Your first video games

The Game Room
1

There’s a fun “what was your first computer?” thread over in IMHO, so I figured I’d ask other gamers what games first drew them into computer and video gaming.

My story: I inherited my brother’s BBC Micro sometime in 1988 or 1989, and along with it I inherited two 5.25" floppy disks onto which he’d copied tons of games. I think there were about 20 on each.

One or two (Stryker’s Run, for example) never worked right or never worked at all, because he hadn’t copied all of the code - IIRC, he had to copy the code manually in chunks - but all the rest did.

I had Elite, Revs, Thrust, Chuckie Egg, Missile Command, Joust, Frak!, Asteroids, Superior Soccer, Rocket Raid, Airlift, Battle Tank (a Battlezone clone), Chess (yes, it was just called that), Exile, Froggy (Frogger clone), Galaxians, Galaga, the brilliantly named Way of the Exploding Fist, Repton, Felix Meets the Evil Weevils, Mr. Ee! (sort of Pac-Man-ish), Jet Set Willy, Knight Lore, and Lunar Jetman.

There were more I can’t remember, including an isometric scrolling flying game (Airbase Raid or something).

Some of these games were immense classics and astonishingly influential. Elite, for example, set almost every aspect of the space combat simulation exemplified by Privateer, Descent: Freespace, Eve Online, Freelancer and so on. You could fly through space normally or travel long distances quickly using jump gates or hyperspace; you could dock at space stations and trade goods; you could be a bounty hunter and make your money killing criminals; you could be a criminal yourself and prey on big, slow trader ships. You could also buy various ships and equipment to better suit your playing style. Finally, when you got powerful enough, you could fly to the front lines of the war against the aliens and make serious money, eventually reaching the rank of… Elite.

The game universe is still by far the biggest I’ve ever seen - 8 galaxies, each containing 256 planets, 256 stars and 256 space stations - plus essentially infinite space in between.

It’s one of the ten most important games in history. Strangely, I always preferred Joust as a kid. Go figure.

2

The Atari 2600 was the first video game system I had. IIRC, I got it for Christmas 1983, which would have been right after the Great Video Game Crash. Santa must have got a good deal on it :smiley:

Loved playing all the games I had, even E.T.

3

Space Wars.

4

Our first gaming console was an ATARI - so I was definitely of the Space Invaders & Pong generation . . .

But more realistically, I was in to PC gaming first with games like Kings Quest 5 (because that had a girl as the main character, not a guy.) I also had a few other Zork style games. I never really had the systems to support the higher-tech games back when I was a teenager - my family was not very tech-savvy. So I know I missed out on some of that skill set in a huge way.

Later on, my first ever online game was The Sims Online back in 2003, after many months of playing The Sims. I played that pretty regularly until several of my online friends convinced me to jump to World of Warcraft in Feb 2005.

Still playing World of Warcraft. I’ve thought of looking at other online games - but I just don’t have the time to reinvest myself. I’ve got a few end-game toons on WoW and I can play a few nights a week max - so it just doesn’t seem realistic to add to that.

5

Atari 2600 here too. “Under 50 bucks!” Was it Space Invaders I played?

It’s funny how I actually have a fairly clear image of that game, even though I don’t remember most of the other games I had.

6

My whole family would play Space Invaders. We had names for all the different row types.

I have a clear recall of my mom yelling, “Watch out for calisthenics! watch out for calisthenics!” (there were a row of invaders that looked like they were doing jumping jacks to us).

7

Combat for the Atari 2600 here. Quickly followed by Pong and Air-Sea Battle. We had an early Atari 2600 - my parents bought it either late 1977 or very early 1978 - and I was informed in no uncertain terms that I was not to touch the system without direct adult supervision (I turned 5 right around the time we bought the system).

8

Hah! I remember that row!

I started out with an Atari 800 – had cartridges for Pac Man, Centipede, and Space Invaders. Our game library expanded substantially when we added a cassette drive, and even more so when we got our first 5.25" floppy drive. Ahh, the good old days.

Best retro gaming moment ever: backstabbing your friends in Wizards of Wor.

9

Atari 2600! I distinctly remember Combat, Adventure, Pitfall, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Demon Attack.

10

My stepbro had a Commodore 128. I remember playing a Bruce Lee game, and a Mission Impossible game, both of which were rad. The graphics were sorta comparable to Lode Runner, so it was decent for its time. I loved the Mission Impossible game because if you fell into a pit your guy would let out this fading scream as he fell.

My first system was a ColecoVision. I played lots of Zaxxon. For my 8th birthday I got a Nintendo with R.O.B., the light gun with Duck Hunt, and the gold cartridge Zelda. This was before Super Mario Bros. was released, so I had the original Mario Bros., which was quite a bit like Donkey Kong.

Yep, those were the days. leans back wistfully in rocking chair

11

Back in the mid-1970’s (1975?), I had one of the original Sears Pong games. It was bright yellow with black knobs and could play pong, pong, and pong.

12

Tele-Games, an Atari clone. We played Adventure! until our eyes dried out. Over and over.

13

My first system was the Atari 1600XL. Mom was able to justify buying it as “educational”, since it had a keyboard and was programmable. Unfortunately, it used a different sort of cartridge than the much more popular 2600, so we couldn’t trade games with friends, or pick up used games for cheap. We had Centipede (which I was great at), Jungle Hunt (which I could easily get through the first three zones, but always died to the cannibals at the end), and Frogger (which I never got the hang of).

Later, we got an Apple ][e, with a slew of educational games we inherited from a retiring teacher, and eventually, I bought myself an NES (Mom had no objection to me having one, so long as I bought it myself, and it took a while to save up $100).

14

Our family had a Fairchild system. It was basic games - Tic Tac Toe and the like. But there were a few tank games, a Space Invaders clone that were good - they certainly burned the weekends away.

15

Pong and Haunted House for the Magnavox Odyssey.

16

Yes, but could it play pong/

I used to think Frogger was so hard. In World of Warcraft, there is a part in a dungeon instance where you have to run between these highly poisonous blobs that are in a frogger pattern.

For some reason, it’s clicked for me how to run through it and I never die. But I amazed how some of the best players in my guild continually die running through.

I am in awe - because they are phenomenal players. I think it’s just a genetic frogger flaw.

17

I got a Pong game for Christmas in '75 or '76. It could play two-person Pong, four-person Pong, and handball (solitaire Pong!).

For Christmas in '78, I got a Mattel Electronic Football game:

Just found an iPhone app which re-creates that game!

For Christmas in '82, I got an Intellivision, along with the Dungeons and Dragons game cartridge. I was in heaven!

18

Before the home systems arrived my earliest gaming experiences consisted of riding our bikes to the bowling alley where they had space invaders and asteroids.
Then one day in 79’ dad came home with an Atari 2600 without prompting. We played it for about a day and it died on us.
He took it back to exchange it but when he returned the next day he said
“I took it back to exchange it, but the guy at JCPenneys had something new that just came in. He said it was better than the Atari.”
And at that point I got my very first look at, and was the first kid on my block and class to have, an Intellivision.

19

My first system was Intellivision also. Had a ton of games for it - all the sports games, both AD&D games, Tron, all the voice games, etc. I think I’ve still got it in my attic.

20

Was the Intellivision better than the Atari?