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 feel sorry for a lot of you

[DNS-and-BIND]

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:First Gaming Experience

[COMON$]

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.

A HOLLOW VOICE SAYS 'PLUGH'

[Goldarn]

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.