PC - well, I know it was on the Vic 20, which we got the summer after kindergarten. My favorite game was Clowns, but it may well have been Gorf, Sea Wolf or Apple Panic that I played first…
Console - Q*bert. My best friends had an atari.
Sigh!!
It was . . . Pong 
Hmm. My dad bought a system that was probably about as old as the Atari systems in the very early 80’s. We played these educational hunt the letter games on it, and it was hooked up to the TV. “Wow. I can make the TV do things!”
I also watched my cool cousins play Space Invaders on their Atari. And The Bard’s Tale.
Rogue on the old 386. That thing was cool because it came in colors.
I’m guessing it was Burnin’ Rubber on the Amstrad 464 although if it wasn’t it would have been another game on there.
Console though, I would have to guess Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive/Genesis.
My first was Pong in a college sandwich shop in Nashville in 1972. I wasn’t very good at it.
Bosda, you might be confusing Asteroids with Computer Space which is the only arcade game that I have been able to find that came out before Pong.
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Note that Atari wasn’t started until 1972.
The first arcade game I played was probably one of Space Invaders, Missile Command, or Asteroids. My first computer game was a chess program called Sargon on the Timex Sinclair 1000.
My father worked for a computer center in a bank when I was a child. I used to help on the weekends fetching punchcards from the warehouse and loading them into the reader.
This would have been around 1975.
Sometimes the computer guys would let me in front of a terminal and run blackjack. Not long after I’d played the text adventure cave game (they ported it here - http://www.astrodragon.com/zplet/advent.html )
The first graphic based game was either pong or a lunar lander game. I don’t recall which.
Our first computer game at home was Pong, then an Atari 2600 (I was a Combat King!). Later we got a TI99. I always wanted the Vic-20. I have one now. I got it about 6 years ago. It’s still in the box. I’ve yet to fire it up.
Pac-Man or Centipede in an arcade was the first video game I ever played, but I can’t remember which one. Pac-Man was also the first video game I played at home on our Atari 2600. First computer game was Oregon Trail.
My sister and I used to love those Atari games. We fought over who got to play. We didn’t like two-player games as much. I used to play Delirium all the time, but my humanoids kept getting captured and mutated. I kicked butt at Adventure and Kaboom, though. Pitfall was fun too.
Ooooooh did anybody else play the Dizzy games? Dizzy was an egg that wore boxing gloves. 
i cheerfully concede the possibility!
Original Pong-er here. I remember stating at a motel over New Years 1975 with a pong-like hockey game that we were able to get free games on by carpet-shocking the control knob with a quarter.
I think I remember that. Its housing was rounded yellow fiberglass and had a fat little rocketship trying to shoot a fat little flying saucer. Do I have that right?
It looks like most people’s initial exposure to video games was with home consoles rather than arcade games. Interesting.
I remember playing Pong at home as a wee lad in the late 1970s. My dad was a pretty good opponent, and I suspect he even let me win every once in a while.
The first arcade game I can recall playing is Asteroids. I definitely ate up a lot of time with that one, along with Pac-Man.
The first home video game system we had after Pong was the Atari 2600. I was a Donkey Kong addict on that one.
Arcade: Asteroids, Q-Bert, Pac-Man, or Defender. I really can’t remember how old I was when I played those games, but those are the earliest ones I can remember. Loved Star Wars when it first came out.
Console: Atari; Pong, Space Invaders
Home Computer: Commodore 64; some game involving apples and mazes that I had to manually type in, debug, and save to a tape drive. Floppies for home computers hadn’t been released yet. I was about 5 or 6. Debugging a game when even your parents can’t tell you what “syntax error line 1234” means really sucks. I remember being frustrated as all hell, comparing similar lines of code to see if I could get the thing to work, and leaving the damn thing running for days so I could take another shot at it before wasting a ton of time writing it to a tape.
If I remember right, I played console and arcade games years later. There was also a cartridge game called Lunar Lander, I think. You had to worry about fuel consumption, had two side thrusters and a bigger bottom thruster. Later, when we got a disk drive, I got a helicopter flight simulator called Super Huey.
The first game I ever played was on our IBM PS/2 286 - it was called Freddy’s Rescue Roundup - you had to run up and down ladders and along ledges to save road runners from ghosty things. Loads of fun.
There was another game… something about knights, and worms… and if you got eaten by a worm you ended up inside it, and had to find your way out. You could put them to sleep with flowers. However, my dad traded the 5.25" floppy drive for an extra megabyte of RAM, and I couldn’t play it anymore.
That PC… it had a mighty 20MB hard drive. And 1MB RAM (we never did get the extra RAM to work). I have no idea what the processor speed was. It ran Windows 2.1.
First console game was Super Mario on the NES, and then Alex Kidd on my Sega Master System II - closely followed by Sonic the Hedgehog. Alex Kidd was a rubbish game.
Blimey, I remember The Incredible Machine. And Chessmaster 2000 (I think they’re on 10,000 now). I’ve still got the box for that… not sure if the disk still works though.
Lunar Lander, on a mainframe, with a light pen. Would have been around 1974 or 1975, since I was in first grade.
(once, in the '70’s, for 20 minutes…)
Pong at home and I played Hangman on a TRS-80, which is a lot like a computer.
Arcade game? I don’t remember. We used to go to this place that had the more physical type of games and they had some electronic games as well. I don’t remember what was my first ‘pure computer’ arcade game.
I just wanted to go on the bumper cars.
I’m another one who started with Pong. My grandfather bought it for me in 1975 and all kids wanted to play it at my house (just about the only time I was popular as a kid).
I still remember the first time I played Asteriods…
I was in middle school (1979 or 1980), but my mom was going to college so I got to hang out in the arcade room some weekends when she went in to take a class. All the games were pinball except for a few mechanical type arcade games (car racing with a plastic car and a rolling drum type backdrop for the road, that type of thing) and one day a workman delivered and set up Asteroids. I noticed him first and watched him set it up and play one game to test it. Before he left, he opened the door and tripped the switch a few times to put $10 in credits on the machine! By that time a couple of college kids had gathered around, interested in checking it out. But I was first in line so I got to play first.
Played, died. Next kid inline tried, died even faster than I did. I got to go again, did better than before, died again. 2nd kid in line tried, did better than the 1st but not as good as me. I got one more chance, did (I thought) fairly good. 3rd kid stepped up and beat me. By then there were a dozen kids gathered around. Given that I was a middle schooler and they were college students and it was their arcade, I beat a hasty retreat. … But I still have the memory of playing my first three games for free and it taking three tries for them to beat me.
Pac Man. It was a miniature arcade type thing that my grandmother had. I was terrible at it.