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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?
. . . 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.
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.
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 :)
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
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.
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.