say about that.
There was a Galaga and a Battlezone in the Osco drug store that I played occasionally a few years later. I remember once dying pretty much immediately in Battlezone. Then immediately afterward a mother bringing two children, probably twins, about 5 years old. She dropped in a quarter and they both played, each using one of the two joysticks used to steer the tank. They were too short to see the screen. And they beat my score.
It was clear to me that I was really a Galaga player at that point, and I never played that Battlezone machine again.
-Dave
On a green/red plasma-display Toshiba laptop.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I can remember Oregon trail on monochrome screens in elementary school, and I can remember a bass fishing game on my uncle's 386. However, the most vivid early gaming memory was EASILY playing Civilization when I was 9 and it had just come out. I was thrilled when I "figured out" to to fortify units in a city and then get them back out again, when I survived long enough to research the steam engine for the first time only to watch my brand new ironclad die attacking a trireme, or just looking at the Hanging Gardens from the city view and thinking about how amazing the graphics were...
And here I am now, having recently become re-addicted (CivIV:BTS), thinking about the attack I will launch on the Inca after I get home from work...
On a TRS-80 CoCo, my first gaming experience was Dino Wars in cartridge form.
Being 4 years old I was entranced by Dino Wars... controlling a big red or blue dinosaur around on the TV screen was probably the coolest thing ever. The game itself probably wasn't that fun, but for the hardware it ran on it did some pretty advanced graphical stuff. Two dinosaurs on the screen at once, and you could move them left-right as well as toward the foreground/background. And the dinosaur "sprites" would scale in real-time (i.e. get smaller and smaller as you moved him further away).
In any case it left an impact on me. And when I got a little older and my Dad showed me how I could tell the computer what I wanted it to do using BASIC... I think that determined my career path right then.
But what a great piece of hardware the CoCo was, at least for me personally. First computer my family ever owned, back in 1983. I was able to teach myself BASIC and some rudimentary assembler on it, all before I was a teenager. Used it for a couple science projects even.
And all the while not realizing these were skills I could get paid for when I got older and entered the real world. It wasn't until high school where I saw they had a 3 year sequence of programming courses (BASIC to Pascal to a college level Computer Science course) that I realized it, haha.
Still have the CoCo in my closet. It still works last I checked. If I had a place for it I'd probably set it up but alas, fancier stuff has taken its place. Ah well. My rambling over.
My parents decided to pawn me off to an Intellevision, the first game ever was Tron Deadly Discs and Nightstalker. I remember seeing pong and other arcade games, and being in awe that I could play them free at home!
Ryan
My mom would put trailmix and candies on all the places. So when you landed you got to eat yummy treats!
Been hooked ever since...
ahh, space invaders!
My dad got us a ZX81 when I was 9 and I was addicted from day 1. I saw War Games shortly after and it looked so cool to hack into wherever, so being the naive and uneqipped kid I was I started typing 1's and 0's into the terminal thinking I could hack anyone ... alas, not a thing.
My uncle had Pong and to this day I remember the first time I saw it when I was about 6 or 7 years old. I was captured right then and there. All I wanted in life was to play that game and ride motorcycles. I started writing my own games a few years later when I was 10 and finally had a real computer in the form of a TI-99/4A.
Don't remember too much about this game except it was kinda like a mix of Raiden and Starfox.
found a link though: linky
Computer Space coin op, 1972, in Philadephia. That thing had an fibreglas arcade cabinet with speckles embedded in the resin. Cooler than anything seen since.
I also played the original Galaxy Game at Tressider Union at Stanford, but that was a few years later.
I got a Sega Master System for christmas. If you booted it up without a game, it offered a maze that was captivating. When it was evident that I had mastered the maze, I received Choplifter. Great helicopter game.
I wrote my first game on an ASR-33 hooked up to a PDP-8.
Gunner - you were a medieval cannoneer; your cannon could blow up and kill you, or more or less randomly hit the target.
The kicker was that if you hit your target 7 times, the inquisition came and burned you at the stake, since only someone who signed a pact with the devil could hit his target 7 times in one day.
I also wrote something similar to battleship and a lunar lander but I'm a bit hazy on the details of those. I think some of these even ended up on a DEC tar file somewhere for distribution.
All this on endless rolls of paper. Sweet eh?
I can't remember if it was Mario Brothers on the NES, or Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe, but the first game that really got me was Final Fantasy 2 (4 in Japan). After that, there was no turning back. I sucked in Kings Quest, Quest for Glory, Zork, and the continued not-so-Final Fantasys that followed.
-
*drools* GAMES!!!!! *more drooling and facial ticks*
My first experience with video games was Pong. It was cocktail table version located at Spaghetti Warehouse in downtown Dallas. This was around 1973 or 1974. My first hand held video game was Football. http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Mattel/FB.htm
I'm 29, and my first game ever was Galaga (on coin-op arcade). I still love that game, the simplicity, playability and just fun factor. Easy to pick up, like so many other game of the 80s. Sometimes I still fire up Mame or a C64 emulator to play my old favorites and get nostalgic. Many of the newer games require you to go much more in depth to really be able to enjoy them. Ah, well, I guess people in general only really love the stuff they have good childhood memories about.
I was about six years old, and an only child. It was New Year's Eve and we were at my parents' friends' house. The friends were both engineers (a married couple) and grade-A geeks, and the house was filled with computer parts, Star Trek action figures, and all sorts of other things I'd appreciate more now.
;)
It was about 11:00 p.m. and I was starting to get "not tired" and irritable the way small kids do. I could read and write and had some minor familiarity with computers (we had an Atari computer at home, courtesy of my worked-for-Lotus uncle), so to keep me entertained my dad's friend sat me down at his desk and fired up a program.
"A friend gave me this," he said, "and a friend of his gave it to him. It's from the Soviet Union so you may not know about it yet."
That game was Tetris, and I was hooked. I begged my dad for most of the month of January to let me play it again and for my birthday (February) he got the engineer friend to make us a copy.
The following years saw me playing Oregon Trail at friends' houses and saving up babysitting money to get LucasArts classics from the J&R catalog. I never had much money, but I played Nintendo at Jenny's house and Sega at the Brooks's. In recent years (where I am a grown-up with my own paycheck but yet no kids, haha) this has translated into my own custom-built gaming PC and a Wii (with a 360 to come this year).
Even now, when I play newer versions of Tetris on my DS or whatnot, I think fondly back to being a little girl and being immeasurably pleased at being able to kick my dad's ass at a video game.
Commodore 64: Quest for Tires circa 1983. This is the first video game I remember.
I remember my dad playing this in front of the whole family, and being utterly terrified of the end because of a dinosaur head that pops out of a cave and tries to eat the caveman. I'd go into my room and watch the TV peeking around the corner, waiting for him to get past it so I could go back in the room. The graphics were so realistic.
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
Pong ? yeah I played it when some neighbors bought the Atari version.
Some time after that, we bought a Apple ][e, and I never really quit gaming since.[Pruneau
We had 2 different Telestar's. In the following link we had the 2nd one and the 3rd ones on the page. The black one even had a revolver looking gun that came with it, an early version of duck hunt... well, you just shot at a square block I think...
http://www.game-machines.com/consoles/telestar.php
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
I remember playing Shamus on the old PCjr. Never could beat the thing, rarely even got half way. I was so excited when I discovered years later that I could emulate a C64 version, and turn off collisions! Oh, and those old BASIC games, Star Trek, Super Star Trek, and Landing Party. And there was some sort of Clue variant that I never beat, and have never been able to find, where you move this little face around the house from room to room interviewing suspects and looking for inconsistencies in their alibis. Then Deep Space and Space Station Oblivion came along and rocked my world.
Former US House candidate, TN-5
That's a tough one to answer. I almost experienced the d20 but I wasn't cool enough to fit in to THAT crowd. Ironically enough, I play the game here and there today. So I'd have to say my first experience was actually before that, in Japan. They had the desktop video games (Space Invaders) and Pachinko games (a bit like slots). This was several years before I had my own Atari 2600 (where I learned how to press that red button like no tomorrow, and replace the springs). I remember Colecovision and Intellivision as well around that time.
The first I can recall is when I was 6-7 years old playing Robot Odyssey on my family's Tandy 1000. It was a really awesome game where you'd program robots via logic gates to accomplish tasks and go through mazes and such. I don't think I ever got past the 2nd level, though.
It turns out that somebody's gone about creating an open-source clone of the game in java, called DroidQuest. It's worth checking out.
I was a 16yo Antioch College freshman psych major, the department visited a fridge-sized PDP off-campus and we each got to try Lunar Lander. I crashed, but I still say they had the equation for gravity wrong-- it accelerated way too fast.
I can also remember playing Chutes and Ladders for the first time, and thinking, "Wow...this is even BETTER than Candyland!"
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
At the Rye (NY) Playland Ice Casino.
The two-player version, where one person drove the front, and someone else could stand in back and drive the back of the truck.
They also had Stunt Cycle at the time, but for an 8 year old, Fire Truck was it. It was hard to get time on the machine though, until Space Invaders came out.
Can we assume your first gaming experience was "Oregon Trail" on the Apple ][?
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
...on the Apple 2e
First gaming experience: being lifted up by my dad so I could play a Space Invaders machine in while on holiday Teignmouth (circa 1979)
First home gaming experience: playing PacMan on the Atari 2600 (circa 1982)
Best gaming experience (still): playing Half-Life with my co-workers after hours on our company network (circa 2001). Nothing since has come close to the joy of playing a good multiplayer game with friends, in the same room, on a no-lag local network.
Scorched Earth was my first gaming addiction.
I had Cosmic Cruncher, Omega Race, Radar Rat Race, Lunar Lander, Gorf, and a hand full of others that I can't remember. I'm sure I had a pong or breakout game on it as well. My favorite was Omega Race by far. I wasted many hours on that game, until I my parents gave me a book on video games written in BASIC. Later I inherited the TRS-80 when they got a Wang, and the Wang eventually followed suit. I didn't have any games for the TRS-80 or the Wang, but they were still fun to program on.
Almost funny: three pages worth of replies, and noone mentioned MASTERMIND.
Back in my student days, I wrote (because I was told to, as an exercise) two versions of the color-guessing game in a version that replaced the colors by digits 0-9: one on a PDP-8 in FOCAL (with an antique teletype as terminal), the other on a KIM-1 in assembler.
0123
1 match, 0 in position.
4567
2 match, 0 in position.
The KIM version was even simpler, because all there was for I/O were a LED display and a hex keypad.
I remember that i had a buroughs computer that my dad brought home in mid 1982 (born in 79). No one in the house could get the damn thing to work. It was supposed to have all this stuff already loaded on it. Word processing, games, graphics, but it had some weird proprietary OS or something on it (maybe an early early unix, i honestly can't remember).
Low and behold, who is the only person who is able to figure out how the damned thing worked. me, muggin's here. loved it. loved it to insane amounts. I would spend hours looking at the screen, typing in various different commands, playing with the shell, running the programs. I was hooked. Especially with Choplifter. The game was awesome. The levels were awesome. It was intense, and got me hooked.
In many respects, my first gaming experience was also my first computer experience.
after that, my parents graduated me to an atari 2600. That lasted for years, until I finally got a NES, then a Gameboy, then a SNES, then a playstation, then N64, then Dreamcast, then Xbox. Haven't moved up to the wii or 360 yet, just out of personal protest of the costs of online subscriptions on the 360 and the lack of supply of the Wii (getting one in march for the bday).
There was something about the 4bit graphics that we used to play with that is totally different from todays gaming. We were able to get deeper into a game, play for hours and hours, because there was no way to save. It never seemed repetative, just a challenge. 20$ for a game, and once you beat it, you would move on to the next game. Modern games, with their episodic content and world-replacing reality have lost some of the connection we early mid late 30 year olds had with our games of youth.
Who didn't spend hundreds in quarters on Tron or Star Wars Arcade as a youth. You ever regretted it? doubt it.
1974, highschool, I grabbed some BASIC code for the old UN*X game "CHASE" out of a magazine and typed it into the only computer at the school a PDP-11/16 (no video, just DEC paper terminals and a TTY machine for saving and loading code on punched paper tape, and hard drives the size of washing machines). (Later, in college, I made an enhanced version of this game for the Apple IIe under the name "TAR", which became so popular kids were breaking the keyboards in the library, until the librarians made me take back all the floppy disks I had given out. Eventually, I started to port it to the Amiga, but I haven't finished it... yet!)
Anything that comes from MTV is definitely not news worthy. Changing the call sign to CTV (Commercial TV), NTV (Narcissist TV), LoCPTV (Lack of Creative Programing TV).
I grew up though the 70s and 80s. Pong was the thing as well as the Atari 2600 and the Commodore64, but now it's the same crap, just better graphics. The video game industry is becoming more and more stagnant. People will say that games are better now then they have ever been, and I would agree if your talking about the graphics.
The game play has gone down hill because most everything is being designed to be ported to Xbox and PS with it's controller interface.
The creativity in games have been taking a good idea and building crap on top of it. I.E. The NFS 2 had a great multi player interface in which you could race against your friend and out run the police. Now it is replaced by random driving though city and changing the color of your card paint.
STOP with the eye candy and build a game with creativity and a great game play. That is the only reason why Unreal has lasted as long as it has. The eye candy is now there, but the game play made the game with it's great network stack.
I had the honor of enjoying my first experience by not even playing the game. My brother came home from his friends house and talked about this, "Jones in the Fast Lane". He said something along the lines of, "this guy went a baseball game and threw up hot dogs". Now I was only five or six at the time but at that point the journey was on to meet this "Jones" guy, and the story goes and I find out he was a video game character. Then Wolfenstein came around and badda bing badda boom.
Snipes was included in the early Novell LAN installs as a "performance testing tool". Used a shared file as the board and 5 or 6 users could run their pieces around the ascii board shooting at one another. Great fun at lunch in the office. Was deleted when we ticked off a VP who didn't like us shouting across the cubicles. My first experience with a multi-player game. Also,due to the terrible keyboard interface, my first experience with hands crippled by typing.
The first game I remember was playing "Hunt the Wumpus" on a terminal in my Dad's office. "Hangman" and an early version of "StarTrek" were close seconds.
I also recall playing life using an early version of the mouse in one hand and a funny "piano keyboard" sort of thing on the other. That was at an "open house" of some sort.
Hopefully some wise guy will say "that their first computer game was placing bets on how long the Bombes would take to finish a message."
As far as electronic gaming goes, it was probably Pong of all things. The first satisfying game was Ultima III, I even have the cloth map hanging on my wall. No idea where the little metal ankh is tho.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
My Uncle T. was a finance geek. He was the finance director of oil mining drill bit company. Used to carry around a small bag of black diamonds with him and I thought this was the coolest thing ever.
...as a suitcase full of clothes. It had an 8cm green screen and an integrated keyboard. Very noisy piece of kit. This would have been about 1980, I think.
:)
He had portable computer the size of a suitcase. It was as heavy as a...
There was a game on it where you stood on a mountain shooting cannon balls across the valley trying to hit player two on the other side. You had to type in the weight on the ball, the angle of attack, the power, etc. I couldn't get enough of it.
He would never let me play it for long because of the risk of breaking it - it got so hot. I would have done the washing up for a year if he'd have let me have a decent go.
I did the Pong thing, NES and all that, but this was my first go on a PC playing games. (Actually that might be a lie because I remember playing Animal when I was a boy too - which came first?)
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Anyone remember 'Gorillas'? It came with some QBasic package that my dad was running on a 386. That also reminds me of 'Schorched Earth' which my brother and I would play for hours, flinging 'Death heads' at random off the bouncy walls to see how many AI tanks named 'Wilbert' or 'Deiter' we could smash into oblivion.
My earliest meaningful gaming experiences occurred daily before my mother dropped me off at daycare. She would catch me staring mindlessly at arcade style game screens completely enthralled by the glowy lights... I was too young to really get-it. So she picked up an Atari 2600 when it first came out and we would get up an hour early everyday to play together before she went to work and I went to daycare. I was about 3-4 years old and we had a blast!! It's one of my fondest video game memories as it involved family and represented my first exposure to the video game world; I was *just* starting to 'get-it'.
;-)
I am not a hardcore gamer but have always had taken a healthy interest & enjoyment in gaming; sports, vids, tabletop, you name it! I think I was able to do this in part because my mother participated and it doesn't matter how awesome something is, when your parent is involved, you will be desperate to find something else to do in fairly short order
A Magnavox Odyssey with a membrane keyboard and funky silver joysticks. It's so long ago that I couldn't even tell you what games I had for it, but I do remember having a lot of fun with it. I think we got touch-tone on our phone and a microwave oven that same year.
It was responsible for initiating my lust for all thing tech; not long after I started working my way through the Commodore product line and then into IBM.
Yes I remember playing some old video games. As to which one was first I am not really that sure, it was a long time ago.
I remember my dad trying to get games to run on our TRS-80... which didn't really work.
I also remember playing pong on this device with dials you hooked up to your TV. It was probably my first disappointment as well, as it had a number of different setting, one of which was hockey. To my dismay, it was pong with like 5 paddles on each side all of which moved together.
I had friends that had Coleaco and Atari systems, and I remember playing those... they mostly sucked also.
I had a friend with a Commodore 64, and I remember spending a lot of time at his place playing pitfall and the like. It was pretty fun.
I also later got a 286, which I played a lot of BBS door games (if you don't know what that is, get off my lawn!) like tw2002,and crappy games like wolf3d or curse of the azure bonds, or take your pick of side scrollers or adventure games like king/police quest etc...
After that was the original Nintendo with good 'ole Mario, Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc... tons of games.
Several consoles and computers later (Warcraft 2, Duke3d, Doom 2, Starcraft, and other goodies), etc..
I have an xbox (which I don't use for anything by DVD's now) and a nice computer now (which I primarily play WOW, some Quake Wars, a bit of ET, and a sprinkle of MOO2 when I am in the mood). I couldn't bring myself to buy either the 360 or the PS3 or the Wii.
Nothing to add, but lets just say my imagination had more resolution than my HDTV.
It's really not fair to just pick one, because different game types have different influences.
First gaming experience: "Blitzkreig," a hexagonal-board battle game. Later played quite a few other classic hex games, like Richthofen's War, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Borodino, etc.
First video game: Pong, in a friend's basement. Wasn't impressed.
First college gaming experience: RPG: Tunnels & Trolls, and later D&D.
First arcade video game experience: Space invaders also came out while I was in college, but the first arcade video game that really grabbed me was Galaga.
Favorite gaming experience: Diplomacy. Started playing it in college. No game comes close for me, video, RPG or board. Too bad it's so darn hard to find six other players willing to devote the time to play it properly.
I still play video games, but perfer RPG or turn-based games to shooters. Once you turn 50, you just don't have the eye-hand coordination any more.
(I can still beat my son at Madden '08, though!)
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
And for some reason I don't rememebr the titles as well as I remember the experiences.
//c because it couldn't access some inner disk sector.
First computer game was coin-op tabletop Pong in some restaurant while the family was traveling cross country. I remember the whole family watching it like a TV for the whole meal. Then I was finally allowed to put a quarter in it and I lost almost immediately. Then we got in the car and left that town far behind.
The first home game machine was a Pong clone. Came with two paddles and you screwed it into the rabbit ears in the back of the TV. However it didn't have a switch to go between channel 3/4, it would only work on channel 3. But since I was right next to the CBS channel 3 transmitter, even without an antenna hooked up I couldn't get a good enough signal to get it to work. I was denied my revenge against Pong.
First educational game was some kind of math/space invaders game on my TI-99 4/a. Yeah, I don't remember the game, but I remember thinking that educational games were crap. Fast forward 25 years where I designed them for a living. That early awful experience was one of the driving forces.
The first multiplayer experience was when I was in my first year of college (1990). I sat down at a terminal and someone had left it connected to some random TinyMUD. I didn't even know there were multiplayer games! I dicked around with it for a while, but didn't really figure out what I was doing until much later. It left a lasting impression.
Later that same year I played a 2 player jet fighting sim over modem (direct dial-up, probably 300 baud). We spent 15 minutes flying towards each other, saw each other for about 1/4 of a second as we overflew each other and then got disconnected.
Around that time I played the first game that I stayed up all night playing. It was Dune 2 and it had me enthralled. I stayed up playing until the sun was well into the sky. It was a totally new type of game play that took both thought and prompt action. Started my general interest in RTSG.
The first game I pirated was Karateka on the Apple ][. Turns out that the copy protection kept it from working on my Apple
I remember spending a few hours typing in hex codes from the back of InCider or Byte magazine to get a Missle Command style game.
I don't remember the first game I programmed. I'm sure there were dozens. The first one I wrote in assembly was a basic version of Lemmings (The first game I played on a Amiga, and the first game I played with a mouse.) However it ran too fast to be much playable and only had one level. (Remember the Turbo button?)
There are a lot more, but one thing I learned in all of the intervening years: I'm really not very good at Pong.
Text-based adventures (Zork, etc.), then Rogue (an IBM-PC version of NetHack).
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
I remember back in the '70s my dad brought home pong. We hooked it up with an RF switch to the back of a small black and white television and played for hours and hours. I remember just being transfixed by the idea of being able to actually control something on a television. It was an amazing experience. Later we got the Atari 2600 system and that really opened my eyes to the possibilities of electronic games. My first 2600 game? Combat! The tank battle was fun, but the airwar part of it was my favorite!
On a PDP8, at Clemson. I was in high school at the time, and wrote most of the code on a TSS8 machine over a phone line. Controls were the main switch register. I am still amazed that it displayed actual moving, orbiting blobs the first time I ran it on the box with the 1024x1024 oscilloscope.
Later on as an undergrad, I cleaned it up and moved the controls over to two boxes with four push buttons each (turn left, turn right, thrust, shoot).
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
My first "Video Game" was the "RCA Studio II". Has ANYONE else ever heard of it? It came out in 1977. It had the same black and white blocky graphics as Pong, but it had 5 built in games and a cartridge slot. It had 2 numerical keypads for controls that could be used for both number based games and as directional arrows. I spent hours playing bowling, racing, or drawing complicated pictures that could not be saved, lol. Then, finally, I found some carts for it at a rummage sale that included an early 1 or 2 player Spacewar type game. Think I played the thing until I wore out the keypads.
Nevermore.
at MIT Railroad Club
Man, I feel old just thinking about it.
Game Program Combat
Am no fek Buddhist, but this is enlightenment.
I was very young, 4-5 maybe, and don't even remember the house it was in.
It was around 1985, and we had just gotten a Commodore 64. The game was Donald Duck's Playground http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/reviews/view.php%3Fid%3D588
You worked as Donald Duck to get money, and then you bought playground pieces for his nephews to play on. This, and Burger Time.
Fun fact, I just found out this game was in color. We had a black and white monitor for the C64, I had always assumed the game had no color. Amazing, thanks Slashdot!
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist" -I guess I should leave then
Pong. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop..bloop. Bloop.
Before that... pin ball games - some of which were very very elaborate.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
And not the fancy graphics based version either!
Gregor
hee hee
Sure, I played some game about a boulder rolling down a hill on a Commodore PET, and I played Pong on an Atari 2600, along with Gyruss, Asteroids, and Tempest at the arcade, pizza parlor and local supermarket, but the game I really remember as being intesely great was Dragon's Lair, the Laserdisc game. I first played this at an arcade in the mall in Central Islip, NY when I was nine or ten years old, and after plunking $1 into it for two games (because, you know, it cost an astonishing $0.50!!), I walked away with my knees shaking from excitement.
I remember thinking at the time that this was the future of games. Not the one choice per second, or the limits, but the sound, the pictures, and the immersion that Dragon's Lair offered. No longer was I simply pushing giant colored pixels around a screen, I was a real character, as real as any Saturday Morning Cartoon, on a real adventure facing off against fully realized environments and traps. Sure, they were the same every time, and there was very little "game" there. That didn't matter. It was the experience, the sheer emotional rush, that really got to me.
There were games I'd played before Dragon's Lair, but that was the first "game experience" that produced a real response, and it's something I'll never forget.
My first video game experience was a battery operated phong game with a built in speaker inside the white chassis operating on a black and white panasonic television back in the 70's i believe.... I was fascinated with it,,,later on i bought an atari 2600 vcs video game....where it was possible to change the game cartridges...man was that a lot of fun.....i got so intrigued that I bought a commodore 64 from a magazine that just tested and reviewed it..that I had to make my own software from it...first in basic..then later in machine code using the hesmon 64 cartridge....creating shoot them up games for it..being naive enought to realize that there where no need for sellable games for this device back then..damnit...oh well....shit happens..and then you learn stuff...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
My first computer gaming experience was in High School (1970) on a field trip to Bell Labs. They showed us one computer that was running their home grown space war: 2 ships on the screen with thrust, rotate left/right, and fire buttons. The ships popped into space on each side of the screen and (if you didn't start thrusting) fell into the sun.
The Bell Labs guys said that this was not an actual project, just something they did for fun but they had a signup list to play at lunch that was a mile long.
I was already interested in computers but that clinched it.
boyfoot_bear [with teak of chan]
Well, Lunar Lander on my TI-99 got me through some boring college classes. There was something I played on my TRS-80, but I don't remember it. When I got my first PC, a genuine IBM-AT, it was the Infocom games - Zork, etc.
What was your first experience with gaming?
Hide and seek, you insensitive clod.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
i mean,my first memory is yars revenge,i think i watched it when i was a baby
:3
but my mom told me that she played missile command,a LOT when was pregnant of me
But I don't really count that as it belonged to my sister's boyfriend and I only played it once. A couple years later a pizza place my mom went to after work had several video games I used to feed quarters to -there was a submarine game I've long forgotten the name of that was my favorite. I'd count that as my first gaming experience.
Didn't try pen&paper RPGs until the nineties and still never got into them.
I "ported" a BASIC Star Trek game to PL/I in 1975, by hosing the code into a text editor and making all the BASIC line numbers into PL/I labels, among other software engineering atrocities.
I put an ad for this game into Creative Computing, eventually selling about 50 copies by shipping decks of punched cards through the US mail.
I even got a legitimate, for-pay account on Clemson's 370 mainframe to handle the card punching. And discovered that the command I was told to use for punching didn't charge my account, so my profit margin was huge.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Yep, I played the first Magnavox Odyssey - black and white, no sound, just dots moving around behind plastic overlays that you stuck to the screen. Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Given the above question, most folks answer should be something like Candyland or Concentration. And I doubt many people really remember the first time they played Candyland or similar games for 3-4 year olds.
My first experience would probably involve a deck of cards, though I have no idea what specific game it would be: go fish most likely. My first computer game would be a teletype checkers game played on a shared university mainframe when I was in 7th grade, er.. 1981ish. And my first encounter with a d20 would be the Red box Basic Set when I was 12 and it was the dining room table. My first gaming console (located in a house I lived in) would be a Playstation 2. I always preferred PC gaming but my wife wanted a console.
I am not that old. It was back in home, in India. We used to live in a small house, and it all looked so big back then.
:)
:)
:)
My father was a lecturer in a University, and when we would get sick we would go to University Health Center. I remember that whenever we would get sick, my father would take us in the morning with him to his department. Then he would leave us into computer room ("Oh this room is for staff members, how lucky are we!") and start a game of Space Commanders (and sometimes Gorilla on QBASIC). It must have been 1992 or 1991, I don't remember clearly. I still do remember though, that whenever we would get sick, we would be so happy for the next day
Later he a got an IBM PC and he bought it back. On a hindsight, I think my father himself was a geek. On a 5-1/4 floppy we would have DIGGER and SPACE COMMANDER and PC-MAN! Man it was so fun! And it was incredibly hard to beat my father
Then one day he bought us KEEN4E.EXE, and PRINCE.EXE. I don't think any game molded my imagination more than Prince of Persia. It. Was. Awesome. I would later draw the prince and Jaffar and the scene of princess room on Corel 5.
When I reached my bachelors, for the first time I saw internet. And my third semester's grade sheet is proof that I played a LOT of Pacman. And only a month ago I finished Commander Keen. My father still bodes that he even completed Pyramid of the Forbidden. This time when I meet him I have something to tell him
I miss my childhood.
On topic: best line from the article - "Back then it seemed to all make sense - the flying around, trying to catch the popsicles and root beer mugs..."
When I was around 6 years old I remember watching those big guys playind arcade machines. I never had the chance to play them since my parents never helped me :P, however I could stand there for hours watching the big coloured "squares" moving around. Fortunately for me, one day my dad arrived with an atari 2600 and two games. Space attack and pacman. I remember perfectly how we connected the system to the tv set and plugged the space attack cartridge, WOWWW it was great to move the green aim so you could shoot the "space battleships", hehehehehe those graphics were so simple. I played the atari 2600 for hours, days, years (pacman, baseball, soccer, tennis, jungle hunt, frogger, pigs in space, space invaders, moon patrol --> GREAT GAME, etc). After some years a NES arrived (not forget the zapper) and Mario opened a new era for me, I could actually finish a game!!! I finished so many games, hahahaha I remember having a list of finished games (for sure more than a hundred), hahahaha I think I had no life, hahahaha.
;-). PS2 with the god of war series (prince of persia, guitar hero, madden, fifa, devil may cry, ...), nintendo wii (Zelda, Rayman, Mario, Madden, Metroid) and in the future a ps3 (sorry microsoft no xbox I love linux).
Genesis arrived, I was shocked how great the games were (remember altered beast?) and during the SNES vs Genesis battle Street Fighter II camed by. I played that game so much time, I think my mother contribute a lot to Capcom's economy for all the tokens I spend in that game, hehehe. All my friends took me to their arcades so I could avenge them in Street Fighter II (Oh my god I had no life at all, hehehe).
When the following consoles arrived I decided to make a pause in my "videogame career", my bachelour in telecommunications engineering was a bit more demanding, then two years and a half in different jobs, a master in computer science, and then I came back baby
My life with no videogames could not be complete, cheers for my first video game experience!!!
The system was an old Sears Atari 2600.
The name of the game... was Yars' Revenge.
Coleco ADAM was my first gaming rig. Colecovision cartridges AND hand coding programs from BASIC magazine baby!
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
To show my age it would be this :http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/scripts/picshow.php?image=videosport.jpg&folder=/Museum/Pong&back=/Museum/Pong/index.php
I owned one of those plugged into my portable black and white TV. Of course space invaders was out in the arcades at the time and it blew this junk into the water...
Then came the Atari 2600.......
As for many people in the UK who were at school in the 1980s, my first gaming experience was Granny's Garden on a BBC Micro. This was approximately 1983, so I'd have been 5 or 6 years old. It was a few years before home computers and consoles became commonplace, and the UK government had just started to really push computing into schools. Dan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game) That game was so hard when I was 6 years old
The original...played in a bar where my buddy and I were doing some serious underage drinking.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I am pretty sure that my first contact with videogames was the arcade version of Space Invaders, in a small cafe by the port in my childhood village. I was 6 or 7 then, and for nostalgy sake I kept coming back year after year to this place until the cafe was destroyed to enlargen the port. There was no joystick (only left/right buttons) and I kept losing, but was so fascinated by the game that I insisted all the time for my schoolmates to come with me and play it. The bartender would tolerate me playing if my father was around, but not a bunch of kids with no money. Fun times though. Then I remember huge arcades full of teenagers and punks ; my father was quite reluctant even to bring me there, but I remember Silent Service, M65 Ambush, Gunsmoke, Frogger with the noises, all those shooting games..and all those pinballs of course, Xenon or Devil's Dare. On consoles I remember Pong, Vectrex games and so on at my cousin's but I did not have any since I had a C64 with Time Pilot, Ghostbusters (in that order) and then a bunch of pirated games when the computer got popular..
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Phantasy Star, the game that forever molded me into a fat nerd, until I grew 8 inches between 8-9th grade, became a basketball standout, had sex (with a girl) and went on to a merry life of playing sports for money. If you change the word sports to whoring, that is.
It was "Golf" on a Xerox (!) mainframe. The local university donated computer time to our high school, and we could dial up the mainframe using acoustic couplers and a DEC Writer terminal and mess around. Only one terminal for the whole school, and no PC's at that time, but this was before computers became massively popular so access to it was not a big deal.
"Golf" was written in BASIC, and it would basically type out where you were, e.g. "You are in the fairway 40 yards from the pin" and then you would type in your club selection.
Then I discovered the "list" command, and got a copy of the code. I realized that I could change the game any way I wanted to, so not only was it my first gaming experience, but the beginning of my career.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
My first thought was,"Why can't I use the buttons in the game?" even though I never saw buttons used in any game.
God spoke to me.
I was 6:
http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/generated/tapeinfo/m/Mazogs.html
On my ATARI 2600.
When mom forbid from playing long sessions of it dad picked me up one of those Mattel Football games (I'm sure you've seen the reissue-just little LEDs on a football shaped screen) and man was that thing fun. Soon I had portable pinball, pool, baseball and Space Invaders. The coach used to let me get out of gym class (I sucked at gym anyway) by letting him borrow one during class and he and I would play games while everyone else did laps,LOL! Man, those were the days. I could whip Coach at pool and pinball, but he would wipe the floor with me on football and baseball.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Thumb wrestling and bloody knuckles
Lode Runner, Birds, Tank!s, Hot Air Balloon, Wheel of Fortune, etc on Mac OS6. I managed to hook up to its serial port and apple-talk the filesystem to my PC where I can now emulate it in vMac, even with all my old homework from elementary school on it. I still have the machine in its original carrying case in the closet where the 20MB drive can rot in peace. I also have an Apple IIc with an onslaught of games that was there alongside the SE back in the day. I've successfully copied disk images from my PC to it to complete the collection, but not having success copying number munchers/o'dell lake back :(
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Yeah so! I was four. It came with a special controller for the Atari.
C64 - My first game was a little cooler One on One: Julius Erving and Larry Bird You could even break the backboard in 1984.
My first video game ever, must've been one of the earliest Magnavox Odyssey series, like a 300 or 400. I was only about 5 at the time, but I remembered it was bright red, and had knobs to turn to move the paddles. Of course, later on I wasted lots of money and time on all the classic quarter-operated arcade machines whenever my folks would let me. In school, we got a few Commodore PETs, and I wasted as much time as the teachers allowed playing "Miner" on them with the cheesey character block graphics and speaker beep sounds.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My first games were on single sided floppies for my Dad's Fat Mac. I was like two or three, but I can remember Count On Mac, Concentration, Daleks (which, at the time, I never understood), Battleship, and Pinball Construction Set. Later, it was Prince of Persia, Sufflepuck Arcade, and Specter on the Classic before we upgraded to the Performa and got color! Actually, I can remember allot of the games from this page.
#include <signature.h>
I think I played Jumpman Jr first, or maybe it was Gateway to Apshai. They both come to mind. Ahh, the good old 8 bit pixelated graphics. But the gameplay was sure fun!
The expression is "I could NOT care less." Think about it.
Second-Gen gamer here. River Raid on the 2600 my father bought for himself. Over Christmas he was yelled at for playing too much RockBand.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Yes, that's right - I had to drive hundreds of miles to play a video game!
Much later on I was to work as a software engineer for Dave Johnson, who was himself a games programmer for Atari very early on. He introduced me to Nolan Bushnell when we ran into him in a bookstore.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
but the question says nothing about computers. The first game I remember playing would be either Shutes and Ladders, Candy Land or maybe Parcheesi probably about 1957 or so.
I remember Munchman was the first game I played on a TI-99-4A computer. It's like Pac-Man in reverse; you lay down chain instead of eat up dots. Other great games for the TI-99-4A include Parsec and Alpiner. I actually still have the system and it works.
Related: Advantages of Classic Games over Today's Modern Video Games
I was working on my Boy Scout computers merit badge, and a friend of my parents let me use a computer of some sort at Fluke.
I still remember sitting in that cold room, the tall menhirs of flashing lights and whirring tapes behind me. When I was done running my programs, he said, "try this." He typed
ADVENT
and my fate was sealed. I work on computers to this day. The first game I wrote myself for my TRS-80 model 1 (4K of memory!) was a simple text adventure.
Willy Wonka had it all wrong. It's computers that are worlds of pure imagination.
Followed shortly by Space Invaders on the same machine
No sig today...
My first computer gaming experience was playing checkers on the Dartmouth Timesharing System, back when it was still called DTSS, running on a GE mainframe. Every square on the checkerboard had a number, and you entered your move as the from square and the to square. This was all at 110 baud on a ASR-33 teletype.
I few years later I played ADVENT on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E...
Both of those experiences clearly touched me in some way, as evidenced by my 27 year career (so far) in computing...
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Mine was on the Vic-20, the Commodore-64's immediate predecessor. The first was a simple Basic counting game that I think my mom wrote as part of a programming tutorial. I'm guessing I was about three years old at the time.
My first commercial game was probably Tooth Invaders. You were a toothbrush, running around on a set of 2-D teeth, removing plague. Germs would wander around depositing plague and could kill you. If enough plague accumulated, you'd get a cavity and lose. Graphics quality put Strong Bad's "Duck Pond" to shame. After that it was Mole Attack, Moon Base, and the best game available at the time: Choplifter.
After we got a 286, I spent quite a bit of time on the first edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator, flying a 172 out of Midway, amusing myself sometimes by flying into the Hancock building.
Aww...the memories. I should go find an emulator and ROM's for all these.
Lakehurst Mall, c1983, Aladdin's Castle. My father picked me up so I could reach the controls on a Frogger machine.
... unless someone hacked on it a lot after I released it into the wild. Mine was the grid-of-quadrants navigated by warp drive, impulse drive within a quadrant, move around and shoot at stuff version.
The only thing I added to it was Tholians, who would grab you as you entered a quadrant and start laying web segments around you. Your phasers would bounce off the web and hit you, so you could escape them only by hitting them with photon torpedoes.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Pong on the Coleco Telstar Ranger.
You could play any game you wanted to as long as it was:
Pong
Hockey
Tennis
Jai Alai
Skeet
or
Target
http://www.pong-story.com/coleco_ranger.htm
My family owned a bowling ally that had a decent sized arcade, so I'm not sure what my first video game was, but I definitely remember playing Space Invaders, Asteroids, Battle Zone and Crash before I started kindergarten.
When they person who we leased the games from would take the coins, he'd usually put a few credits on each for us.
I'm pretty sure it was croquinole, might have been checkers, but I liked shooting the game pieces across the board, so I wouldn't have been much fun to play against. I guess I would have been two years old or thereabouts.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Precursor to asteroids, two triangle spaceships fly around a sun spitting missile pixels at each other.
Be careful not to fly too close to the sun!
Hmmm... First Game was Astro-warrior for the Sega Master System First Computer game was the ever classic Wolfenstein 3D And teh world just got cooler and more bloody from there :-D
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
I took a long time until a game came out that was better than it...
That would have been in the Clarksville drive-in snack bar in a shit hole town of the same name...I was so small that I couldn't see the whole screen of the Space Invanders game that I would have stood and watched the entire time the movie played if I could have. Didn't even get to play it
But the comment about driving your Mom crazy with the sound reminded me of a much later memory...playing Kung Fu on the NES (remember the noise it made when you kicked? "FOO FOO FOO FOO FOO!" and you kicked CONSTANTLY) when suddenly my door is literaly kicked in by Dad while shouting at the top of his lungs "Turn that shit OFF!!!".
Looking back on it now, it was probably as much caused by Makers Mark as it was by Kung Fu...
I had Pac Man too but I REALLY loved Combat. Especially the tank levels with the ponging bullets. I'd LOVE to play that again.
1. First video game experience: Atari 2600 as a very young child (I had to have been about 2). One of my favorite games was Tutankhamen, which I pronounced "Too-TANK-em."
2. First taste of NES: At my best friend's house next door. It was Super Mario Brothers, and I was amazed by how the game scrolled, and how you could jump and had to avoid the holes. I remember completing Level 1-1 after a few tries, much to the surprise of my friend and his parents. This had to have been early in the NES life cycle; 85-86.
3. First gaming high point: Super Mario Brothers 3. That game was HUGE. I remember begging everybody that I knew or barely knew who had a copy to let me play it. I finally got invited over to my grandparents' neighbors' house to play it.
4. First RPG: Dragon Quest for NES, free with my subscription to Nintendo Power. I had to gain experience, so I went around town talking to people. I went back to the king, who said I haven't gained any experience. What!?
6. First "multiplayer" gaming experience: Command & Conquer over the phone line with my previously-mentioned best friend.
7. First major multiplayer experience: Quake 1. After playing countless games of Duke 3D over Kali, a friend game me a set of 4 numbers separated by 3 periods and told me to type it into the Multiplayer Game box. I did, and I was surrounded by ~10 other gamers, running and gunning, fragging left and right. That marked the beginning of the end of my social career.
8. First MMORPG: Technically it was this Java game about space pirates (I can't remember the exact name). You started out in these random 2D rooms, then you can go fly around in space and mine asteroids or something. But my first REAL experience was with Ultima Online. That blew me away.
Adventureland and VooDoo Castle on an Exidy Sorcerer when I was 8 or 9
Technoli
I was born in late 1972. My first memory of video games is my dad holding me up so I could see Space Invaders running its demo.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Between Taskmaker and Marathon, and a few other old games for the mac that I got from Macformat magazine, I spent most of my time in the basement until my parents deleted the 'games' folder. That's when I think I started thinking about smoking, underaged drinking, and hanging out with questionable people. Then they got me a NES from a garage sale, and I was back in the basement.
1968 - SpaceWar! on the MIT PDP-1
Around 1977 or so a neighbor's father got Pong. Another neighbor's father had some old home system (TRS-80?) with Scott Adams adventures and other text games loaded from a cassette drive, including the one where you landed on the moon and entered two-word commands to walk around and look for clues. A third neighbor got Odyssey2, and that was a real eye-opener -- space ships in color! In short order, other kids in the neighborhood got the other consoles of that era -- 2600 (the Tank game is a classic) and Intellivision. At our house, we were kind of late -- my dad got me a Colecovision, which I believe didn't come out until the early 1980s. We also played arcade games at the local candlepin bowling alley, but that came at least a year after the home consoles and TRS-80 arrived. We also got a VIC-20 at that time, because I wanted to fiddle around with programming. A few people have mentioned it before, but I'll say it again ... for a lot of people of my generation, video games fostered an interest in programming and other types of computing technologies. Generally, if you played games a lot, experimenting with PCs, software, and programming was a common next step.
My first computer game was SimEarth, and that remained satisfying all the way from elementary school until jr. high when we finally upgraded the 386. Then it was onto others: SimTower, SimCity 2, Pitfall, Dangerous Dave... Plenty of software toys through until now, with SimCity 4 and D&D.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
The first game that I ever played was at a restaurant on one of those old arcade tables, I think it was either Pong, Pac Man or Arkanoid. Around that time I also had my first experience with a computer over at a friends house. I remember playing Test Drive and that one level where you drive along the side of a mountain (and crash into said mountain). Shortly after that I got my first game console, a Sega Master System (that system still works ~20 years later).
Eventually I got my first PC (a 386), and I got hooked on DOS games. Some of my favourite DOS games: Lemmings, Prince of Persia, Capture The Flag, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Kings Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Goblins/Goblins Quest, and tons of others which I can't remember off the top of my head.
I've been a huge gamer for almost 20 years. I own multiple high end computers, a PS2, PS3, Wii and a DS lite. Lately I've been hooked on Team Fortress 2 and Super Mario Galaxy. My favourite game is still Zelda: A Link To The Past.
I'd say my first experience gaming was banana toss or nibbles that shipped with Windows 3.1 on my dads 386. My first truly enjoyable gaming experience had to be Commander Keen on that very same computer 3 or 4 years later. I still remember the day i finished it, buried in the basement hiding from thanksgiving day relatives.
My first gaming experience was a Scott Adams two word text adventure called "Adventureland" on a Commodore Vic-20 Cartridge.
My first game was Spacewar, played on a CRT attached to a pdp9 (and later on the original CRT on the pdp1x at MIT, where the most elaborate spacewar was. Wonderful game. Note it had 2 to 4 spaceships circling a sun. The more elaborate one had homing torpedoes and regular ones, hyperspace, and both had a star chart munged from astronomy dept. Spaceships and torpedoes both were affected by gravit of the sun which could be varied. Later, programming another I found how important and nontrivial it was to keep orbits from decaying.
Good question. I think it was Atari 2600. I don't remember who bought it for me (either my parents or my uncle). I don't know what games I played when I started. Didn't Atari 2600 come with that crappy Pac-Man game? If so, then that is probably it. I had a Pac-Man fever back then. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Atari Frogger, PacMan, and Spider Fighter were the first games that I recall playing.
My first was late 70s. It was some kind of console that played more than one pong-like game. If memory serves, it was a big square console with rounded corners that hooked into the TV, and it was orange. I don't think there were controllers, you used small black dials on the console itself to move the long blocks up/down. It was definitely pre-Atari-2600. I think it might have had some kind of counter/slider so you could keep track of the score. Maybe? It was a long time ago. Come on, anyone remember this?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I never really liked pong, it was too boring, and then it got destroyed by leaking batteries. A few years later, I ended up with game and watch (donkey kong jr, donkey kong and lifeboat) and was hooked.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
http://www.videogamehouse.net/parsec.html Also, the kid across the street had a Magnavox "Odyssey 2": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey_2
I'm not as old as some people around here, so I wasn't around for the first pong days, but I was using a PC back around Kindergarten. My dad was/is an accountant and got the computer for his office. I don't remember which one I played first, but there were three of them. Xonix, Bouncing Babies, and Ninja Mission
The reason I got into programming though was combination of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
It came with Donkey Kong, and we bought Venture along with it. Interesting controllers on the Coleco, especially considering that none of the games I played on it used the big keypad that took up most of the controller. When we got our first color TV shortly thereafter, the first thing we did was hook up the Coleco to see it in all its glory. Holy shit, red! And blue! (not that color TVs were uncommon around 1980, but we had a black & white then)
At the arcade I was mostly into Pacman, Tron, and that first person Star Wars x-wing game with the awesome controller. At Pizza Hut I was way into the tabletop 2 player asteroids game.
Around then I also started getting time on various apple PCs (we couldn't afford one) and wrote a bunch of silly games in basic. Spent a lot of time with my buddies typing in code from those "100 PC GAMES!" books. Played various text adventures then too.
There were two major turning points in my gaming life though that were very much like "firsts". One was the NES. The NES was simply the shit, and for the first time I could RENT video games. Sooo many games! The second was Wolfenstein 3D. Yeah I'd played a lot of side-scrollers and stuff like that on my sweet 386 16Mhz, but Wolf3d blew me away. Since that game I've never owned another console. I'm a PC gamer for sure.
Colossal Cave Adventure, man I'm getting old.
My dad had an Atari 2600. So before I was out of diapers I was playing Pitfall, Breakout, and yes, ET. Of course, video games didn't consume my soul until I was 4 and my dad got an NES. Damn you, Mario! Damn you and your delicious mushrooms!
Zorgons Revenge on the Oric 1.
In the summer of 1961, as a kid, I got to play tic-tac-toe on the new Axel Wenner-Gren computer at the University of British Columbia. No way can I remember the model, but the Wikipedia article on Wenner-Gren suggests that it was a Wegematic 1000.
It filled a room, and they say its air conditioner was housed in a second room. Ah, tubes... It had something like 32 words of memory. I typed my move on an electric typewriter, and it re-drew the board in typewriter characters a few seconds later.
My older sister used it to customize a job application letter for a number of different companies. That surely is one of the first end-user mail-merges in history.
And to think I'm not 60 yet. Computers really are new!
And my father never let me win.
However, I quickly learned that if I drove my tank into a wall, just right, I would suddenly warp randomly around the screen. So every time I could, I'd drive behind a wall. And while he drove up to get a shot, I'd be ramming my tank into obstacles desperately hoping to trigger the warp and get a chance to be behind him and shoot.
It never really worked, and I'm still not sure my dad ever connected what I was doing to a strategy (I think he thought I just couldn't drive the tank at all), but it was both my first game and the reason why I spent most of my video gaming life poking at the 'hidden' corners of most games rather than playing as my brother did and trying to beat everything the first hour I played it.
Sadly, there are fewer and fewer games that have any sort of 'exploration' reward built in and 'glitches' like the one in the Combat game tend to be less and less interesting as code has becomes more and more complex.
I still remember the countless hours I spent in Dungeon Master, trying to max out a character to see if it was actually coded to do something if you become an "Arch-Master" (or whatever the ultimate title was called). Or the hours I spent playing Sundog, trying to get the developer easter egg to trigger again (while standing around in a town, a developer walked up and asked me if I enjoyed the game. I said yes and he gave me a million credits. I always wanted to find out what would happen if I had said no. ^_^)
Somehow, that was always more fun that just ramming through the game to prove I could beat it.
We had an Atari 2600 with a bunch of games, Spider-Man being one of my favorites. But by far, when I got online and found TradeWars 2002, I was hooked. I think that's the game I got into the most. Played with a team in a few tournaments and actually wona couple. I actually bought a copy and had it running on an old Win98 box with SynchroNET BBS software for a while until the hard drive crashed. I have a couple friends (whom I got hooked on it as well!) bugging me to get it back up and running! One of these days when I have some time... :-D
I'm pretty sure I was 5 (based on where I lived). I played tic tac toe against a computer in the library at the Boston Museum of Science. I think this was on a KSR-33, which 20 years later in the military I was trained to repair!
Twas the original Sonic the Hedgehog. I was about five years old when I somehow got my older cousin's Genesis. I remember when that title screen started up, it was right when the music started that I was enthralled. I've been a gamer ever since.
first... and last.
:)
on a more sanitary note, my first experience was castle on pcdos 1.0, which had a huge impact on my formative years and later got me into table-top gaming too
for any idiot still wondering, i'm just kidding about corridor 7.
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
Nethack on an old dying nix box that had food inside it. I remember opening it up a couple years ago and finding zombified strawberries.
First gaming experience - checkers with my Grandfather (he cheated routinely)
:-)
First *computer* game - a number-guessing one on a Monroe 1880 programmable calculator (no display - numeric paper roll output only)
Followed by "Hunt the Wumpus" on a RSTS PDP-11
Uless you count toggling the RIM-loader on the PDP-8 front panel - that could be quite challenging to win
You kids and your fancy video displays - bleh.
It was some question-answering puzzle on a text terminal. I remember the computer was in another room and the game was booted from a punched tape.
I wasn't much into Arcade games, I was too cheap to pay the 25 cent for a game.
We also got the original TV game console, but didn't spend too much time with it. It is limited how captivated you can get from "pong". I wasn't hooked until our local bookstore began selling Vic-20, and used Adventure (aka Colossal Cave) as their demo. I don't understand why they allowed me to spend so many hours there. It never generated a sale, I couldn't afford a Vic-20, and soon after I found out writing games was even more fun than playing them.
Around 1977 or so on a huge basement-sized mainframe with some computer science major buddies. A great way to waste time and build up some nerdly coolness points. "Beg your pardon, captain?" Shortly afterward some of the predecessors of Zork, Colossal Cave, was it? Later, Parsec on a TI 99/4a used up a lot of my time. The first few King's Quest games. Lot's of computer and console games since. I'm having to compete for time on Super Mario Galaxy now with my kid. My son's friends (or my wife, either) can't believe that I like to play games now so much, though the real pleasure still is in the puzzle solving.
Pong 1972
STUNT CYCLE!! 1975
Taito: Gun Fight arcade 1976
Atari 2600 1977
Taito: Space Invaders 1977
Parker Bros. Merlin handheld 1978
First computer games on Teletypes, PLATO, and PET at the lawrence hall of science in ??? early 1980's? Where you could pay $5 to play all the computer games you wanted for an entire day.
Star trek where each "screen" was printed out on a teletype machine. Wasted tons of cpu time when, you payed for cpu time.
Circa 1974. It had the best periph ever. A pump action shotgun. Long after the Odyssey keeled over we still played guns with the shotgun. It was totally realistic, at least to a 7 year old. At least it wasn't painted bright orange.
And who can forget the awesome color and graphics you used to make by static sticking plastic overlays onto your TV. Good times for all.
It was a bundled game with qbasic on IBM DOS 5.0
less is more
I'm 28 now, and my first recollection of video gaming (and one of the first recollections of my entire life!) is playing this game on my dad's IBM PCjr. I was probably 3-4 years old at the time.
I'll forever remember that dreadful loopy 'downward spiral' sound effect that happened when you hit a wall. Ugh.
I can't quite remember which came first. I had a Brick Boy (came with Link's Awakening), an NES (with only Super Mario Bros. 2, yes the Doki Doki one), and one other one, which I'll relate here.
Once or twice a week after school (I think it was 1990, maybe first or second grade?) I would go home with some elderly gentlemen that belonged to my dad's congregation . I would have a snack (I think it varied, but all I can remember is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into fourths), and then spend the next hour or two playing text adventure games on his PC. He would be off doing something else, and if I got stuck (which happened often) I'd ask him for help. He had a few playing manuals of sorts and had beat these games before, so he would tell me where to look and I would go there and he's go back to whatever else he was doing.
A few years and one move later, my family finally got our own PC, and I was able to get another text adventure. This lead me to be more inquisitive as to how the rest of the computer work, and probably sparked my interest in computers altogether.
This kind of scenario would probably never happen today, though.
[these are all games i played, not games i made:]
my first video games were dedicated consoles with dials to set them to various sports simulators. especially if those sports were like hockey or basketball. one had a paddle-controller design, and included some top-down race tracks and tank games.
after we got an atari computer my first cartridge games were "congo bongo" and "serpentine", my first cassette-loader was "blue max" and my first shareware was "gauntlet" (a lunar mission blaster). my first downloaded game was "oil field". my first "serious" simulator was a nuclear power plant sim. the first game i coded from an issue of "COMPUTE!" was some magic-carpet scroller. my first platformer was "escape from epsilon".
the first big commercial-console game i played was "pitfall" for atari. later i got a chance to play "super mario bros" for nintendo. the first cartridge i owned for the atari 2600 was "berserk".
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
First my father bought (what else) Pong, here in Brazil called "Telejogo Philips". I remember the exact year, because it was the year of the World Cup in Spain: 1982. I was 11. I don't remember how it actually got bought, whether new or used, or why on earth my father decided it was good that we should have it (since he himself never played).
The exact next year I got a Sinclair ZX81, instead of the Atari 2600 I craved for. Wisest decision from my father, since it caused me to learn to program!
Eventually I got my Atari 2600 by writing letters to a chewing gum company ("PLOC") which had a promotion "Come up with the next slogan for PLOC Chewing Gum". The phrase that got me the Atari was: "Se PLOC desse em árvore: Me Tarzan, You Jane" ("If PLOC grew in trees: Me Tarzan, You Jane"). Those were the days...
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
My first computer games were in my elementary school library on TRS-80's: Oregon Trail and Worm. A year later I had my own TI-99/4A and was programming simple games myself.
I have always preferred games with lots of depth of interaction between the player and the computer, like Civilization. These days I make maps for Starcraft including adaptations of RISK, Civilization, Phantom, and Turret Defense. A game that's moddable is much more fun to me than one that's the same every time it's started up.
My first non-computer games were probably Match, War, Tag, Hide-and-Seek, Candyland, and a wide variety of other board games to follow.
Well... The first game I've played was Pong on an Atari 2600 back when I was 3. Games today are really still a game of Pong. Though... Players are trying to avoid the ball now... And the ball's become a grenade...
It had to be around 1975, 7th grade; my cousin's husband worked for DEC in Las Vegas. He took us in to show some equipment and we played a networked variant of Star Trek on a pair of swoopy looking DECScope terminals. They had line drawing graphics for laying out the eight-by-eight sector/quadrant grids, and outside of the two players being on separate screens and only aware of each other if caught on a long range sensor sweep or in the same quadrant and not hidden by a star system, it was very similar to the common single player Trek of the time...
That had to be PDP based since VAXen weren't out yet.
In 1977 I was playing artillery and golf games using a Tektronix 4010 terminal fronting a CDC Cyber 70 Model 73. Also fun...
We wrote stupid number guessing games, blackjack and baccarat, but the best was playing a game of Star Trek that ran on an HP 3000, like the parent post. We would go from sector to sector, zapping Klingons, looking for Dilithium crystals and avoiding the Romulans. It was really quite insane how exciting the star ship Enterprise looked in ASCII: -.=
Well, I guess you really had to be there. I spent many happy afternoons in Mr Seddon's computer lab, with David Stewart-Patterson, Dominik Dlouhy, David Fudger, Mike Candy and sometimes a Grade 10 student looking on like Ian Turnbull or Neil Anderson. Yeah, Mac High!
It was my 5th birthday in 1987. My parents had bought me an Atari ST, connected to a 14" portable TV, I remember my mother telling me that it had 16 bits, she was not quite sure exactly what a bit was, but that it definitely had 16 of them. That night I stayed up until 4am playing Nebulus and Carrier Command. I have been pretty much addicted to computers ever since, and now at 25, I work as a computer programmer.
AC poster is absolutely right-- TI-99/4A was a great machine, and Parsec was a phenomenal game. As others pointed out, if you had the speech synthesizer module, the game would announce things to you. This machine was arguably what set me on the course of CS and IT, roughly 24 years ago.
And Parsec was only the tip of the iceberg. My love of music was founded with a TI program called "Music Maker" where you could enter notes on a staff and it would play it-- it had 4-note polyphony-- and this was in, what, 1985? I entered in a clavier piece by C.P.E. Bach. Awesome! I also learned my first programming language-- TI Extended BASIC-- where I wrote a dungeon-crawler, and even worked my way up to an asteroids-type game using sprites (that crashed almost immediately upon launching). I also remember playing Zork, Alpiner, Star Trek (another speech synthesizer game: "Entering sector 2 point 2")... and some others I can no longer remember the names of.
Of course, I learned about troubleshooting, too. The TI periperal bus sucked, and the machine would regularly eat my floppy disks. The only storage mechanism that worked reliably was the cassette tape drive, but it was god-awful slow. The main lesson being, don't ask your dad for troubleshooting help unless you want to spend hours learning new swear words.
You people have such old games by comparison to what I had. I don't exactly remember my first gaming experience because I was extremely young. I think that when I was 3, I was exposed to a few educational titles on a Mac Performa 600 computer, known as "The Backyard" and "The Playroom". But, if we're talking about actual games, then my first experience was my cousin handing me a floppy disk for the game "Lemmings" when I was 4. He showed me how to type in the MS-DOS commands on my grandmother's then semi-new 486 to play it. And I played it. And played it. And played it. It was my addiction which went on for a long time, and now I run one of the few active Lemmings forums out there. It was the only thing I had until I was 6 or 7, where for Christmas I got a Game Boy Pocket bundled with Super Mario Land. I became so good at it that I could finish it with nearly 50 lives (which was pretty good for a little kid like me). In fact, the exact Game Boy and cartridge are sitting right next to me, beat up to no end but still working. :D
Aladdin on Win 3.1 in about 1995-1996 when I was 4-5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney's_Aladdin_(video_game) (console only, apparently)
I never spent 5p to play the actual Space Invaders in an arcade, as the idea of the money being gone at the end never appealed, so I got the Psion clone.
Of course I shot through the blocks.
At first, I was going to say it was Planetfall on a Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000, but then I realized I was thinking in terms of the first game on a computer we owned. Prior to the Tandy, my elementary school got a Commodore PET back when I was in 3rd grade... our school's first computer. I remember the principal was so proud... he carted the thing around from classroom to classroom, showing it off. He'd make up some math problem, then have us race against the computer to solve it (I think we might have gotten calculators, not sure). Anyhow, it took programs you loaded off cassette tape. One was a game called Miner I believe... there was a sign-up sheet where you could reserve time to play it during recess. I'm not sure if we got LOGO for it too or if that came later with the Commodore 64s... my memory is a bit hazy.
Just searched on Google, and apparently I was at least correct that it was called "Miner". Here's a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-7hguyq8mY
Ah, the memories!
Bee Wary. TRS 80. 1978. Amazing what you can do with a resolution of 128x48 pixels. THat thing had a spider in it with legs. Cool game
And of course, Star Trek.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
First experience of computer gaming? That would have been Space Invaders on the school Commodore PET in about 1981. It was written by the Biology teacher, he charged us to play it during break times. I think the money went on his pipe tobacco...
I was first exposed to role-playing games about the same time. A different Biology teacher started a D&D game up. I soon took up DMing and bought some of the first AD&D books in the UK.
The game was hidden even from the campus SysAdmin - first game and my first realization that computer security was a farce.
Commander Keen FTW! Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy! was the first game I ever played as a child. I had such hard time and I don't think I ever beat it without my dad's help. Today, I can beat the game in probably about an hour.
We also had a couple freeware/shareware collection CD called Games People Play (this was before the web, so they never had a website). It had tons of DOS games, including the original Warcraft demo, which I went on to play the full version once I found it in a store for 5 bucks. Some of my other favorites on there were Jetpack, Doom, Maddog Williams, and Cyberdogs.
Today, it is still fun to fire up DOSBox, mount the CD on drive D: (hardcoded drive for by so many old programs, including the CD game menu), and have fun.
First Analog game - can't really remember - certainly remember 1/6th scale Action Man (aka GI Joe) wargames with my neighbour Dennis when I was around first grade (in the late 60s). Later evolved to tabletop 1/72nd scale wargaming, and eventually to the satanic D&D and AD&D in the late 70s. Assuming we are ruling out Snap or Go Fish...
:-)
First "Electronic" game - valve-based Tic-Tac-Toe at a local hobbyist meet in the early 70s (I was born in 63). Remember being amazed by this 12"x12" sized board which was vertical and you toggled a switch to make your O or X. Its logic was unbeatable iirc (silly game really).
First Digital Game - I *THINK* (and my memory has become really hazy here), would have been Asteroids in the local train station (I skipped Pong, no TV), perhaps Trek on the local university's mainframe. First "PC" game would have been Adventure on a TRS80 around 1980.
Current games - WOW and DOD:S.
mid 70's teletype machine hooked up to mainframe at lawrence livermore lab in berkeley and we played ascii star trek. killed couple of trees in the process.
people on ludes should not drive
I don't remember what came first, but...
At some point between ages 6 and 8 I had a Mom's-Office-Surplus computer with a green-black monitor and one program, a word processor. It wasn't a game, but I had a lot of fun with it, mostly making ASCII art. I also made up some sort of game... I forget how it worked, but I think it involved using the thesaurus to make funny sentences.
My best friend got an NES at some point, and later an SNES, and I was desperately jealous, but I never got one. We played a lot of Mario. My first console ended up being a PS2.
At school, we had some Commodore machines, and any time we were allowed, we played this platform game about a guy with a pointy hat. I think it had an Indiana Jones-esque theme but I forget the title.
Pong! then Hack then Adventure... but really immersed? Really engaged? Zork. I didn't eat. It was all I cared about. When Zork II came out I "tested" every possible permutation of the spinning room. I wasn't even playing the game, I was seeing what would happen... ::Fear ::I don't know the word fear
This
I was about 11 years old. One of my "rich" friends said he had a Radio Shack computer at home. After school, I rode my bike over to his house. We spent the next 2 hours typing two basic programs into the TR-80's huge 4K of RAM: anumber guessing program and a "fire the cannon at the building bade of pound signs" game. We stored the programs on a cassette player. We thought we were the coolest guys around. Girls would love us! Boy was I in for a lifetime of disappointment.
Avatar on NovaNET. Then I lost access for a decade. Then I got it back, on the cyber1 system, starting over as a lowly pud.
But, darn, it's just so damned good. Barebones, but good.
Of course, I went through the whole CS/DoD thing until the hax0rs ruined it, then BF1942.
Nothing else in games has interested me. I still play Avatar.
Oh yeah, there was a 'game' we used to play on AOL... Dark Parking Garage. But I grew out of that fairly quickly. Same old thing over and over and over and...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
An arcade game that came out when I was about 16. I remember a couple of years after that running into Space Invaders blotter acid. Definitely not for the weak at heart.
The Tea Party is just the GOP with a bag over its head.
I was at a shop with my mum. I don't know how old I was, but I wasn't much taller than the coin return on the cabinet, which, to my delight, had a 20c piece left in it. I think the game was called Destroyer or something, you had to drop depth charges on submarines. It was a black and white game (this was the mid-1970s). I wasn't old enough to know how to work the controls. It's weird, but looking up at the screen is still a strong memory.
Some time after that I had an afternoon of playing table-top space invaders with my father.
First home computer game was ADVENTUR on a CP/M machine in the 1980s. Dad paid a small fortune for that box.
Interestingly enough, (and yes, this does indicate my age more than a bit) my first gaming experience and my first real nerd experience were one and the same: Doom.
Getting that bitch running on 8 megs of ram was a trial, but it taught me alot about the system I was using. And as for the gaming... haha, I can remember being genuinely terrified the first time I played after midnight with headphones on.
Sometimes I wonder if the current crop of gamers coming up is missing out, not having to shoehorn their games into the minimum specs the way had to be done back around Doom and before. Of course, I'm sure there are some old saltdogs on here that'd say the same thing about me....
The best mixed martial arts training in Boston - www.redlinefightsports.com
For me, it was Empires, Sentinel and Populous 1 on a friends computer.
I really can't recall which was the ultimate first one.
The concepts of Sentinel has not soon be used in another game.
Similar would be commandos and even Ultima Underworld 2(although it is somewhat irrelvant there because you dont gain enough XP by sneaking past monsters.).
I later played Populous 1 twice, once with my left hand and once with my right hand clicking.
Empires prepared me for Civilization 1.
And so it started.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
A better question would have been: What was your first computer gaming experience that really hooked you in? When did you first look at a clock that showed it was early morning, and tell yourself, "better quit and go to bed... just a little more..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Wars
For the life of me I can't recall where. A pizza parlor or something.
I remember the best strategy was "tap the buttons at random". It kept the enemy confused.
Hm. I think we were coding games like that on an OSI (Ohio Scientific) computer my father had set up (I think he still has it) it was a 6502 system with a whopping 12 KB RAM, 2102's I believe. The monitor was a modified 12" B/W TV (those with 12 DC power supplies, using transformers for isolation were desirable) and storage was an audio cassette recorder.
The games were easy enough to master, so we learned a bit about randomising the movement of space ship we were fighting. I also remember coding it so there were up to five attacking ships at a time. Didn't see Space War until much later, running on a DEC PDP 11/50 with VT52 terminals.
First computer game I ever played was Hunt the Wumpus Little did I know it would be the beginning of a life long obsession.
and I'll get that wumpus one of these days...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
First gaming experience was Castles on my dad's 286 work laptop. Never understood quite why the red pixels hated me so much, but it sure was fun filling 'em full of arrows.
When my mom was pregnant with me, my dad was a 20 year old kid working at a Chuck E Cheese. My mom got to play all the video games she wanted. She spent hours and hours playing Ms Pac-Mac. Her theory of why I like video games so much is because I was playing them before I was born.
My dad brought home a computer from work in three parts, one of which was cooled by a powerful, noisy fan. It had a monochrome green monitor and we played Hunt the Wumpus on it. If you don't know, in Hunt The Wumpus you're a spelunker in a cave system inhabited by teh dread Wumpus. You only have 1 arrow, and you can tell by looking at the blood on the walls whether the wumpus is in a nearby room. If you walk into the room with the Wumpus, you're dead. If you fire your arrow into an empty room you're doomed. Very intense.
Then later we had the same game for the TI-994a on a cartridge. I used to play it in different languages, pretty fun!
Other shoutouts go to Yie Ar Kung Fu in demo mode on the way out of the grocery store and Speedball for the PC (the very first one with 8-bit graphics.)
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
My older brother was in is first year of Engendering and I was 8. He had to buy a personal computer and to my great happiness he got a Coleco Adam including some awesome space ship fighting game. Unfortunately he found out after a couple of days that that computer was ratter shity for the work he wanted to perform and exchanged it for a first generation IBM PC. No graphic card :(
The only thing looking like a game that he had was some strange disk with Zork written on it and because I did not speak English I took a dictionary in order to try to play that game. Even if I played other arcade games before that Zork was special because there was something magic about communicating with the computer in order to play instead of just smashing some random buttons.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Atari ? Green vector graphics tank arcade game; two joysticks + fire-button. Addictive. Spent lots of my student grant/time on this one and struggled to resist games in the 25 years since.
I was working as a Typesetter on a CompuGraphic Editwriter 2600. A service repair guy came out for some reason and provided an 8" floppy with several games on it including Pong and Mastermind. I was already playing RPGs and because of the Editwriter and gaming, I bought a Sinclair ZX80 to write programs on. I actually learned to program using the Basic book that came with the Radio Shack Color Computer.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Tic-tac-toe on a PDP-11, along with lots of other kids at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. Early 70s I guess, since the Centre opened in '69.
Pong etc came later as an extension of the overall Arcade experience, and were okay, but I was more interested in cars & girls by then so didn't spend much time with home consoles, and only dabbled with the various games for the Apple and Amiga as they came along.
Real gaming, for me, started in '96 when the raver chix I was partying with turned me on to WipeoutXL and Tomb Raider on the PSX back at their place. That's when it became serious fun, and I haven't been away from gaming since.
Hey, I had Phoenix for the Atari 2600! A family friend had an arcade machine of Phoenix, so my parents bought me the Atari version later. I know what you mean about obscure, though--The family friend was the only otherperson I knew who'd even heard of the game, let alone played it. One of my greatest achievements was getting the highest score on the arcade box--it's not a feat I've ever duplicated since. My first gaming memory, though, was playing "Pitfall" on a friend's Atari, when I was about 5 yrs old. I had a lot of trouble jumping from aligator to aligator, but the song that played when you jumped on the rope was pure joy, and even then, I dreamed about where you would end up if you took the tunnels instead of the surface beween screens...
Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?
Dungeons & Dragons for Intellivision. First person CRPG with big, blocky monsters. It was great when I was 4, though.
Pong... back in camp, a while ago. So I'm old... (yes, I also played Adventure on a mainframe).
Vi havas e-poston.
I played this on the old IBM mainframe under TSO/ETSS at my college back in 1982! By the time I graduated in 1986, we'd translated the source back into BASIC and ported it to some cheesy Texas Instruments IBM PC/AT clones.
When I was just six months old, my parents and I were vacationing in a beach town, and in a convenience store my dad held me in one hand and played a Pacman cabinet with the other. A year later we returned to that town, and when Dad walked me past the store again, I pointed to it and said "Bamans". He interpreted that to mean Pacman, and he was so impressed by my memory that when we got home two weeks later he wrote a whole game in BASIC on his C64 named "Bamans" for me! (Though he didn't make it exactly a Pacman clone.)
Though I was too young to remember the Pacman incident, he kept his Bamans disk for years (probably still has it), so I was old enough to remember that game.
I was in third grade at the time.
Parents offered me a Nintendo if I learned my multiplication tables (1-12).
I still remember them to this day.
Helped me enough in math that I plan on doing the same for my kid, with whatever game system is out at the time.
that a friend kept at home around 1974. Later played board games including "Chitin" and "Melee"
Like the sign says... played Impossible Mission at a friend's cottage on his C64.
To this day it remains one of my favourite games ever, and is still a great challenge. (I've only ever passed it once)
I can't believe nobody's mentioned Logo. Maybe we can't really call it a game, but when I tried it for the first time I thought it was awfully fun! Then again, Ive always enjoyed math and programming just a little too much for most peoples comfort. But there was a turtle! You got to tell him where to go! I sure as hell thought it was a game at the time.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
It was either Super Mario 1,2 or 3 , Duck hunt, Castlevania, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all on the NES. Although something is making me think it was duck hunt.
At least I *think* that's what it was called. I played it in 4th grade back in the 70's, and the added bonus is I got to leave class to play it. Big ol' typewriter thing with an acoustical coupling modem. Dial the phone to the number of the mainframe at the University, and jam the receiver into the modem, log in, and then:
get -$ lunar
By entering in some simple parameters (amount of thrust, I think) try to land a ship on the moon without crashing, and with enough fuel to take off again. The "screen" was a huge pile of tractor-feed paper. Beautiful symphony of sound as the element (I think it was pre-dot matrix -- maybe a print head like an IBM Selectric typewriter) displayed your commands, and then the responses from the mainframe.
I crashed many landers. I landed a handful, but didn't have enough fuel to take off again. But what a blast!
In 73 or 74 he brought home a PLATO IV terminal and an acoustic coupling modem. My young self started playing Empire as soon as I found the games. Empire was a networked Trek like game and I was playing multiplayer over phone lines with a dozen or so people when most folks didn't yet own a calculator.
this sig deleted by another sig
I was 6 or 7 years old and the Thrifty had a Pong game, it was a nickle per play. I was an instant gamer, given that an ice cream was 15 cents it was hard to justify my gaming habit even back then.
Timing is everything
Back in the '60s I saw a news broadcast showing Walter Cronkite playing Space War. About 3 years later I had 6 weeks to do a intersession project, so I learned FORTRAN and reverse engineered Space War from my memory of the TV show, and got it up and running on a PDP-8.
It was a lot of fun.
I was born in 1979, and in 1982, I was three years old and old enough to go with my parents to the New Jersey Shore.
My grandmother on my mother's side owned a small beach house in Bricktown, New Jersey (now known as Brick, New Jersey) and we would travel down there for the summer - both my parents were teachers, so long vacations were the norm. We'd spend the days we weren't at the beach on the boardwalk - this was before the boardwalk was littered with detrius and society started generally collapsing, and we used to go to Seaside Heights most often in those early days, usually starting at the Funtown Pier and working our way to the Casino Pier.
For those of you to never experienced skee-ball, you have missed out on life, for those of you who believe you have played skee-ball in some Dave and Busters somewhere in Milwaukee instead of being there in an open-air arcade with the smell of the salt water and the cool breeze from the ocean wafting in, doubly so.
One of my earliest memories is my father holding me up just as the sun was setting (the time to go home from the boardwalk) as he put a quarter into the Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine - the last game of the beautiful day - and we played together. I still remember the orange walls, the smell of taffy, the music of the arcade playing in my ears, he encouraging me as I avoided, and then chased the ghosts around (I was always afraid of the ghosts and would often go directly from power-pellet to power-pellet, with no sense of strategy or timing, I just hated being on the defensive, I think.)
I don't know why that memory is so strong with me. Maybe it was just a child's unbelievable capacity for joy - something I don't think I have the capacity for now. Maybe it's just that it seems to be a time when I was completely free of fear and harm.
That's probably my earliest memory. Me, Dad, playing the last Ms. Pac-Man game of the day, just outside the arcade, on the boardwalk at Seaside Heights.
I don't know if I could ever go back to the boardwalk today. Even if it was just as grand and glorious as it was that day, I know it could never live up to my memory.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go call my dad and tell him I love him.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Tic-tac-toe on a IBM computer around 1968 or so.
The game learned until the best you could do was a draw.
My brother was attending Cal Poly Pomona and one day he brought home a Teletype machine. I can't remember the model, but it had a plastic acoustic coupler on the back that you could fit the phone handset into. We were able to dial into the Cal Poly computer system and access his account. The Teletype machine had no display screen at all, everything was printed out via a thermal paper printer. That didn't keep me from exploring a large chunk of 'Adventure', which had me pretty much hooked from that point forward. "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."
My first gaming experience was Metroid on the NES at my neighbor's house. This was in 1987, when I was 5 years old, IIRC.
adventure, then empire on a dec pdp-10
vice chair orange county java users group (ocjug.org).
Pong was my first videogame experience, but i remember this old tank game that i think was called 'BOLO' that i have been trying to find for a long time.
It was a monochrome game, not sure what platform, but you were in a little tank in a maze, and you had to destroy the enemy tanks and the 'generator' that was continually making more tanks.
One of the cool things about this game was that when you destroyed a tank, it would explode in a little green monochrome ball, and any other tanks touched by the ball would explode too, making for some very cool multi-explosions when you destroyed the 'generator'
anyone remember that one, and better yet, where i can get a copy??
-- what's that smell? --
...and I had a friend who was basically a tape jockey for the University of Texas Regional Computer Center in Dallas. He got to take home this Texas Instruments TTY unit with a thermal printer and keyboard and would dial into an IBM mainframe. He showed me Star Trek for the first time and we played for about three hours. Had to be all of a 300 baud connection and we could only play between midnight and 5 am. And yes, we waz high.
Man, that thermal paper was so expensive!
Later, a local bar, J. Alfred's, had the first Pong game I ever saw. That beastie ate sooo many of our quarters, and while I was sucking down Lone Star.
State of the art black and white block graphics, I am guessing about 180x120 pixels and a square wave audio monophonic synth.
"Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw" by Jimmy Buffett was the most popular song on the juke box and the whole bar would join in when it played. Mmmm, that song came out in 1973 - but maybe this was 1974.
Hell, I don't know. I have travel too far in interstellar space to remember.
"Now, brother, tell your children,
Not to do what I have done...."
My favorite games for Intellevision were B-17 bomber with the voice module, and my dad and I used to play Utopia as well. Good times.
I was 4 or 5 and this thing had actual handle bars and a throttle - I can still picture it in my mind but had totally forgotten it was possible to do wheelies on it (I'm not sure I realized, at that age, that you could). I can still remember concentrating incredibly hard trying to get the speed just right for the longer jumps....*sigh* Nostalgia.
on a Heathkit H8 with 16K RAM, 8080 CPU, 5/14 AND 8 inch floppies. Nearly all of the software was FREE back then - except the BASIC interpreter.
Not only was Pokemon: Blue Version my first ever game to play (and beat, as well), but it taught me how to READ. I could only sound out words like "cat" and "eggs" before I got Pokemon Blue. By the time I had beat it, I could read and say "hippopotamus" and "economy" and just about whatever else I wanted to read. Yeah, I'm that young.
Probably not actually my first, but definitely one of the most memorable. I was about 14, and it taught me so many valuable lessons like how to avoiding getting STDs from prostitutes, and how to hook up with chicks at night clubs (but never go back to a hotel with them).
Unfortunately I'm female, and heterosexual at that.. so I've never been able to properly tune the skills the game taught me"If you never did, you should. These things are fun, and fun is good." Dr. Seuss
I can't remember which it was but my first PC gaming experience was on an Tandy 1000 and it was the Harley Davidson type game. Something along the lines of Road To Sturgis. I think before that though we had this console that plugged into the TV. I have no idea what it was. It only had one game for it. You had to jump around this pyramid and collect fruit or something, your character was a spring I think. My favorite early, for me, game was Gunship 2000. I was very addcited to that when it first came out. I played it on a 286 Packard Bell with 4 meg of ram and a 40 meg drive.
--Rules And Models Destroy Genius And Art--
First home computer was a Sinclair ZX81 and the version of Pac Man in ZX Magazine where you entered the assembly by hand was _much_ better than the Pac Man cassette released in the U.S.
My first gaming experience was in the arcades, probably 1975 and there were too many games I played to say just one. Circus, Breakout, Dominoes
My first computer game? Tank battle for a home built computer in 1976
My first video game on a console? Atari combat in 1977
A very long time ago
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Aha! Your mentioning the Commodore 64 puts me in mind of my second computer, a VIC-20. Does no one remember the Scott Adams graphic adventures that ran (from cartridges, I think) on this? I have blissfully nostalgic memories of playing "Pirate Adventure", where saying the right incantation in a London flat could transport you through a whirlpool graphic to Pirate Island, where you could meet a parrot who kept going "Pieces of Eight!" Remember how creative you had to get with those two word commands (TAKE KEY, KICK DOOR)? My favorite was one of the last ones-- your map would say to go ten paces from the last landmark and dig: the command was "GO TEN".
God that was fun. Must have been because I was young, because no game in the past 20 years has interested me even remotely.
Getting old....
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
As a game developer and internet fiend, many first-time gaming experiences stand out clearly in my mind.
When I was 7 years old, my father, a Honeywell engineer, brought me into work one day. I don't even know why today, it seems such a random and out of the ordinary experience to me now 30 years later. That single experience had a tremendous influence on my life. He planted me in front of a terminal connected to a mainframe or minicomputer on the premises. First he tried to introduce me to Star Trek, probably because I was such a fan of the show. It was way over my head. So he next turned me loose on Hunt the Wampus. That was perfect. Mapping, or even imagining, a squashed dodecahedron was clearly beyond my abilities but it had enough suspense and humor to keep me hooked. I also spent some time drawing on an amber screen terminal with character graphics.
A couple years later, age 9, the downstairs neighbors babysat me, and the husband had a portable 110 baud terminal that allowed me to play Hunt the Wampus again. The idea that you could play computer games over the phone line was an amazing revelation.
A year later my next major first was a console experience in the form of an Atari VCS, borrowed, with about 20 games. I spent the most time playing Space Invaders and Asteroids, Asteroids becoming something of an obsession until our house was burgled.
Around the same time, much to my surprise, a brand-new Apple ][+ appeared in the house. It came with Adventure (Colossal Cave), Olympic Decathlon, and a Space Invaders clone. It wasn't long before Sir-Tech's Wizardry, Epyx's Crush, Crumble, and Chomp!, and a host of Automated Simulations' DunjonQuest games such as Rescue at Rigel, Morloc's Tower and Temple of Apshai were occupying my time. That's when I start programming, and the first game I typed in? Hunt the Wampus. I had to type it twice because of a power outage and thus was born my first lesson in the merits of saving often.
In the following years I moved on to Atari computers, BBSs, D&D, and generally immersing myself in geekdom. Funny how I'd end up at Slashdot.
+0 Meh
Number Crunchers and Oregon Trail were the first games I played. But I wouldn't call it a true gaming experience - at least not what I now I define as a gaming experience. It was about keeping top score or shooting buffaloes. Forget the storyline! Now the first game that had a long lasting impression on me was Marathon 2: Durandal. Just mentioning it gives me chills. I was in the 7th or 8th grade and I remember spending hours in my room immersing myself in the storyline and daydreaming about it. I really felt I was on a mission of discovery. Every now and then I still hear the wind (if you played it you know what I'm talking about!)
When i was 6-ish mom bought dad a new gizmo to play with... a computer!
Dad didnt have much interest in his TRS-80 coco & so i soon inherited it.... I never once found a commercial game available for it (i didnt have the tape or floppy drive for it anyway) So all it had was whatever you programmed into it.
I worked through all of the "Learn TRS-80 Basic" books that came with it, with the little TRS-80 guy (picture a cartoon TRS-80 coco with cartoon arms & legs & a smiley face on the screen) and soon learned to write my own stuff.
I would spend hours programming basic games for my brothers.
Some of my favorite games were dungeon crawling text adventures. Very simple stuff, find the sword, find the sheild, find the dragon, kill the dragon, dont fall into any traps.
Id draw the whole dungeon up on graph paper, & even invented my own form of flow charts so i could optimize the code (it wasnt uncommon for me to fill up the 8k RAM, and the computer went haywire when you did)
I also once wrote a boxing game that basically just let you put in a name, weight, & shorts color. It would randomly throw jabs & uppercuts between you & your randomized opponent until one of you ran out of hitpoints & were knocked out.
sidenote: TRS-80 basic had a surprisingly good random number generator... anybody know how it worked?
Once when my brother reached the part where it asked for a shorts' color, he put in "transparent" we laughed about that for days.
Hey, we were kids, we were easily entertained.
No way to save the games, so when you shut it off, it was gone. Mom had a hair-dryer that would throw out just the right frequency RF interference to hose whatever you were doing... Many hacking sessions were brought to an abrupt halt by dollar signs appearing all over the screen, meaning a reboot was in order, & back to the drawing board.
Once i wrote a simple program to do my math homework for me... Factoring was tedious work, just what a computer is for. The teacher required us to show our work, so i just wrote out the code on the back of the sheet. Got an A+ too, but only after explaining to teacher how it worked.
That was really the only programming i ever did, i tried to get back into it in college, but just couldnt seem to wrap my brain around it anymore.
How sad is that? i peaked at age 8 LOL
Anyway, i still have my (er uh dads) TRS-80, & last i checked it still worked... all the keys are worn smooth.... good times.
My first gaming experience was when I was four and was from one of those educational-game systems, called socrates (http://www.vidgame.net/vtech/socrates2.htm) I used to work so hard at spelling to color in those pictures or construct the little dwarf johnny five which was the systems mascot. I loved that little thing, until it was replaced by a Nintendo.
Star Trek vs Klingons on an IBM mainframe at uni in 1974
Beat that!
And I re-wrote it for the Vic 20 cause I could! ''
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
It was 1969 or 70, in the old Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia. There was a computer whose sole purpose was playing noughts and crosses. Or tic tac toe as you might know it.
And it had a primitive touch screen. I was blown away.
My very first steps were toward a Pacman arcade machine at a local laundromat. I got my NES in preschool, when NES was HOT. I remember using my Powerpad as a blanket.
Ami doin it rite?
The store manager allowed me to use the computer as much as I wanted after school. In return, I demoed the machine to any customers who showed interest).
The manual included a simple moon-lander game, where you punched in the power of the burn you wanted, for each second of the landing sequence, and tried to land without either running out of fuel or smashing your spacecraft. It was a text only-game, and you just typed in a number and got back the result. ... now you had to calculate and input the burn rates in real-time. The store manager suggested that I could sell the game, but I really didn't believe him. Unfortunately by the time I saw some of the other crap that people were selling as commercial games, my save-tape of the game had degraded to the point where it was difficult to read, and I'd gone on to other things.
I thought that this sucked, so I figured out how to do real-time text input, wrote an simple input editor and added some screen formatting and (very rudimentary) graphics.
Ah, yeah... those were the days, when a couple nights after school work could give you a commercially viable game!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
My hands were barely large enough to handle the controller but I remember the night we got it VERY well. It was the first memory I have of staying up late enough that the sun came back out!
And now my favorite game is Diablo 2. Hmmmm... Had never put two and two together there...
I got an NES for christmas but my mom and her friend stayed up all night playing it. They got to the first warp zone and didn't know how to go down a pipe so she ran around until time ran out. Years later my grandfather would play Dr Mario for hours at a time in a trance. Until I sold my NES. He is dead now. I feel kinda bad about taking away his Dr Mario.
I got the "bowl with suction cup" powerup, but the other player was very skilled, and was able to use it to launch things to the ceiling instead of of just dropping them on the floor. Needless to say, she completed the first level very quickly :)
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
My own gaming experice is almost exactly like Peter Molyneux's, except that I mowed lawns to earn the geatus to buy Pong, and once disected, it did rise from the ashes to work again. (Thanks Dad, for teaching me well!)
Looking back, I'm not sure why there would be a problem taking the game apart, unless you tried to open up the pots too... As I recall, (and I could be wrong!), the game was rather robustly made and it would take a real effort to screw it up, or total ignorance of how circuits work. Then again, it's been many, many years ago, and I could be thinking of something else. If I'm not, then it would take a very ham handed sort to break the circuit board to keep it from working...
I'm not sure if I used a soldering iron to weaken the plastic seals, or if that was something else. I do seem to remember that just taking out the screws didn't open it up. One had to get past some epoxy too.
I'm sorry, I'm just an old fart now. I really can't remember clearly how I opened it up. Perhaps if the Web was around then, I'd have written it up.... 8)
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Miner 2049 on the Commodore PET.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
It'd have to be this, many a year ago: http://c64s.com/game/2107/secret_of_bastow_manor/
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
All of Molyneux's games have that in common. You play with them for a few minutes and it's the greatest thing ever, until you realize that it's broken and never going to work again. Seriously, can this guy design past the "concept" phase? I appreciate the creativity but his games really do suck when you get down to playing them. Most overrated game designer of all time.
I remember playing Pong and later Space Invaders on unix mainframes where my Dad worked...Burroughs which was then bought out by Unisys in the mid-late 80's.
:-)
I was 5 or 6 years old and had the whole mainframe to myself
Dynamite dan on the spectrum used to keep me occupied for months before I could afford anything else. Those were the days :)
Combat, the usual. Later when I got a shiny new Laser 128 that I worked three summers to buy, I discovered the wonderful world of text-based porn. Can't remember the name of the game now, and google helpeth not, but it provided you with naughty sex tips and hints based on how long you thought you could do it for, 5 minutes, an hour, or ALL. NIGHT. LONG.
Fond memories...
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
In college I got access to Universe (on a TOPS-20 (I think) machine), Dungeon, Zork (ported it in Fortran to an IBM mainframe), etc, etc. TRS-80 games, Rogue on MSDOS, porting Nethack to the Amiga, working for PlayNet (which became AOL). Also I'd play a real-time multi-player Trek game that was a predecessor of Netrek (which I later ported to the Amiga, and played in online league games in '92 or so), later worked porting games to the Amiga.
Since this about first experiences, I'll stop the stream of consciousness there.
I seem to remember that being the first game I played.
"I smell a mugwump!"
My first gaming experience was Star Master for the Atari 2600. I think I was 3 or 4 years old. I probably sucked. BUT, I do remember my Dad turning up the sound on our console TV and shutting off the lights so it was more intense. :)
My father told me I wasn't allowed to play wolfenstein 3d, so I had to. And it was awesome. Then I got really into scorched earth, and doom. And then everything else. =3
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
How about Lunar Lander on a PDP-8/E - just 2 months after the Eagle landed. It was pure text, but it was fun!
I'm sure I must have played a bunch of video games on various crappy, er, classic computers, but the one that stands out in my mind is Sneakers. Not the cheesy Microsoft title, but the timeless classic published by Sirius Software. Or the space-shooter game, Hadron. Come to think of it, I bet the theme music (go Apple ][ sound chip, go!) was inspired by the theme from Star Wars. (This was 1981; what in the burgeoning computer industry wasn't inspired by the theme from Star Wars at that point?)
-- haaz.
In a text-only form, on a mainframe terminal at Iowa State during an Astronomy seminar.
I still remember the day at my school carnival in 1984, when i saw the classic tennis game played on TV.
I paid about 10 cents in the carnival to play it about 5 times (50 cents).
Dropped out of gaming for a while and rediscovered it playing Netwars in a Netware environment in 1996 on my first job.
Then quickly moved to Wolfenstein in 1997 which was my favorite.
At present? Playing Company of Heroes mostly and liking it a lot...
But i can never get the same thrill of old tennis game played on a blact and white TV screen and two screwballs holding a small controller and screwing the knob to control what was bar on screen called as a tennis racquet.
Same like you can't capture the first kiss and first lay ever.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I was best man at my best friend's wedding the day after Mt. Saint Helens erupted. After driving two hours at 90 mph in a gaudy orange Kharman Ghia I borrowed from my brother, I actually arrived early, to my everlasting surprise, and spent an interesting morning with my friend's sister's husband looking over a computer he'd built from a HeathKit box. As I recall, it ran a strange operating system called MS-DOS, so I heard the word "boot" for the first time in a context other than Wild West or Wellingtons. On the computer was a game: Adventure. "You can go in there and get lost," my host said. True then. True now. True forever. I brought a hibachi as a wedding gift. In return, I got carpal tunnel syndrome, cataracts and lens implants in both eyes, and a viral itch I may never be able to scratch. Thanks, Larry.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
My father deleted all the games he had on his TRS-80 (Model III - I think), and I was 5 at the time, so I couldn't do anything about it. When I was 10 I wanted an NES so badly, cause my neighbor had one, but my father said: NO! "I will buy an IBM Clone instead...". He did. It was an 8086 with 4Mhz. He showed me DOS, all I did for quite some time was: cd\games\digger .. digger.exe. (and no it was not "digdug"!!!) It was an awesome game, and had beautiful CGA colors. I still have it and play it with dosbox. so here I go: cd digger. digger. ---> TIMEWARP ---> I am 10 again. But I was better at it as a kid :-(
cat
The first time I played was ping pong, green chars on a black background in the late 70's. ... hehehe
Hangman and moonlander on a HP47C in the early 80's, then doom and so on.
Today I own a PS3 (sega,f1,need for speed) and I am playing simpsons, lego star wars and ratatouille with my 4 and 9 year old
jobst
to code or not to code, that is the question.
I read that headline wrong, and thought to myself, well, at least there won't be a first post to this one
First game I remember was Windows Minesweeper. I remember seeing it at a friend's house and playing it for a while.
Eventually my family got a PC as well, the only games that I remember were on an Apogee shareware diskette (Wolfenstein 3D, Math Rescue, Monster Bash).
Other friends had NESes and SNESes, but there was never a video game console in our house until I was 12 and got an N64. For months we only had Pilotwings 64, which was fine, but I remember how awesome it was to get Super Mario 64. Then Zelda 64 for a Christmas soon thereafter, I've loved that franchise ever since. I don't know what it was like for Zelda fans used to 2D worlds to be thrown into 3D, but it was a glorious introduction to adventure gaming for me.
Its hard to know where to draw the line.
Neighbors got pong.
Dad let me play with something game-like on a IBM 360 terminal.
The first "real computer game" was "Star Trek" on an acoustically coupled printing terminal in seventh grade (circa 1977).
A good friend (John Cox) introduced me to D&D version one (the three white books, plus "chainmail" if you wanted "realistic" horseback combat) in 8th grade.
But if you _must_ take the first blush at complex game theory to make an impact on me...
When I was about five, all the kids in the neighborhood got a bunch of chalk and _covered_ the big round dead-end of my street with rules and routes (like "the game of life" meets "hopscotch" with easily 100 nodes).
This thing was what gaming, and programming, and systems theory would boil down to, mulled over in the minds of 14 multi-cultured middle-schoolers (I was too young to actually be allowed to grow the system, but I did get to play in it).
I still remember it with awe.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Below the Root. Windham Classics. For the Apple IIGS.
It was probably a Commodore PET that my dad used in teaching college finance courses (which would be how I got into computers, and how I eventually got into game development). I have no idea what the first game would have been... probably something from here, maybe Space Invaders, AFO or Lunar Lander. There was also a gold mining game and a dam buster game.
I took a look at several of them again on an emulator a year ago or so, and was struck with two interesting thoughts. First, disregarding graphical limitations, almost all of the genres we see today were represented in some way (shooter / action, sports, adventure, simulation, strategy). Second, some of the game design was very good, some was an exercise in frustration.
In particular, the dam buster game was just annoying. Your airplane flies from right to left across the screen. You need to drop a bomb at just the right time, and with enough passes you can break the dam. Fine, that might have almost been a good game, or the core of one. But they put in a gun that shoots at you. There is no way to control the plane, no way to choose your altitude (which seems to be chosen randomly) and absolutely nothing you can do about whether you get shot down or not. In fact, odds are excellent that you will be shot down randomly enough that it is simply impossible to win before you run out of planes most of the time, regardless of your skill at the game.
I like to believe that game designers have learned from this mistake. That causing the player to randomly die helplessly and hopelessly is bad. That making the player the hero is rewarding for the player, and that frustrating the player by not providing enough information for them to succeed or killing them randomly without recourse is something we have learned is Not Fun in the last 25 years. But really, you still see it all the time in various forms. I find it fascinating that, on one hand, game design has changed so much over the last 25 years, while on the other hand, so much of it is still the same.
sig fault
It was a sort of platform game called NAKAMOTO on my Dad's Sharp MZ800. This is a desperate call for anyone in possesion of this game. I can't find it anywhere, not even sceenshots.
I don't remember the name of the game, I must've been 2 or 3 when I played this. I cannot remember anything about the computer I played it on, aside from that the screen only displayed black and a lightish brown color. The game involved a donkey (the player) on a road, and you had to dodge cars, debris in the road, or something, by changing lanes, which you did by hitting the spacebar key. There may have been a way to win, or more levels, but I just don't remember any of that. All I remember is standing on my tiptoes to reach the keyboard in my parents bedroom, straining my head to see above the edge of the cabinet to look at the screen.
I really wish I could remember the name of it, but it was 16 years ago. Less than likely now.
"Zaxxon" and "Donkey Kong" at motorway services. The Donkey Kong board was in a "Battlezone" case. So to control Mario, is was both sticks left = left. Both sticks right = right. Left up, Right Down = Jump. As if the game isn't hard enough to start with. ;D
Made in 1977 - picked one up as a kid at a car boot sale in the early/mid 80's... Funky orange joystick things...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
I think it was the game my dad wrote for me on a Tandy. Later, I typed game programs from a manual into an old Sharp pocket computer that was already way out of date at the time. I also played Gorilla and Nibbles on MS-DOS. My first commercial game was Wing Commander. Strangely, I didn't play PacMan or other classic arcade games until the 90s.
1979. About 1/2 hr before my 6th Form (Year 11 for the non-oldies, non-Kiwis) Tech Drawing Exam. Played some form of Star Trek on a home built computer at school. Built by a new music teacher (!) at the school (from dim dark memory). The computer was a home etched motherboard sitting in a cardboard box. Used a black & white television as a monitor. Still remember it vividly to this day. Spent the whole exam thinking about the computer and the game. Failed the exam miserably. Been addicted to computers and games ever since.
I was dazzled by the colors, the sounds and the cuteness of that game. I still play it in MAME, but without the arcade console, it's not the same.
Star Trek on a PDP 11, in 1969, in the basement of the science building at university. With the output on tractor feed paper. Reams of paper to see a missile step across the 'screen' to hit the Klingons!
I guess it depends on what you consider a game. I remember way back, probably before I even got to elementary school, my father introduced me to programming with Logo. I guess you could consider that a game, in that you controlled a turtle on a screen, giving it commands to walk around in different patterns. There weren't any Goombas to stomp or anything that I can remember. The first actual game I can remember playing I think would be Parsec. That's one of those left-to-right scrolling space "shoot-em-up" games where you try to blast through alien ships trying to get to the boss of each level. [insert several other games] Then there was DOOM. I loved DOOM. I miss DOOM. 3 DOOM 3
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
Mine would have to be Commander Keen and Captain Comic on the the 386 my Dad brought home one day when I was a kid. I still love to play some Keen now and then, it's amazing how it all comes back to you... 15 years later...
There was a bunch of great shareware stuff my Dad installed for us... the original Wolfenstein, Monster Bash, Test Drive, Dangerous Dave, Duke Nukem. *sigh* All the goodies on dosgamesarchive.com.
1966. Carnegie Tech. Spaceware on two room-sized video devices, with light pens.
Took the entire computing strength of the campus to run.
I was introduced to a cousin's Nintendo. I was about 3 or 4 at the time. Those are my first memories of video games. I was never really "into" video games until I was 12 or 13 and played Warcraft II at a friends house. We were killing time because it was raining outside. Now I enjoy pretty much every genre of games :)
I doubt any /. have ever played this game, but it was my first game experience back in the early 80's. Zeal was a text adventure game we used to play on my dad's IBM Sr. Partner 808886. It was real time, so if you stood still for too long you could get attacked. It also required a vast amount of memorization since you couldn't actually "see" where you were. A great game, I've never played anything like it since.
I was playing with C64. That's where I learnt my first BASIC as well. How old was I? I think I was 3 or 4 or 5 years or something like that. At the peak of my C64 mania I had 3 or 4 C64 machines if I remember well, both brown and white. I still have and occasionally operate one of my brown C64 (yes real hardware, not emulation) with the 1541 floppy drive! And yes it still works great after so many years.
Had to load them from the cassette recorder.
At 6 years old, I had a lot more fun with Lunar Lander.
And my dad showed me no mercy on Sargon (Chess).
Oddly enough, I would also play Lunar Lander on his HP calculator that loaded programs from a magnetic strip. But that came later.
- OrbNobz
Time travelers of the world, united!
Commander Keen
Pong was the first, but Wizardry on my best friend's Apple II will always have a special place in my heart.
"Creeping Coins breathe on you causing 1hp of damage." *sigh*
Well, discounting the childhood games of Tig (or Tag, but we called in Tig), British Bulldogs, Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Conkers and a dozen others that I sincerely hope are still played in some form or another in schoolyards around the world or all hope is lost! I assume you mean video games.
My first experience would be Soccer on a friend's intellivision and I recall sucking at it and thinking it sucked too. It's not the game's fault, I'm just not a big association football fan. I'm thinking probably 1982 or 1983. My first positive experience would be Chequered Flag on a ZX Spectrum 48K in about 1983. After that, I was completely hooked on computers in general. I still own an original copy!
my mom and dad got me a NES with Mario and Duck Hunt. The snotty nosed neighbor kids had one several months before we got this one for Christmas. It was heavily used for many years after that.
Went down with my family on a shopping/relaxing weekend to Seattle back in the late 70s. The hotel vending machine room also had two pinball machines and some odd thingy called Space Invaders. My dad was gobsmacked and fed quarter after quarter into that thing for me (age 7-8) and my brother (age 4-5) all weekend while my mum headed to the Southcenter Mall to shop. Happy times.
My first game I ever played was Space Warp on a TRS-80 III. we have come a long way from loading software from a cassette tape.
Ok. I saw pong when it first came out,
but I think my first game was Lunar Lander, or Hamarabi,
on TSB, Time Shared Basic on the DataGeneral Nova,
at Lawrence Hall of Science c September 1970.
That winter, we got a remote terminal, and wrote Monopoly from scratch.
It wasnt until 1972 that we got StarTrek.
I saw Doug Engelbart at XParc. What ever happened to the below desk paddles.
Curse of the Azure bonds for Commadore 64. Crazy hard, I never even made it outside.
Also, Kung fu kid for the sega master system, which was in my opinion a much better system than the NES.
My dad showed me the Doom demo, and not only was it the coolest looking thing I had ever seen, but it made me interested in computers. Before that, I didn't know what they were, nor did I care.
asteroids in the local chippy when I was about 8
My commadore 64 is really neato..what kind of chip you got in there a dorito?
Thanks for the fond memories. My dad traded in his pickup for a TRS-80 with 32 K!!! And - get this - it had 16 colors. Isn't that wild? He splurged and got the 5.25" diskette drive (toaster-sized, stainless steel). We would type in games from Rainbow magazine in Basic. Joust was one of them. Dad also bought me one - a text-based takeoff on Alice in Wonderland. Later, we got an Apple 2C (or was it a 2E?) and the whole family got hooked on Ultima IV. I will never forget the day my little brother saved over my game that I had been playing all summer. My kickass Paladin that had almost won the game suddenly became a crappy Mage or something like that. For a few years after that setback, only boys and parties could ease the pain (okay, so maybe I just turned 16 and that was the real reason). Confirmed geek from way back - that's me.
Intellivision' boxing, tron, my friend even purchase the voice enbaler for tron,,,,,voices sucked but it was still incredible. Dont remember all the other games but that was my first,,except for the arcade,,,but you needed quarters for that and i did not have any.
Astrosmash. Nothing beats disc control. Even Wiimotes don't have the awesome factor of the Intellivision disc/numberpad combo. Plus if the disc fell off it was fun to throw at my little sister.
Star Raiders. Totally rocks!!
was going to say it was police quest, on my dad's 286. then i remembered all (relatively) the late nights playing Pirate's Cove and Dracula on the Commodore 64 my uncle gave me. (to be clear, late = 9pm, as i was like 6, no floppy, cartridges and tapes only, hooked up to a b&w tv thru vhf). that pretty much did me in/doomed me.
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
1. Parker Brothers' electronic game MERLIN (looked like a telephone handset, kinda) was great.
2. UNO card game.
3. Atari 2600 with "01 Combat" cartridge, Video Olympics (played with paddle controllers), Asteroids, PAC-MAN, etc.
Those are the earliest ones...
To
Combat for the Atari 2600 is the first one I can remember - going thru all 27 games one at a time, driving tanks, figuring out how to manuever, and then suddenly getting bouncy shots and shots that go thru one side and out the other -
then biplanes, then jet fighters -
good times
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee