You left out fiddling with the volume control on the tape deck to make the modulator work. The same setting never worked twice on mine, even with the same tape.
Still, I didn’t complain too much, as the only other computer gaming I had access to required typing in the program…on a machine with no permanent storage, or any ports to connect to permanent storage.
Mine was more “Spend several hours typing it in and then lose it all before you could run it because the computer overheated.”
Anyone remember the original Ultima games? 
How about Wizardry? Bards Tail? I remember with Wizardry you actually had to boot the game (by 5 1/2" floppy on 2 diskettes!) and you could hack the database with a hex editor to give yourself unlimited levels, make up your own super powered items, etc.
I also like the original Dungeons and Dragons (Pool of Radiance and such) when it first came out. For MMORPG the first one I really got addicted too was Ultima Online, though I’d played several dial up type online MUD’s and such before.
-XT
Yup, remember them and played them all.
I fondly look back on playing games by Sierra On-Line. Police Quest was unreal. I couldn’t believe the graphics! Then they had the Space Quest series, the Leisure Suit Larry series, and others using the same graphics engine.
It makes me sad to see what happened to Sierra after Windows became prominent.
Heh, they did the graphics test as late as Wing Commander IV, though it was a bit of a joke by the time I was running the game on my 1.8GHz Pentium IV computer that I used to have. Then I experieneced an unexpected new problem: Evidently my disk drive was too FAST for the game to handle, leading it to constantly have to go back and re-load portions of the game because the drive kept shooting past it. Or something. All I know is that game had to read from the disk a lot more than anything else I’ve ever put inside my computer.
Also, I fondly remember Shareware gaming, when you could spend $5 or $10 for what was basically an extended demo of a game, maybe the first third of it or so, and it would end with a splash screen talking about how amazingly awesome the full game would be, and you were encouraged to share the disk of your game with your friends.
I was so tired of messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys, I finally decided to have a single autoexec.bat/config.sys for every game I had. Autoexec.moo, autoexec.civ, autoexec.atn (A-Train), etc etc etc.
Kids today… they turn a switch and the game comes on! :rolleyes:
BTW, my still most-played game currently is Colonization.
Anyone remember getting the shareware version of Doom and then downloading levels for PvP off of bulletin boards and such? I still remember trading porn for levels on a few bulletin boards.
-XT
I LOVED the Space Quest series…walking around, only to find that part of the background WASN’T background, or a single pixel item solves the puzzle. It’d suck if they did it today, but back then people had the tenacity to push right, push left, go down a pixel, push right, push left, go down a pixel.
A wad for wad trade, eh?
cough
Man, I’m getting misty reading this thread, daydreaming about programming my 2K Timex-Sinclair frisbee …
I had an Atari 600XL with a tape drive. What a pain! And in High School, we played Dragon Quest (was that the title? It’s all foggy now) on the Commodore PETs. Gotta love the green-screen! 
That is what I was going to say as well. I was only 9 years old when I started typing in those printed programs on my Commodore 64. As you note, the quality control in the magazines was often a little lacking. Sometimes they did give you the fix the next month but there were one or two times that I went back over over single line multiple times and even got my uncle to proof it as well and it still didn’t work. Other times, the game would work but something would be hopelessly flawed like screwed up graphics or physics. It really isn’t very different from my IT job today come to think of it.
Oh gosh I loved all the infocom text games, from the Zork series to Planetfall/Stationfall to of course Hitchhiker’s Guide to that weird one A Mind Forever Voyaging. And there was one set in a haunted house/fairground that I don’t remember that well (obviously), and the one supposedly created for female gamers based on a romance novel/pirate theme (which still wasn’t as cheesy as the faux-porny Leather Goddesses of Phobos), and their last games based on Sherlock Holmes and Camelot/King Arthur… The humor was clever, the puzzles frustrating, and those fun extras they placed in the box were a hoot. I still have my “Don’t Panic!” pin from the HHGG game.
Later on these games were supplanted by hybrids like Spellcasting 101 and Timequest(?), which were still text adventures but had some graphic elements too. I think these were by one of the infocom programmers (Steve … Maretsky? maybe), so they featured the same humor and puzzle-making ability. But text games were dying, and I don’t remember finding any more. Which was a bummer because it was a looong time before I was able to by a computer with graphics capability.
Once I moved up from my Tandy to an Emerson 286(!!!), the world was my oyster! I played all the Sierra games mentioned here – King’s Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest – plus all the Monkey Island games, Sam & Max, Maniac Mansion, and the Day of the Tentacle. Then there were all the little shareware id/Apogee platform games, like Crystal Caves, Secret Agent and especially Commander Keen. So much fun!
Then my next huge leap was … Wolfenstein 3D. Which I remember seeing played in the accounting office of my first job, and I was absolutely mesmerized by the seeming realism and immersive qualities of the first person perspective. Plus? Secret rooms! Hidden levels! And above all, killing Nazis! C’mon, what could be better?
Well, Doom and Half Life, eventually. But I think of Wolfenstein 3D as the benchmark between old school and new school. A demarcation that’s wholly subjective, I know!
Lunar Lander on the ZX81!
I remember when Doom came out: some people put it on the network at work and the network got swamped when someone fired the chaingun.
People, people, I had to type in the code myself to play some of my earliest games on the TI99/4A. The machine had 16k memory. I also had an adventure game that loaded off of tape.
I also played the original Star Trek game from Unix. I think that was written around 1973.
Jim (BTW: I am not joking, I really did type the games in from magazines. My wife remembers doing the same thing on the Commodore Pet.)
Look at my link above, What Exit. It’s all there. Or good portions of it.
Well for that matter **Athena ** was the first to mention typing I think.
At least we know what old-school really means. 
Played this as well (Lunar Lander too). I suppose I took ‘Computer Gaming’ to mean PC type games. The first games I remember playing on a PC type system were on an old Atari 400 system with a tape drive…or some text games from a TSR-80. Well…I remember building one of those kit computers in the mid-70’s that you programmed with dip switches and used little LED lights to flash coded info…and I seem to recall it played tic-tac-toe.
However, for me the ‘Golden Age’ was those first tier computer games (that you could play at home). I still remember those early games fondly…and still remember my thoughts on where computer games were going (I was a programmer at the time).
-XT
If you’re jonesing for text adventures, they’re still being written by hobbyists. Check out SPAG and the IF Archive.
I cross paths with Steve Meretzky from time to time. We’re both members of a small professional association and I’ve chatted with him over dinner once or twice. A couple of years ago my wife (who was a huge Leather Goddesses of Phobos fan) made me promise to ask him how to get out of Cleveland. He’d completely forgotten all the details of the game and I came off looking like the worse sort of fanboy … . 
Yes, you’re right, though I’m not sure about the spelling. He was the one who wrote Leather Goddesses of Phobos and then went on to write Spellcasting 101 and its sequels, which were a hoot: sort of a cross between Harry Potter and Revenge of the Nerds.