Oh geez, I had that too. I think there were 4 games - pong, with a paddle on each side and wide open goals, hockey, where you had a restricted goal and a forward on the other guys side - if the ball hit him from behind, it passed through with a direction change - something else where you had a forward, but he was on the same side as the goalie, and a handball single player game.
I fondly remember playing Mystery House on a computer at school when I was in the third and fourth grades.
Around the same time I got an Atari 2600, and Adventure was always my favorite.
I finally talked my parents into buying a computer in 1983, an Apple IIc. I wanted it so I could play the Ultima series, which I’d dabbled in at school. Ultima III was the latest title at the time, so that was my first actual computer game; I soon followed it up with the first two.
Yeah, I totally thought it was a rip off the first time I saw the Space Battle box. Then my dad told me what was up.
I had an Odyssey 2 and I remember playing football on it and some asteroids rip-off and some adventure game and not much else.
While our neighborhood was waging the Atari 2600 vs. Intellivision wars I remember one house on the block had this odd system>> Bally Arcade
(Minor hijack alert)
Anybody remember those handheld sports games you could get in the late 70s? They were a little bigger than an old-school calculator, with directional buttons to control little blips of light. I had both football and basketball. IIRC, it was a two-player game, played in turns. You controlled the offense only, and once you scored or turned the ball over, you handed the game to the other player for his turn…
Do you mean the ones with the red LEDs that represented the players? We had a bunch of those. Football had two modes - run, where you had 2 blockers each of whom permanently killed a defender, and pass, where you had a blocker and a receiver. The funniest part was that as you ran downfield, the runner scrolled back from extreme right to extreme left, so you’d pass the same 4 defenders over & over & over.
ETA: And here it is
You mean like these?
They re-released those a couple years back. I saw them at Target. Brought back a lot of 1983 7th grade memories.
Further searching of my memory & the web shows that I actually had Coleco Electronic Quarterback. Actually, given my parent’s propensity to save a nickel, I probably had the Sears version of it.
Had an Atari with Pac Man (I was shocked recently to find out Atari’s home port is considered horrible - certainly not up to the cabinets, but not awful.), Defender, Combat (I liked the invisible tanks)…I seem to remember having Missile Command. Probably Space Invaders, too.
Played Joust at a friend’s house a lot. And a Star Wars game (first person POV…I think you were piloting a TIE…may have been a Rebel fighter, though…outside chance it was the Millennium Falcon, but, dammit, I remember the TIE panels on the sides!). No clue what system they had…systems, actually…the TIE game was on a computer, Joust on a TV…I’m pretty sure of that.
Yup, I had the Mattel versions y’all linked. Loved those things.
First game system I ever had was yet another pong style knock-off, but it had multiple games to choose from and included a light gun. You could play tennis (Pong), hockey, squash, and a couple others as two person, and then the light gun would allow you to pretend you were skeet shooting (i.e. target would appear float for a bit and disappear) or shoot at a target that moved around the TV screen (i.e. target would never disappear, but the test was timed and the goal was to see which player got the most shots in).
Thecomputer games that I owned were Wasteland and Bard’s Tale sometime around when I was 13, though I had been using computers since I was 6 and had played both educational and non-educational games on and off during that time. (I had a friend that had an Apple II compatible and school had some Apple II’s.)
Wasteland was for a long time my favorite game.
My first serious video gaming experience (that I can remember) was playing the original Asteroids arcade machines, and later I really got into Donkey Kong. I never had a console until I bought myself a SNES in '92 or so, when I was 24 or 25 years old, and I mostly played Super Mario Bros., Ken Griffey, Jr. Baseball, and that really cool 3D-ish version of Donkey Kong (Donkey Kong Country?). I’ve never owned any other console.
Didn’t own a personal computer until I got my first Mac in '96, and I played a lot of a shareware game called Escape Velocity, and later, Duke Nukem 3D and Diablo II.
I remember my dad taking me to the local video arcade when I was four. That would have been 1985. I remember the arcade had a few little stools that you could borrow to stand on so I could play.
We had an Atari 2600. God, that thing was magic. Dad and I used to play at night before mom got home from work. Those are some of my favorite memories.
/edit - actually, I remember more - the very first letter I ever wrote was to Atari. My parents did most of the actual writing. But I had one of those Atari “game catalogs” and was absolutely enthralled by the ad for “Adventure”. Of course by this time it was out of print. But I wrote them just the same asking if they could please re-release it, I wanted to play.
They sent me a very nice letter back with a $10 coupon for “Midnight Magic”. That ended up being probably the best 2600 pinball game, my dad loved it.
Good times, good times.
My very first one was a pong console. Can’t recall the brand or anything, but it played pong, and more pong.
Not long after we got the Atari 2600. My all time favourite game was called River Raid. Brilliant, kept me staring at the TV for hours and hours.
Our family had one of the pong consoles in the 70s… definitely not the Sears one. I thought it was the Magnavox, but none of the photos I’ve seen online match my very vivid memory of that console, so I’m not sure that’s it.
The first cartridge game I got was Radar Rat Race for the VIC-20. It was essentially a clone of the arcade game Rally-X, with rats and cheese instead of cars. I played the hell out of that game.
Atari 2600, Christmas, 1979. Activision–publisher of River Raid–started out on that platform; they had the best games.
I didn’t fall in love with video games and get hooked until getting the NES for Christmas '86.
However,we did have an old Tandy Color Computer or CoCo in the house before that. I don’t remember the model number but you did put the cartridges into the side. The games were amusing, but not engaging and robust like Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda.
My sister and I will sometimes joke about Dino Wars. It was a game with horrible controls, but it had a great fake dinosaur roar. We still do a ROOOWWWAAARRR to each other.
Glad to see someone chime in with the SNES.
This 27 year old thought he was going to have to do he later stuff himself. ** I have a few stories here, so bear with me. **
I believe it was Kindergarten or First Grade. We were at Recess or P.E. or otherwise outside. A friend of mine just randomly stated that if you get 100 “coins” in Mario you get an extra man.
Not that, you know, that did I thing for me at the time. I couldn’t wrap my head around that at the time, much less have the words “couldn’t wrap my head around that” at the time.
Later that year, I spent the night over at his house, and we played his father’s ( I believe ) 2600. He played Superman, and I remeber thinking even back then, how simplistic looking it was. There was also Pitfall! complete with aligators and the shrinking pond / quicksand trap. In hindsight, I think my friend had picked up on jumpping on the aligators heads in order to make through that one screen.
As to my first “Video game” I have to think for a second. I believe I got my used hand me down Nintendo after I got my first computer.
I couldn’t tell you the specs of that computer if I tried. A big honking thing from Zenith. The computer was a hand me down from my Godfather. He apparently needed it for work, and got a newer system. He shipped the entire thing to my house. The thing was massive, to say nothing of the manuals, and manuals and manuals. I remember thinking that, I would have to build the case and everything, and I wondered about that. He reassured me it came fully together, which I thought was cool.
But it came with two games:
Beast I was told this game was similar to pacman. And, I guess to some extent it was the best fit at the time. I remember there being a LOT of levels, based on what letter you pressed as you started the game. You could edit the variations, much like the difficulty switch on the 2600.
The game has you, as a small blue diamond moving around a field of red H es. No power pellets this time though, just smush them between two green boxes. – Unless of course they were the super variety, that could push back. Those types got trapped in a cell at least two blocks thick to a side. But the Eggs, I could never get to all the eggs before they hatched, it was so crazy!
I remember the day I found out that if you pressed " 2 " on the set up screen, you could play a co-op game. the two little white houses that were always in the lower left “woke up” up to become the second player’s piece. You could work as a team, or you could have friendly fire.
and
Blockout – A game in the style of Tetris [IIRC, Tetris bought the rights to Blockout recently.] Instead of looking “down” into a well that held 2-D shapes, Blockout was straight back, playing with 3-D shapes. A “Line” was created once you blocked out an entire plane with blocks from various pieces. Which was all fun and good, until you got the pieces that purposefully made you take up two planes at once. [Imagine the pain of not having an I piece, but on every fourth turn or so.] I had to point blank ask my godfather what the rule was to remove pieces. I was like “I think there is something I don’t know.” As he was playing and removing planes.
6 keys to rotate the blocks, QWE and ASD – complete with animation of an L block.
One night, about 2 or so in the morning, I could hear the game beeping and booping. I got up, and made it to where I could just see where the computer was. [I must have been 11 or 12 at this point] I saw my Mom there playing block out. She admitted that she was addicted to it, and that she could not put it down. She went on to say, that she knew it was late, and that it was hurting her contacts. The implication was, that she had played Block-out on a few nights in a row.
There was also a few Fractal drawing programs on the Computer, and Dazzle, What we would today call a screen saver, but you had to remember to turn it on specifically. It’s complete Run was to blank the screen, draw and play with an image, on wake up, it showed its advertising screen, and terminated.
The Computer later went on to run Funhouse, the first video game I ever bought [or rather my mom bought it for me, from the 1 dollar clearance table at Babbages, I believe. [WOW]
We tried to get Prodigy working on it, and I believe that we finally did. The Speed back then of course was slower, and it felt like it. We could never get the configuration right on setup to have the monitor run Prodigy in Color.
Despite that, I would do anything to get back intoMadMaze again.
My first game console was a Colecovision and I spent many, many hours playing Cosmic Avenger. I remember every time you’d win, the distance between the ground and top of screen would get smaller and I’d play until there was just a narrow tunnel over and over again. We had other games of course but Cosmic Avenger was my passion.
But even Cosmic Avenger paled against the hours logged across the street playing Intellivision’s Utopia against the neighbor. God, the hours spent planting crops, chasing one another’s fishing fleets around with our PT boats and trying to mentally steer hurricanes away from our hospitals…
I wouldn’t sink that many hours into a title again until years later when I got my Commodore 128 and a copy of Pirates!.