Good thread. My brother got a BBC Micro around 1986 (when I was four). I think the first game I ever played was on it - Chuckie Egg, or possibly Elite.
The first arcade game I ever played was Special Criminal Investigation (or Chase HQ 2). The premise was the same as Chase HQ - hunt down fleeing criminals in a sports car - but instead of ramming them you pressed a button on the steering wheel to make your passenger shoot at the crim from the sunroof.
It’s boring if your game is like every other game. Games should be interesting, original, and fun. Restricting your game to 100% pure text, thus superficially resembling an entire genre of old-school games, raises the bar considerably if it is to compete with interactive fiction like Grand Theft Auto V and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.
I found this list of top text games, though it is unclear what criterion they use to decide whether a game is pure enough text to qualify for the database. Out of the top 10, 4 are commercial games and the rest are freeware, though some of the freeware is by commercial game developers. So it seems people are still making, and even selling, text-based interactive fiction, yet the number of authors who can successfully pull this off is small and it remains a niche market.
I remember my dad bringing a “portable computer” from work home back in 86 or 87. By “portable” they meant “it’s about the size, shape and weight of an oscilloscope (complete with the insert monochrome screen)”. It had games I still remember to this day : *GATO *(a WW2 submarine simulator. We kept losing at it because we’d forget to open the torp tubes before shooting, and also by shooting at the re-arming boat because it was a green dot on a monochrome map), *Digger *(feat. PopCorn as a soundtrack because fuck copyrights), *Zaxxon *(an isometric shooter) and one other game I remember more hazily - it was a maze game, viewed from top-down, where you controlled an ASCII-like character that looked like an owl ; ring any bells ? We never quite grokked that one and I think maybe it could have been a rogue-like game ?
Then a couple years later Dad bought an actual DOS machine for home, with a monochrome green screen this time, along with a huge box of secondhand games - there was PitStop, and Bushido, and *Gunship *(god that game was so fricking good) and Falcon 1.0 ; there was a horrible olympics game that ruined your fingers via mashing, *Asteroids *was there along with *Pacman *and *Frogger… *good times.
Ah, memories. Friend’s dad had an IBM PS/2; as I recall, Digger was the only game they owned.
There was a pre-cursor game to Zork that a family member that me play, which was fun. We also had a version of Frogger that ran on our Apple IIe.
Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II. My school got a computer lab and we’d go in and play this.
First game I had at home was Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on an IBM PC Jr.
I loved Bard’s Tale and I just saw on GOG that the game has been re-mastered and released a week or so ago. Very excited!
You can check it out here: The Bard's Tale Trilogy on GOG.com
I played Pong at one friends house and then later Atari Adventure at another friends house. Loved playing Asteroids in the arcade, and loved going to Radio Shack to play Pyramid text adventure on the TRS Model (I? II?).
I bought a TRS Color but didn’t really buy games for it because I was pretty excited about learning programming and being able to create my own graphics and games. Eventually I got some games, don’t remember the first, but I do remember playing Missile Command, Berserk and Zaxxon.
These were the games I made:
Devious was a copy of arcade Xevious:Devious clone of Zevious - TRS-80 Color Computer Game - YouTube
Qiks was a copy of arcade Qix: Qicks - 1984 clone of Qix for the TRS-80 Color Computer - YouTube
Module Man was original but included aspects of various adventure games: Module Man for the TRS-80 CoCo - YouTube
I was born in the early 1980’s and I have very vague memories of my dad taking me to my cousins house where they had some sort of games console set up, I don’t know what it was or what games were being played, next time I’m speaking to one of my cousins I’ll have to ask.
I also remember being taken along by my older brother while he was visiting a friend, they had a computer and a game, which I think was Defender. While my brother did whatever he was there to do I sat and played this game, I remember begging to be allowed to stay a little longer and he promised we would come back another day and I could play it then. Thirty plus years later and I’m still waiting. 
First game was either “Bustout” (a Breakout clone) or “Skiing” for the TRS-80 Color Computer. “Bustout” was the first one we had at home, when we got our own CoCo instead of just the one at Grandma’s.
That looks familiar enough that I might have had a copy in the 8 disks full of (probably pirated, in retrospect) games my aunt and uncle who worked at RadioShack had compiled and shared. Unfortunately, I remember preferring to play “Quix” to Qiks. Maybe Quix was easier?
That’s probably the one done by Tom Mix software, it’s not quite as close to the original but I’ve seen other comments that some people like that version better. The real version can be a little chaotic with the lines changing directions rapidly.
That’s really cool that coded some of those old-school 8-bit games. So how long would a project like that take you? I assume it was coded straight in assembly, right? Were those games comfortable enough to fit into RAM limitations, or did you find yourself needing to get creative to optimize your code so it could fit?
Short answer:
A few months, while going to high school at the same time.
Longer answer:
The first one I linked to was actually my 2nd game, I was 15 years old and still learning. My first game was a copy of a game I played at Radio Shack on the Model II called (I think) Storm Arrows. I sent copies to multiple software companies to see if anyone wanted to distribute it, I got rejected from Tom Mix and one other company, but Spectral Associates responded with “we have that game already but make another one and we’ll distribute it.”
It was all assembler, my computer had 4k, but Spectral Associates helped me upgrade to 16k. Everything was hand coded, fonts, sounds, etc. Memory was definitely a limit but not to the extent of really sweating about it. Speed was a bigger issue because everything was handled by the CPU, all graphics and sounds, it really limited what could be done with the graphics.
Ah, that’s pretty cool to be in those days when a high school student can code up a computer game and send it to various software companies on spec. I did a little assembly on the C64 back in the late 80s, so I have some idea of what’s going on, but I the games I did were mostly BASIC with perhaps a machine language routine in it, but BASIC wasn’t fast enough for anything requiring graphics with any semblance of speed. Really cool stuff. I’ve always been in awe of the Atari 2600 programmers (especially the Activision ones) and what they could get that thing to do with the limitations they had (especially 128 bytes of RAM and the clock cycle you had to religiously keep track of.)
Ya those were fun times, now days it’s crazy the amount of manpower that goes into a game. I loved playing Adventure on the Atari, it was simple but it felt so cool back then.
We spent a lot of time over at K-Mart playing on the various computers and consoles like the Atari, Colecovision and Intellivision. They probably got pretty tired of us hanging out all day playing games.
Sears (IIRC) had a cool pinball/breakout hybrid. No idea what it was called.
Pentium III 533 Mhz
No, that wasn’t it. 