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?

Colossal Cave Adventures

[spun]

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.

Star Trek using TSO

[baegucb_18706]

But the bosses kept uninstalling it because it could crash the mainframe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(text_game) [wikipedia.org]

Re:IBM PC

[yo_tuco]

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

Re:IBM 360 - 1968 - Hangman

[SL Baur]

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]