Mine was pong.
I got it for christmas in 1975, just after it came out. I was a freshman in college, and I took it to school with me.
For 6 weeks I was the most popular guy in the dorm. Folks were lined up down the hallway to play it!
Then everyone got sick of it all at once, and it got played maybe 6 times after that.
No matter! I soon moved on to Intellevision!
Radio Shack’s Electronic TV Scoreboard
I had the cheaper model w/o the gun.
I played with that thing for hours. Later, I got the first generation Mattel Intellivision.
I had a friend who had Pong, but the first game I owned was the Atari 2600 with Combat. I think my mom might still have that game system tucked away at the house, hmm.
Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis.
Atari 2600. Don’t remember which was the first game, but we had bunches of them. Yar’s Revenge, Pac-Man, Pitfall, the abysmal E.T., Combat, Bowling, Basketball, Missile Command…gads…
Combat bowling?? That sounds awesome!!
There IS a comma there, ya know…although I think an early version of Combat Chess on the 2600 would have been awesome.
We had Atari (Pong and Castlevania are the games I remember) when I was in junior high school, but they were family property, and I really didn’t play them very often.
The first game I really got involved with was Jewels of Darkness, a text-based interactive adventure that was loaded on the mainframe of the college I attended in the 80’s. I’m really surprised I managed to graduate sometimes.
When we got our first computer, I got a graphics version of Jewels of Darkness (still mostly text, but with monochrome graphics!) Otherwise, I played a LOT of solitare that came with Windows 3.1!
Pong. Late 70’s sometime. I thought it was the greatest invention in history.
The first one I owned (seriously) was Fusion Frenzy which I bought for my kids a few years ago. I first played Pong on a ferry between Bangor, Maine and Nova Scotia in rough waters in about 1977. I remember it well.
I’d played some shareware type games on my computer, but the first real game I owned was when I bought a SNES that came with Mario. I really liked the game and played it for a couple months but it got to be too hard. I put it away for something like six months, then went out and bought a guide. That helped a lot, and I managed to make some good progress for awhile, but then even with the guide the game got too hard. I was terrified of any area that involved floating platforms, and if they combined floating platforms over lava, I was an emotional wreck.
At that point I was really determined to get through that damn game, so I went out and got a Game Shark cheat system. Then I was finally able to finish the entire game. Total lapsed time: at least a year.
I’ve since gotten much better at video games. Falling to my death into a bottomless nothingness still freaks me out though. I hate jumping across floating platforms suspended over nothingness.
I know it was a Commodore 64, but I can’t recall the first game we actually had for it. It was either Alpha-Build (which I LOVED) or Asteroids (or whatever the C54 version of that was.)
Christmas Eve 1979: Atari 2600 with Combat. Fun until my PITA brother figured out how to fiddle with the switches to get the right tank to shoot through walls and killl the left tank.
Castlevania was a Nintendo game, unless there’s some earlier game with the same name that I never heard of.
The first game that I owned was Duck Hunt, the game that came with the NES. I quickly moved on to Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda, and proceeded to play the crap out of them. Before that, my uncle had an Atari and let me and my cousins play with it.
These days I’m spending quality time with Civ IV and World of Warcraft, but I still remember those halcyon 8-bit days.
You played Castlevania on the Atari?
Tetris on Original Game Boy.
Dungeon Of Doom for Radio Shack Color Computer was my first video game.
Klendathu for Radio Shack Color Computer was my second video game. Fight those bugs Starship Troopers.
Pyramid for Radio Shack Color Computer was my first text adventure.
The British equivalent was the Tandy Color Computer. The cartridges and program tapes would run on either model.
A later version of a dedicated Pong ‘console’. Came with a light gun and in addition to ‘Pong’ you could play such exciting games as “Hockey” (two pong paddles per side) and “Tennis” ('Pong with uhhhh… ok I think it was just ‘Pong’ but called “Tennis”)
The light gun did work however in its own game called, oh hell I can’t remember, let’s call it “Stupid Light Gun That Works if You Point it in the General Direction of the Television”.
Still, lotta fun and friend jealousy. My mom was cool for buying it.
Mega Man 2 for the NES. First I bought with my own money anyway. I had some given to me earlier, but that’s not the same.
Mixed-Up Mother Goose is the flat out first I owned though. Played at the tender age of three on a 286.
We had an Atari 2600 and a Pacman game that looked like a miniature arcade game. I’m not sure which one we had first.
Is it just me or did I see an Atari - like system on sale at Best Buy. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?