Which were your first games ever?

[PureGhostGR]

I'm getting nostalgic again.. And I blame christmas for it.

I keep remembering my first experience with games.. It was christmas and I had just received my first "really good" present from grandma, an "NES game console", that was it for me.. I was hooked for life from the first moment the catridge light turned on.

First three games in chronological order:

NES:

a) Ice climber : Wow.. I remeber staring at the screen mezmerized. I still remember this game fondly..
b) Donkey Kong Jr : This was a good break from Ice climber.. nothing more.

And then about a year later.

c) Zelda : Revelation. Everything changed after Zelda.. I wanted more out of games.. I was hooked for good.

PC:

a) Karateka. Action game. Boring.
b) Indiana Jones and the Last crusade (adventure). I was about 11-12? not able to understand english.. I couldn't figure out how to give marcus the game protection and naturally I was forever stuck.. LOL.
c) Loom.. What can I say.. the earth moved and I discovered adventure games. I still remember listening to the tape on my little tape player, trying to understand what was said.. lol.

ahh.. gaming memories.

So, what was your first gaming experience?

[Privateer Puddin']

Monkey Island 2 on PC aged 5...didn't know how to save so i had to restart it every time

[Mr_Frisby]

pudin man - dito with the not knowing how to save - tho worse as I was more like fourteen before I played MI1 so . .


First (and most lovingly remembered game)
Countdown - I never get sick of being labotamized . .even to this day.

Followed closely by LL1 and Goldrush .
(Goldrush is still one of my favorite favorites, sh*t I wish Tierra would get off thier fat arses and make a remake of that'n!)

[Squinky]

Quest for Glory was the first game I ever remember getting hooked on. I mostly had to watch my older brother play though....I remember when a monster would come on screen, you could hear the floppy drive start up, so you always knew to type "Throw Dagger" or "Cast dart"

[GarageGothic]

First PC games:

1) Space Commander (Space Invader clone in CGA)
2) Castle Adventure (I think that was the title. Bird's eye view, arrow key and text input, ASCII symbols for characters and objects)

and the one that made all the difference:

3)  Police Quest

I remember the first time I played police quest on my cousin's computer as if it was yesterday. We didn't know about savegames, so we just restarted the game every time the character died (most often while driving). I thought it was so cool that you drive around and enter seemingly random locations like the hotel. My cousin left me at the computer, and I tried walking around and typing some things. I walked up the receptionist at the hotel and typed - I didn't know much English - "give me a gun". The game apparently interpreted this as "give gun" (to receptionist) and responded with something like "Thank you. But I'm not giving it back". And that, my friends, was my very first, but certainly not last, experience with the problem of text parsers.

[Nacho]

The first one was in that early 80´s machine you had to plug to the TV, and it was some kind of 2-colour arcade called something "Arthur".

The first game... I can´t really remember, but I´m almost sure that as for GA it was "Indiana Jones and the last Cruzade"

[YOke]

I discovered adventure-games quite late actually, but my first meeting left me a different person. Indiana Jones FoA.
A very dedicated salesperson insisted on giving me a demonstration, so while I watched he installed it on a computer in the store that had a Roland soundboard installed. And when saw the intro and heard the glorious midi theme (hehe) I was sold, and have been ever since.

[SSH]

Hungry Horace (Pacman clone) on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum... Yay!

As for adventures, it was one of the ones you type out of a book... Usborne "Write your own adventure" or something

and then graphical adventures... must have been ages before I had one actually... probably Discworld 2!

[Captain Mostly]

I know (because my mother tells me) that we used to play The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum... But the first game I have any REAL memories of would probably be Prine Of Persia on the PC. That Skeleton was terrifying!

[Ali]

Dizzy on the ZX spectrum instilled in my a lifelong fear of ANYTHING that moves. To this day, if I get within the vicinity of a bird, my hands and feet fly off while my body recedes into the distance.

[jannar85]

Maniac Mansion at the age of 8 (?)

[Duzz]

ahhh, castle adventure... didn't think anyone else would have played that. I played that for hours on end, avoiding rooms with monsters cause I could never work out how to kill them.  then I always drowned in some trap downstairs or something... I would've been about 6

that and digdug, and elevator and arctic fox.... I played Space quest 1 as I said in the old computers thread, but the first adventure i really got into was hero quest ( quest for glory)  man that game rocks.  I remember going to primary school all excited cause I found out you could play the dagger throwing game and  win money, and telling all my friends who were playing it at the same time... I was too scared to venture out into the forest much though, I don't think i really understood game saving either...

[DGMacphee]

Pitfall on the old Atari console.

[Ghormak]

Any of the hundreds of C64 games my brother had. I can't really narrow it down to a particular one.

First PC game was Police Quest I, I think.

[Timosity]

I remember playing pong on atari, that the kids next door had, before I had a computer.

I did have a 'Game & Watch' which I had a game called Turtle bridge, Donkey Kong was on 'Game & Watch' Too on a double LCD screen, These were the original Nintendo's before the consoles. They were so cool, I think I still have it somewhere.

There were basic arcade games Like Pacman & Space Invaders, but these were at Arcades.

Eventually in the Early 80's we got a C64, and had Pitfall & Pitfall 2 on tape (a computer tape, same as audio tape, but these were used before floppy disc's)

My favourite cartridge game on C64 was "Wizard of War".

My First adventure game I played wasn't until I was in High School, in about 1989 (in Year 8 ) I played LSL3, Then SQ3, then all the previous ones, and others like PQ, KQ, Code name: Iceman, then I got Hero's Quest for a christmas sometime (I still have the original box, 3.5 & 5.25 discs & manual, probably worth a bit these days) I'd heard about MI & MM, but never knew any one that had them and it wasn't until I was into my 20's that I played the MM & MI games.

It wasn't until this year that I found a copy of GF in Kmart.

Also have a search through this forum, cause I'm sure there's probably still one of these topics that hasn't slipped off the end yet.

[LordHart]

Well, my first console I owned was the Sega Master System 2... with built in Alex Kidd game! Oh my god, I love that game, and I've only recently finished it too after I downloaded the ROM.

I'm sad I sold the console years ago, being still young, but not old enough to truly feel nostalgic for it. Now, I really miss some of the games, like Enduro Racer, Last Ninja, Alex Kidd, Shinobi, Choplifter and oh so many more classics.

The first PC game I ever owned was Ultima 7: Black Gate & Serpents Isle. They were followed by Doom, Master of Orion and Cyberdogs... ahhh, the memories.

Great topic.

[Nine Toes]

Hmmm... my first gaming experience was when I got my Atari.  I remember liking the one game where you're in the jungle, and you had to jump over crocodiles in the water, and you had to swing on vines... I can't remember the name of it for the life of me... If I had to guess, I would say it was probably Pitfall, but did they even have that game on the Atari?  Along with that, Galaga and Millipede were always fun.  Galaga... that game was a blast, with all the funny color patterns when you killed one of those space bugs... seizure-causing fun for the whole family! :o

When I got my NES, my favorite games were The Legend Of Zelda and Shadowgate.

As for PC, I never had a favorite, but I always played this one game called Castle Of The Winds.  It was and RPG, and had really crappy graphics, no animation, and the control scheme was screwed up (to fight a monster, you simply push up against it).  But it was really addicting.

[Inkoddi]

My first game was Prince of Persia (I was about 4 years old and didn't understand the controls, kept dying on level 1) I still play it and it r0xorz!!! I found a Prince of Persia site here.

Then there was THE INCREDIBLE MACHINE!!!,
Kings Quest V (at the age of 6 i think), LSL 3, Doom, Lemmings 2...

The first NES game was Ice Climbers.

Edit
Oh.. and Commander Keen

[Andail]

Garage Gothic, I also played Castle Adventure!
It was so exciting, though I never got very far....I remember finding the cellar, where there was this water trap. And fearies that blocked some corridors....I also found out you could save the game, but after having loaded a game, it would get all buggy and different levels were sort of mixed to one level. My biggest dream was that there would one day be a game like that, but with graphics....

[Captain Mostly]

I think that Price of Persia 2 is one of the most outrightly under-rated games EVER. People always ignore it these days when charting the prince's history...

Frogger also featured quite heavily in my early gaming memories... As does SPACE WARS (although not the origional version)... And Crystal Caves (a really odd graphical version of some other dungeon based game, the name of which escapes me just now, that drew each colour of the location images one at a time...)

[DragonRose]

First ever... this is really hard. Not because I don't remember the games- which I do- it's just that I couldn't read at the time so I made up names. My parents thought this was adorable so they never used the real names either.  I think it was probably "Asteroids" for the Atari ST.  I called it "Crash Moons." You had to shoot at bright green asteroids to prevent them from hitting your triangle-ship.

First game on the PC was probably "Where in the World is Carment Sandiago." I never managed to catch her, because I never found any way to save.

[LordHart]

As does SPACE WARS (although not the origional version)

There was more than one version? I had it on the very old Milton Bradley Vetrex... now that was a system... those lines were absolutely brilliant!

[Darth Mandarb]

We had Pong ... it wasn't an Atari unit.  It was a stand alone thing ... I can't remember what it was called.  I think it was called just 'Pong'.

That's my earliest memory.

We had every computer/game console that came out back in the day (my father is a techno-junky)  Atari (all versions), Colleco Vision, commodore, apple, nintendo ... it just goes on and on.

Some of my favorite game memories ...

Atari Console ...
Pitfall - the original
Pac-Man - who didn't love this game (if you can remember when it came out!)
Frogger
Galahad - (similar to Castle Adventure ... but more primitive)

Atari Computer ...
Quasimodo
Raid on Fractillis
Leather Goddess of the Phobes - what a bizarre game!
The Lounge Lizard - yes!  It was Leisure Suit Larry's first introduction.  It was text based (no graphics)

PC Games ...
XO Football
Sierra Games - King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, LSL ... it was all history from this point on!
Wing Commander
Wing Commander II - That opening scene when the Kilrathi actually spoke!!!  It was the first time I had actually hear talking (movie like talking) in a game!  I was floored!  "My stealth fighters distroyed the Tiger's Claw at K'tith Rak Mang ..."  historic!!

EDIT How could I forget ...
Apple IIe ...
The Oregon Trail

There's literally 100s more games ... I could just go on and on and  on and on ...

])]v[

[Rincewind]

I was going to say that it was my SNES - Which I got around the time when it was on the peak of it's popularity, but then I remembered how I, when I was really young, used to play at my older brothers Commodore C64. He had a whole bunch of games, but the one that I probably played first of them all and enjoyed the most as well was "Live And let Die", a James Bond boat-racing game that I will always love not only because the game itself, but also for that incredibly cool sound effect when you picked up a fuel tank... It was some sort of odd c64:ed version of the James Bond Theme, I'd reckon, but to me it just sounded like "Bah-da-daa"... Aah...

And there was another game as well, which was quite fun - It was a simple platformer,  where you walked around as tiny man in some sort of maze, where there were several obsacles or enemies, which you of course died by touching...
Still, that wasn't what I remember most from it. The thing I memorized more than anything else was that horrible, monotonous music... It was like nothing else you've heard... I can't really describe it in words, you'd have to hear it to understand...
The worst thing is that I can't remember what the heck the name of the game was... Man, I really need to play it again...

Ah, I love nostalgia... I still haven't quite forgotten him for giving away the C64, though... Dang...

[juncmodule]

Darth, it was called just Pong. It was the first home video game system ever. I believe Sears distributed it.

My father was a tech junkie too. The first computer I recall was the TRS-80 (not sure which version, had the disk drives, screen, and keyboard all in one unit...I think). I used to play berzerk on it (I think that is what it is called, one man in a room with other pixel men running at him while you shoot him with your pixel). Also this game called Asylum. It was a text adventure/first person maze type thing.

We had an Atari of course. That horrible Atari pacman, pitfall, and the infamous E.T.

Later we moved on to the Atari ST which was my introduction to Sierra and adventure games. We played King's Quest a lot but, I was only half interested. It was Space Quest that won me over. I remember the first time I saw it was at this meeting me and my dad used to go to at a local elementary school. It was basically a meeting for software pirates. It was great. One of the guys there had a copy of Space Quest before it was released to the public. It was great.

My forray into PC's were a little late, as well as LucasArts games. I purchased and played FoA, MI1, MI2, MI3, Full Throttle, DOTT, and Sam and Max just this year. It's been a good year for adventure games for me. I didn't own my first Windows PC until well after Win98 was released(2000 maybe?). Up until then I still had a 8088 and then about a year before the Win98 machine a 486DX with Win 3.11

Wee!

later,
-junc

[foz]

First machine was pong.........binatone it had five games soccer,tennis sqaush all various pong games.

then coleco vision.......zaxxon,donkey kong, and a game called turbo that had its own steering wheel ..thats was back in 1982 i think it was any how...

then the spectum(excellent machine...)  jet set willy ,knightlore, sabourter, popeye.........this was the machine that had me hooked on computers.

C64......i can`t remember any games on this but they were all good.

amiga......another excellent machine well worth the 400 quid it cost....1988 i think it was...
maniac mansion,zak mckrakken,operation stealth,monkey island games and every other game you could mention..........i still have my old amiga 1200 in the loft....(i must get the thing out and fire it up some day.)

pc....full throttle.......made me buy a pc as it was outstanding in its day......talkie adventures were new then.

the dig (tops).....day of the testicle..(all time favourite)....

Shit........... i`ve spent a lot of my life playing computer games....

[Scavenger]

I can't remember! My childhood (early) had two major things in it:

Home:
Frogger
Digger
Space Invaders
Pacman
Stuff (can't remember the name. Blue screen. I think it was Wordstar =P)

Grandparents:
It HAD to be Simon the Sorcerer. StS rocks my socks from the day I first played it to this very present day. The graphics were superb, the music delicious and I could even imitate most of the voices in it =). I was even scared of Sordid! I felt for the Swampling! I laughed at every single joke in it! =P I am the ultimate StS nut. And guess what age? 4-5. When it was first released =) I must thank my nan and granddad one day for owning such a beautiful game. Unfortunately, the copy I owned fell into the hands of my cousins, who probably sold it. Waah.

Anyway. I think it was years before I got my hands on Monkey Island... at least 1999.

[Domino]

My first experience with playing games
was way back in the 1970's with Pong, and then
later on with the Atari 2600 during the early to
mid 1980's. But the one experience i do remember
the most was playing Kings Quest 1 for the first
time back in 1984. I think we had a Tandy 1000
computer at the time, and it was the first time i
had ever seen anything like it. I was amazed at
how i could control this character on screen with
a joystick. I think thats what started my love of
adventure games.

Well fast forward to 2003, and geez i pretty much
have all the major console sytems. NES, SNES,
N64, Sega Genesis, Sega Dreamcast,
Game Boy Advance and Playstation 2.

well i am a GAMER, hence my username. I have alot of favorites, but i would say Kings Quest 1, is right there at the top.

Shawn  

[12431]

well, I didn't discover adventuregames until -97.
my first game must have been virtua fighter. it sucks. i know...

[Ben]

I remember my first game. It was Captain Comic. I think my dad ordered it from some mail-order company. This was back when people paid for sharaware games. I think we also had the Last Half of Darkness, which was a first-person adventure. I remember one room in the game where two girls were playing, and if you clicked on them, one of them would stab you and drink your blood. It was just still EGA graphics, but I almost pissed my pants.

After that I think we got another big batch of shareware games from Apogee. We paid for these too. It had Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, and the original Duke Nukem, among other things. I think that was the point when I became a geek. I remember I used to tell my friends every excruciating detail of every single game I played, and drew millions of pictures of games I wanted to make. I was a weird kid.

My first commercial games were Lemmings and Fate of Atlantis. Even at the age of eight, I knew that nobody kicked ass more than Indiana Jones.

Then in 1994 we got our first modem. We had a billion shareware games after that. And we didn't even have to pay a dollar per disk for them.

[Evil]

My first adventure game was Gobliins II. I also had a genisis...

Sonic 2, and 3D
Aladin
Desert Strike
Jungle Book
Ronald McDonald's something or other
Aerobiz
Toy Story

There where some others too I think...

[earlwood]

As I have stated before, KQ2 was the first graphical game I played (Red Dragon being the first game I have played, Weapon:Serrated Penguin) Hagatha along side the first time I heard The Ripper by Judas Priest, Made for a most terrifing experiences when trying to sleep, showering,entering a room, or playing hide n' seek in the dark.

[Goldmund]

The first game I've played... this was back in - I don't know - 1986? 1985?
It was a Polish amateur game on ZX Spectrum (48 kb !!!) - the title translated to something like Fuckstress the Princess.
So, as you can see, I'm with amateur scene since it started...

[evenwolf]

In the early nineties my grandma decided to buy my brother and me a computer.  It must have had something to do with him typing school papers or something, but I just wanted to play games.  Mom and I were in Sears waiting to pick up the computer and I remember she told me I could pick out one game.

The box art of Monkey Island put me in a daze, so I picked it up, and once my brother installed and booted it up that night,  I became an adventure gamer.

that was MY first game ever, but long before that I recall my brother getting an Atari for Christmas and the two of us playing Joust.

[Snake]

My first experience was Super Mario Brothers/Duck Hunt...
From then on till this day I'm still a die-hard NES fan.

My first adventure game was Willy Beamish and haven't stopped loving it 'til this day.


--Snake

[TheYak]

My first games were the Zork series, Castle Adventure and something called Beast or Beast Hunter or something.  They were all in glorious amber-monochrome, the latter two with pseudo-graphics.  One day, my dad brought home a Commodore Vic20 (Ooo! Color!) and we played insane amounts of Centipede, some Airhockey game and Space Invaders.  We later upgraded to a C64 and I played Street Surfer, Archon, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner and a couple others.  Then, my dad brought home a copy of a game on 5 1/4" diskettes.  It was KQ4 on about 6 floppies.  It sucked me away from the C64's pretty-colored games into a monochrome amber world with a plot-line (kind of).  Thus began my adventuring adventure.

[Femme Stab Mode >:D]

Doom I and II, pacman, pipeliner.
I was 6 ~_^

[Nostradamus]

My first PC was an XT with no hard drive and a CGA screen. My very first games were on a diskette with 11 games, some of them were Pacman, Digger, Space Invaders & that game where you close sections of the screen to get points.

My first adventure game was probably Leisure Suit Larry 1. The original version.

[Oliver]

I remember when my pratents bought me a computer back in 1995
It had Doom installed. THAT WAS MY VERY FIRST GAME. I played it all the time (if I could). We sat at the computer all the time (my brother and some pal's)...that's as much as I remember. (Maybe Tetris too )

[Joelman]

the first game i really got hooked on was "tarzan" on the colecovision, lol it was like the early 90's but we werefar behind technologicaly. then when we got a PC, when i was like 8, it was Commander Keen, and Wolfenstien 3d.and on the NES, it was definitely Super Mario Bros 1.

[AGA]

Can't really remember if I played the NES before I started using the C64, but those two systems are my earliest memories... Mario Bros 1 would be the first NES game (since it came with the system). I played countless text adventures on the C64, but I can't remember the names of any of them.

We got our first PC when I was about 5 or so. My first memory of that was playing LSL3 in greyscale on a laptop my father brought home from work (this was about 1990 I suppose).

[Matt Brown]

My early early game history is a bit of a mush. I remember playing Mario Brothers 2 at my uncles house on the NES, and playing Animal Quest (this really crappy maze game) on our 386dx. that was my first computer.
My first adventure game was Robin Hood, Conquests of the longbow, which I think I first played when I was 6. or rather, I watched my dad and his friend play it. I didnt actually finish it myself until I was 8.
I really grew to love adventure games, (and games in general) when I was about 8 or 9. I used to go to my buddy Phil's house everyday after schools. Phil had prince of persia, KQ's 4-7, and *gasp* an SNES. I remember spending many a summer day trying to beat KQ5...ah.
I've been a gamer ever since.

[jaz]

It´s hard to remember which was the first computer game I´ve ever played, but I guess it was something on my friend´s ZX Spectrum in the middle of 80´s, but I can tell you for sure which one was the greatest....

MANIC MINER!!!!

Yes, brilliant graphics, cutting edge animation and superb sound effects, what else to say.
But maybe waiting for any game to load was even more thrilling... With my buddy´s crappy tape recorder to reach the title screen was a victory already. I guess we didn´t even breathe while loading.
Then another friend of mine got a C64 and that was just awesome! My Commodore favourites were Buggy boy, Gyrus and Wizzard of Wor against opponent.
Then the abovementioned first friend got a PC XT with Prince of Persiia... yay!!! And Test Drive!!! Sweet.
By that time I was really fed up that I don´t have ANY computer, but I had to wait untill late 1992 when finally my parents decided to buy a computer, shiny new 33Mhz 386SX with 2 Megs of RAM. And I remember that it came with two games... One was from iD software and the other from EA.... Yes, you guessed right, Commander Keen and Zany Golf    Both in EGA, which was almost an insult to my top of the line 512 kB video card.

Just to add: first games played with soud card: Lotus Espirit Turbo Challenge 3 and NHL 93 -  Incredible experience.

First adventure game: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis! The best adventure game ever!!!  (at least for me) It took me whole summer holidays to beat it.

Nowadays, the games just aren´t what they used to be when we were young, you know?

[m0ds]

I can't remember way back, but I rememer paperboy and Oh Mummy being some of the first games I played,  I then moved on to TIM and Prince of Persia on my friends 386. Also, Lemmings.

The first game I ever bought was Destruction Derby II. Just goes to show how late I was when it came to owning a PC! Bearing in mind we weren't allowed one until about 1996 :p

I remember playing Sonic, Mario and things like Streets of Rage and California Games back in the early days on my friends games consoles.

[Captain Mostly]

CAPTAIN COMIC!!! I LOVE THAT GAME!!!!

I got it on a cover disk for some some magazine I think!!! The guy had some sort of purple cabbage for a face!!!

I think it was probably only a joke, but it SAID it was only episode 1 (it stopped after you got the crown from in the castle) and I've wanted to see if there was ever any more episodes of it ever since.

I really REALLY enjoyed that game, it was just simple, yet deeply loopy platform fun... Ooooh, I lament it!

*lament* *lament*

[Inkoddi]

CAPTAIN COMIC!! YAY!! There is actually a second episode, Captain Comic II - fractured reality

[Ben]

Yep, I downloaded Comic 2 a while back. It's a much longer game, with an actual story.. It's like an unholy cross between Metroid and Super Mario Brothers.

I just checked, and they have a download at Underdogs:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?gameid=3178

I think there was supposed to be a Captain Comic 3 with VGA graphics and all that jazz, but I don't think anything became of it..

[Ghost]

the first video game i EVER saw was space invaders... i was in the Grundschule then. and the first "console" i had was an atari video system with centipede. oh i loved that stuff, especially Pitfall. Must've spent ages playing it.

my first computer game, actually, was lemmings 2, and the second monkey island 1. now you know where my roots belong

[Miez]

I played "Intrepid Explorer" on a steamdriven Babbage Calculation Engine in 1896. When I was about to reach level sixteen ("Punjabi Punishment") the punch cards ran out ...

er ... no ...

Probably the first game I played was the sad excuse for a "breakout" game in Basic that came with my ZX Spectrum.

[Gonzo]

It was Prince Of Persia in around '91, one of the best platformers IMO. I think it invented the ledge-jumping gameplay, and although it became frustrating when it resurfaced in the mid-90s with Tomb Raider, I don't remember it being that annoying back then.

Likewise the swordfighting system was extremely simple but I still had a lot of fun with it. It just had a bunch of great cinematic moments like *just* getting through a slamming stone door in time, Indy-style, or the tense moment of wondering, mid-air, whether you're going to be able to cling on the other side.

They've made a few 3D sequels now, I played the demo of the one from a few years back but it wasn't that exciting, perhaps because of my old computer though. The first (2D) sequel ('Sands Of Time'?) had some fantastic stuff though, I remember thinking the rooftop/docks escape intro was bloody brilliant.

Anyway, after PoP1 I moved onto The Secret Of Monkey Island, and adventure games became my true gaming niche.