What Was Your First Gaming Experience? 718
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?
Zork (Score:3, Interesting)
My first experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Donkey Kong (Score:3, Interesting)
C64 (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM 360 - 1968 - Hangman (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that old, but still (Score:3, Interesting)
1)Online gaming: MUDs
2)TTRPG: AD&D at a friends house playing a psyonic Dwarf... Badly...
Odyssey 2000 (Score:3, Interesting)
Startrek (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess my age shows now (Score:5, Interesting)
Adventure on PDP-11; Lunar Lander on PDP-8 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.]
Commodore PET, ASCII Space Invaders (Score:3, Interesting)
Links included for reminiscing goodness at the expense of first post karma.
Several had some unique answers (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Colossal Cave Adventures (Score:3, Interesting)
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 for the map to be printed at 110 baud after each turn...
I also remember the text based adventures, especially the maze of twisty passages.
When I was at college, Pac Man and Dungeons & Dragons were the big thing. I spent many an hour playing D&D with a cold beer at my side to keep me safe....good times.
Pong (Score:3, Interesting)
Spacewar (Score:3, Interesting)
Not my first gaming experience... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
re:pong (Score:2, Interesting)
ed
Re:I guess my age shows now (Score:0, Interesting)
I remember having to walk there after first grade or so and dialing a phone number from a list of instructions. I remember the phone number being some college but don't know which... (MIT)????
There was a sign up list for this terminal and I would always try to sign up for an hour block that had nobody signed up for the next several hours.
I would spend hours at this terminal trying to race a US postal truck around a race course that printed out on these rolls of paper. I probably still have these rolls somewhere as I remember I kept them through at least high school.
I wish someone else had some more detail on what that terminal was connected to.
Nathan
The First "Best" Game (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:My first experience (Score:3, Interesting)
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 primarily my brother and I playing. A pattern we would repeat through Nintendo - Techmo Super Bowl and Zelda being the two we played together most often - and then a Sega, with our favorites being NBA Live 95, Madden, and NBA Jam.
Sweet memories.
not to be a pedant.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Vic-20 (Score:3, Interesting)
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's "Duck Pond" to shame. After that it was Mole Attack, Moon Base, and the best game available at the time: Choplifter.
After we got a 286, I spent quite a bit of time on the first edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator, flying a 172 out of Midway, amusing myself sometimes by flying into the Hancock building.
Aww...the memories. I should go find an emulator and ROM's for all these.
'Space War' on an IBM1130 circa 1974 (Score:2, Interesting)
Be careful not to fly too close to the sun!
Space War! (Score:1, Interesting)
Well... pong... but experience? Zork. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WHAT??? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pong (Score:3, Interesting)
Not too long after this my friend managed to score a starter kit for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (in addition to Gamma World and Top Secret). He even found out about some lecture at MIT on AD&D which we attended. Haha. Unfortunately he was never as enthusiastic about actually playing it, and I didn't really have any friends who were. I mostly ended up playing it with my sister, who hated it and was mostly humoring me. Shows the importance of having sufficiently geeky friends. I used to map and write out my own modules but I had no one to play them with. As much as I loved computers, there was nothing on the computer that could even remotely compare to PnP D&D. I really feel that I missed out on something important by not having the right friends at the time. I knew of other people in my school who seemed to play it in groups but I was too shy to try to really make friends with them. And they didn't really appeal to me as friends except for their shared interest in D&D.
I didn't get my own game machine until I could afford to buy one (~$300?). An Atari 400 with that huge and loud external disk drive (although not as big as the 8" one on the DEC). By that time my friend also had an Atari 400, but with the cassette tape reader instead of a disk drive. Damn that thing was SLOW. My favorite games on that were Archon, Choplifter, Castle Wolfenstein, Crush Crumble and Chomp, Lode Runner, and Pole Position. I especially played Archon and Castle Wolfenstein endlessly. I bought Zork as soon as it was released after reading Isaac Asimov's review of it in Creative Computing, but I never liked it all that much. Adventure games at that time could be so frustrating. Those stupid dam controls. Argh. The only thing more annoying were the very first graphical adventure games like Wizard and the Princess. I used to call the help line when I got stuck on that one. I don't know why I put myself through that torture.
It is a little hard for me to describe the intense feelings of fascination and longing I had when looking at the more expensive machines of that era like the Apple IIe. So beautiful. Still love that logo. Or the TRS-80. There was a certain amount of rivalry between those who owned Apples and those (poorer folks) who only had Atari 400/800, but really everyone wanted the Apples. They were just so cool. And there was at least one game on the Apple (Cranston Manor) and one on the TRS-80 (can't remember the name but it sort of reminds me of Rikki Tikki Tavi for some reason) that I really wanted but was never able to play on my lowly Atari.
I went away to boarding (high) school and didn't touch a computer until college when I bought a 486-33DX for like $3000 from Tri-Star, a company I found in Computer Shopper of course. In high school I remember seeing those magazine ads in Omni or Discover for the Amiga. I wanted one of those so badly but I didn't have the money. Actually those ads were pure marketing genius. They seemed (at least to my teenage brain) to offer a glimpse into a whole world of uber-cool tech that would be mine if I could just come up with the cash. Although by that time I was more interested in programming than gaming.
Ah, the nostalgia. I envy kids these days with their high powered graph
Re:A HOLLOW VOICE SAYS 'PLUGH' (Score:4, Interesting)
ADVENT
and my fate was sealed. I work on computers to this day.