What Was Your First Gaming Experience?

Stephen Totilo, at the MTV Multiplayer blog, recently put up a piece that asked a number of notable games industry folks all about their first time gaming. Several had some unique answers, with Peter Molyneux (Black and White, Fable) probably taking the cake: "It would have to be the original Pong. I can clearly remember seeing it in a shop window on Guildford High Street and being utterly transfixed - I had never wanted anything so much - in fact I stole money from my grandmother's purse to buy it. I got it home, took it apart, and never got it to work again - but from that moment on I was hooked on all things to do with computer games." What was your first experience with gaming? d20s on a kitchen table? A Nintendo Entertainment System under the Christmas tree?

I was 14

[by Anonymous Coward]

It was in the back of the van. It was painful and awkward, and I'd rather not talk about it.

Re:I was 14

[Cornflake917 (515940)]

Yeah, Daikatana was also my first gaming experience.

Re:I was 14

[Nimey (114278)]

Hey! I remember you!

Gaming experience, not gay men experience

[spun (1352)]

I think you read that headline wrong.

Re:I was 14

[Ilan Volow (539597)]

So "Donkey Kong" and "Konkey Dong" didn't turn out to be the same game, did they?

Re:

[techpawn (969834)]

So "Donkey Kong" and "Konkey Dong" didn't turn out to be the same game, did they?

But in "Konkey Dong" you can perform a Donkey Punch! Or so I've heard...

Pong

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

I bought one when they first came out. Before that, it was chess.

Re:

[0111 1110 (518466)]

Hey that was my first computer game too! Star Trek or Super Star Trek. It was on my friend's DEC PDP-11. His father worked for 'Digital' so he had one of those slick puppies at home. Check this [almy.us] out. I also played the original Adventure (Colossal Cave?) on that PDP-11 but that's all I can remember. I was about 9 I think. I really loved that machine. To this day I wonder what happened to it. Probably got thrown away. Everything is so much more intense when you are a child, and it was so exciting because compu

Zork

[Thunder_Princes (688516)]

1978, MIT, Zork ~ yay for the DMG! I nearly failed out of school figuring out the carousel room. i had such an elaborate map. ZORK STILL RULZ! :)~

Colossal Cave Adventures

[spun (1352)]

It was 1976 or '77, and I was six years old. My friend's dad was a comp-sci professor at UNLV. He had a teletype and a dial in account to the university PDP 10. He would dial in and set up a restricted shell for us, basically a menu of games. Colossal Cave Adventures was the best, but we also played Lunar Lander, Hunt the Wumpus, and other simple games, wasting reams of paper. That was what got me into computers. Been hooked ever since.

Re:

[Gonarat (177568)]

That brings back the memories -- when I was in 10th grade, our High School had an account on the Lehigh University mainframe. After we finished loading our programming assignments (we typed them on paper tape offline, then loaded them online after the Teacher logged on), we would play Star Trek. I don't remember all of the commands now, but basically one would move from sector to sector. After each turn, a text-based grid map would be printed showing starbases, planets, Klingons, etc. Imagine waiting fo

A HOLLOW VOICE SAYS 'PLUGH'

[Goldarn (922750)]

I was working on my Boy Scout computers merit badge, and a friend of my parents let me use a computer of some sort at Fluke.

I still remember sitting in that cold room, the tall menhirs of flashing lights and whirring tapes behind me. When I was done running my programs, he said, "try this." He typed

ADVENT

and my fate was sealed. I work on computers to this day. The first game I wrote myself for my TRS-80 model 1 (4K of memory!) was a simple text adventure.

Willy Wonka had it all wrong. It's computers that are worlds of pure imagination.

Re:A HOLLOW VOICE SAYS 'PLUGH'

[Dun Malg (230075)]

he said, "try this." He typed

ADVENT

and my fate was sealed. I work on computers to this day.

Heh. I bet there are a hundreds of us with nearly the same story. For me it was my father, and it was on an NCSS PDP-11 via a 15" tractor-feed dot matrix printing serial terminal with a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem and a rotary dial phone in the living room. After that, it was all over.

My first experience

[DrMrLordX (559371)]

. . . was when I was three and my dad still liked going to arcades (games were simpler then, so he could still enjoy them). I would stand on a stool or box or whatever they had provided for kids to use to reach the controls on arcade machines and try playing PacMan, though I was only messing with the controls during the game's demo. Eventually I figured out that the game did something different if you put a quarter in it, so I'd beg quarters off my dad and then plunk them in, only to spend the entire game eating power pellets to turn the ghosts blue. It was a long time before I ever cleared the first stage.

Re:

[Skim123 (3322)]

My introduction to gaming was through my dad, at age three, as well. Our neighbors went on a multi-week vacation, and my parents were asked to look after their house - water the plants, get the mail, and so on. They had an Atari and Space Invaders, so my dad and I would go over there to "water the plants" and stay for hours playing Space Invaders.

Three or four years later we bought a used Atari at a garage sale, although I think the trivial interest in video games had worn off for him by then, so it was pr

Board Stiff

[Stanistani (808333)]

Candyland, natch.

Queen Frostine was the bee's knees.

Re:Board Stiff

[LithiumX (717017)]

It was a long time ago, and I can barely remember it, but I believe the first game I truly enjoyed that required my active participation was that one where you drop things from your highchair, and suddenly you have another one just like it. Drop it again, and another one shows up. I was hooked on that game for what must have been at least a month or two.

Not only that, but it was a multiplayer game (2nd player, generally an adult, was required to complete the first level).

IIgs

[jockeys (753885)]

Gertrude's Chase on a monochrome Apple IIGS

Re:IIgs

[psmears (629712)]

I also spent countless hours making ASCII art on a OS/360 terminal (I think it was OS/360, not sure).

If it was OS/360, it was probably a rare instance of "EBCDIC art" rather than ASCII ;-)

Mine was galacta

[bogaboga (793279)]

Anyone used Galacta, http://takegame.com/shooter/htm/galacta.htm [takegame.com]? I loved this game.

Nintendo

[TitusC3v5 (608284)]

Christmas at the age of 5, a shiny new Nintendo sitting under the Christmas tree, the bundle that included the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo, complete with gun. To this day, I can still imagine the smell of the styrofoam and plastic it was housed in, which never fails to remind me of that Christmas when I smell something similar.

Donkey Kong

[Hellad (691810)]

DK on the Colecovision. I wanted to play as the monkey. This was a great system to grow up on, ton of fun games and great graphics. The one thing that I seems so strange now is that we only played for an hour or two (tops) at a time! We still played outside. I wonder if that is because of the pickup and play nature of those games versus the new games which take 50 hours to complete and completely envelope the person...

Almost 30 years ago...

[rapett0 (92674)]

Looking back, its hard to remember in my new found "old" age. While maybe not exactly right, I do remember a game called Crossbows and Catapults. I doubt that game would have been sold in 20 years due to our new nanny state were everything that can put out an eye is banned.

As for video games, I would think Atarti 2600 probably. I remember switching the RF switch box and firing it up while listening to whatever tapes I recorded off the radio! [I am sure someone will tell me thats nothing, they stuck tran

Re:Almost 30 years ago...

[joss (1346)]

Yeah, well, when I was about 8 my parents bought me an actual crossbow
at a stall in Italy. The bolt had an iron tip that would embed about 1/2 inch
into solid oak. Everyone was a bit upset when I fired it at my older brother
causing an 8 inch bleeding scar where it grazed across his back. In my book
its getting towards a nanny state when you're not supposed to buy lethal medieval weaponry
for 4th graders but I guess people have their own standards.

C64

[Pojut (1027544)]

A commodore 64, in which my dad was playing a wrestling game (I THINK it was called Bebop Wrestling, or something like that). He let me take control of the keyboard, and thus my obsession with gaming had begun (I was 4 at the time)

Vic-20

[iamlucky13 (795185)]

Mine was on the Vic-20, the Commodore-64's immediate predecessor. The first was a simple Basic counting game that I think my mom wrote as part of a programming tutorial. I'm guessing I was about three years old at the time.

My first commercial game was probably Tooth Invaders. You were a toothbrush, running around on a set of 2-D teeth, removing plague. Germs would wander around depositing plague and could kill you. If enough plague accumulated, you'd get a cavity and lose. Graphics quality put Strong Bad

IBM 360 - 1968 - Hangman

[Radius9999 (1220338)]

I was probably the first kid to ever play a game on a computer. My father worked for IBM, and I played hangman. In those days there were no monitors, so every time you chose a letter it would print up the picture all over again.

Adventure on PDP-11; Lunar Lander on PDP-8

[KeithH (15061)]

During an open house in the Physics Department at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, I was given the chance to play "Lunar Lander" on a PDP 8. The input device was a light-pen and the display was a small raster display. The light pen was used to adjust thrust and attitude so that you could control your descent onto the lunar surface. It was bloody tough.

However, the first *real* game I played was Adventur (truncated to 8 characters due to filesystem limitations) on a PDP-11/V03 running RT-11. This was in 1978. Mind you the game was already old at that point because it had, I believe, been originally written on a US Navy Burroughs. [You have to drop the magazines in Witt's End to get the final 350th point.]

Re:IBM 360 - 1968 - Hangman

[SL Baur (19540)]

Nope, you're not even close. The first hit on a google search shows a computer game written in 1958.
http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/videogame.html [osti.gov]

Not that old, but still

[techpawn (969834)]

My first video game experience was NES playing super Mario brothers on the cartridge that had SMB/Duck Hunt/Track and Field. Before that it was various little kid board games but what really got me interested in games was my older brother teaching me chess.. To this day I still love the challenge of the game and a good match between him and I. Thinking moves ahead of the other players and trying to respond in your predictions where wrong. Other games that deserve mention:
1)Online gaming: MUDs
2)TTRPG: AD&D at a friends house playing a psyonic Dwarf... Badly...

Still waiting . . .

[cashman73 (855518)]

I haven't had a "first gaming experience" yet. I'm still waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to come out!

Odyssey 2000

[meta-monkey (321000)]

My first memory in life. I was 3 years old, and "helping" my brother and sister rake leaves so they could earn money to buy an Odyssey 2000. Pick Axe Pete was awesome!

Two firsts at once!

[LibertineR (591918)]

It was Silent Service on my Commodore 64. Joyful.

I got laid for the first time while waiting for the fucking tape drive to load the game. Less Joyful, more Silent.

Re:Two firsts at once!

[raddan (519638)]

Fucking the tape drive doesn't count.

Startrek

[grahammm (9083)]

My first computer gaming experience was the ASCII game Startrek on an HP2000.

I feel sorry for a lot of you

[DNS-and-BIND (461968)]

I really feel sorry for a bunch of people who will post here. I mean, what can you say to someone whose first video game experience was "Super Mario Brothers 3"? You lose so much by that. There are so many great games out there that don't require rote memorization or tens of hours of playing. Once upon a time, you could play a complete game in 5-10 minutes, and then let your friend take a turn. And there were no alternate endings, or fatalities, or secret moves that you could only find on the internet...heck, a lot of times, there were no endings at all. The game simply got harder and harder, and demanded more pure skill and downright innovation from you, until you saw your last man get destroyed, probably in a grossly unfair fashion, and then the inevitable "GAME OVER" appeared. No hacks, no save games, no shooting prostitutes in a spray of blood, no choosing Oddjob and gaining an unfair advantage.

Re:I feel sorry for a lot of you

[El_Smack (267329)]

What you say is true. The sword cuts both ways though. They were in sitting in their own poop when we were in the arcades playing great games like Tron and Joust, and we'll be sitting in our own poop when they are playing the new Nintendo Holodeck.

Actually, we may have gotten the short end of the stick here.

Re:

[edunbar93 (141167)]

A few weeks ago, I saw a 14 year old kid in the food court at the mall. He was wearing a T-shirt that said "I pwn n00bs". I told him I liked his shirt. He said thanks. I told him I was pwning n00bs when he was as big as my son (who was with us. He was 12 months then). He didn't like that so much.

I guess my age shows now

[Brummund (447393)]

but back in the old days, my first memory of gaming is of me and a friend typing in some Battleship game on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX81 [wikipedia.org]. We had no cassette recorder (or at least didn't know we could hook up a standard one, as they claim on the Wiki-page), so we had to type it in every time we wanted to start a gaming session. Still was fun, though :)

Commodore PET, ASCII Space Invaders

[nick_davison (217681)]

First game, in one of the labs at the university my father lectured at, was an ASCII clone of Space Invaders for the PET. Though that was a one off.

• First home computer: BBC Micro.
• First games: (All on the same disc, which implies piracy was rampant back then too - though I was four or five and really didn't know any different.)
  • SWOOP [youtube.com] (Space Invaders clone)
  • A Defender [wikipedia.org] clone called Planetoid [bbcmicrogames.com]
  • A Pacman clone called Snapper
  • An Asteroids clone called Meteors! (these two by Acornsoft [bbcmicrogames.com])
  • A Donkey Kong clone called Killer Gorilla
  • A Frogger clone called Croaker
  • Chess - Model B (last three by MicroPower [bbcmicrogames.com])
• Greatest game: Elite [wikipedia.org]. Given how far in advance of anything else it was for its time, it pisses all over games like Doom (which I admittedly also love) for the innovation title.

Links included for reminiscing goodness at the expense of first post karma. ;)

Several had some unique answers

[DeanFox (729620)]

Unique? I guess I'm a "Dino" or whatever. I still remember the day my father brought home PONG. He was all excited and talking about electronics and stuff I didn't understand at the time. He was an engineer working Top Secret stuff for the government and was all into this. He was going on about miniaturization and that this would have taken a computer with "tubes" the size of a building before... All I wanted to do was was play it.

You had to "hard wire" it to the antenna screws on the back of the TV and change the channel to 3. It was a box about half the size of a VCR player with two hard wired joy stick knobs. It had two slide switches one for 1-2 players and another 3 or 4 position switch for the game(s). Regular pong, advanced (small paddles), I think maybe a "break out" kind of version.

The "ball" just went "boink" and returned after hitting something. You could put "spin" on it by turning the paddle at the same time the ball hit and it escalated in speed the longer you played. That was it. But it sure was fun! Especially the "boink" irritating my mother to the point of yelling at us to "turn than damn thing off and go outside and play" (back in the days that was still safe). Isn't sending your kid out to play now considered child abuse? [sarcasm] Ahhh... the good 'ol days

Pong

[JesseL (107722)]

It was either the Magnavox Oddyssey 3000 [gameasylum.us] pong clone or a game called "Duck" on my Dad's Osborne 1 [oldcomputers.net].

Spacewar

[hidannik (1085061)]

Spacewar at an MIT Open House around 1970 or '71. It was running on a megapixel resolution black-and-white monitor. The students playing it were using handmade controllers consisting of buttons sandwiched between two rectangular pieces of clear plastic - possibly the first gamepads ever.

WHAT???

[sm62704 (957197)]

My first computer was a slide rule, you insensitive clod! Not many games you can play on a slide rule.

I was a beta tester for dirt. They never did get all the bugs out.

Re:

[Pseudonym (62607)]

Not many games you can play on a slide rule.

Dude, if you're old enough to remember the slide rule, you're old enough to remember Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American. There are lots of games there where the slide rule comes in handy.

Apart from John Horton Conway's famous game, My Dad Has More Money Than Your Dad (scientific notation edition), you can use your slide rule to work out the winning strategy for Nim. I'm pretty sure that's the only slide rule game with decent AI, though.

Not my first gaming experience...

[veganboyjosh (896761)]

But my parents always seemed to be one or two steps behind when it came to technology of any kind. We only got an atari 2600 once all my friends had NES.

I guess the guy we got the 2600 from was some sort of electrical engineer or something. One of the games we got was pinball, and this guy had modded one controller to have left and right momentary on button switches. I soon figured out that these buttons were basically just hardwired into the left and right switches on the joystick. It didn't take long to use them for other games. Once, while playing Pac-man, I hit both of them at once. (This, in effect, was the same as moving the joystick to the left and the right simultaneously, something that's impossible with just the joystick.)

All of a sudden, Pac-man went left, through all the walls, and then got stuck in one of them. all the dots disappeared, and I moved to the next level. That led to me challenging my sister to games of Pac-man, as long as I got the pinball modded joystick.

The First "Best" Game

[StaticEngine (135635)]

Sure, I played some game about a boulder rolling down a hill on a Commodore PET, and I played Pong on an Atari 2600, along with Gyruss, Asteroids, and Tempest at the arcade, pizza parlor and local supermarket, but the game I really remember as being intesely great was Dragon's Lair, the Laserdisc game. I first played this at an arcade in the mall in Central Islip, NY when I was nine or ten years old, and after plunking $1 into it for two games (because, you know, it cost an astonishing $0.50!!), I walked away with my knees shaking from excitement.

I remember thinking at the time that this was the future of games. Not the one choice per second, or the limits, but the sound, the pictures, and the immersion that Dragon's Lair offered. No longer was I simply pushing giant colored pixels around a screen, I was a real character, as real as any Saturday Morning Cartoon, on a real adventure facing off against fully realized environments and traps. Sure, they were the same every time, and there was very little "game" there. That didn't matter. It was the experience, the sheer emotional rush, that really got to me.

There were games I'd played before Dragon's Lair, but that was the first "game experience" that produced a real response, and it's something I'll never forget.

Well... pong... but experience? Zork.

[ellem (147712)]

Pong! then Hack then Adventure... but really immersed? Really engaged? Zork. I didn't eat. It was all I cared about. When Zork II came out I "tested" every possible permutation of the spinning room. I wasn't even playing the game, I was seeing what would happen... ::Fear ::I don't know the word fear

Re:IBM PC

[yo_tuco (795102)]

Luxury! We played Tennis for Two [wikipedia.org] on an oscilloscope back in 1958. And we liked it!

Re:

[COMON$ (806135)]

ya what kills me is, what year was that? I did the same and it was only recently that kids started talking about how cool xbox live was...

Not to be a "get off my lawn" guy, but it did offer a bit more to the game when you were setting up your init strings and loading ipx drivers, so that when you did actually get doom up and a going you really got the wow factor. Now you just plug your xbox into the LAN and off you go.