Yesterday I wrote about the very first time I saw a video game. That was a really fun memory to remember.
So I want to ask you all: what was the first video game you ever played? Can you remember? What was it like?
For me personally it was a complete revelation, to the point where it was difficult for me — as a six year old — to think or talk about anything else. I was obsessed. To a certain extent I still am.
Give me your precious memories. GIVE THEM TO ME!
Comments
95 responses to “Tell Us Dammit: The First Game You Ever Played?”
I think I was 5 and it would have been my Uncle’s NES – playing the Mario / Duck Hunt combo cartridge.
I’m just trying to think if my Grandma had an Atari 2600 at that point. I don’t think she did, I only remember that when I was a bit older but the first game I remember on that was the notorious E.T. game. Yep. One of my first gaming memories was that pile of garbage.
Ha ha, yes, the old wood grain version was one of my earliest. Pitfall! Although I had no idea how to play it (being a wide-eyed little tyke at the time) it was fascinating.
Another very early memory is Mine Storm on the Vectrex, which I played at daycare when I was about 4 years old.
1982 was the year I got exposed to video games, motor bikes and the joys(?) of peeing on an electric fence.
If you were going to play E.T. then probably best to do it early, before you had any basis for comparison. It probably seemed OK if you didn’t have anything to compare it to 😛
I distinctly remember we (my brother, cousins, and I) had NO idea what we were supposed to do because we didn’t have an instruction book. We could make E.T. take a few steps, extend his neck and…. that was about it. Even as a kid with barely any video game experience we could tell it was bad.
skifree, actual game, redalert
Oh dear FSM, I’m showing my age but Pong… wow being able to interact with pictures on a telly, it was transformational.
Oh yeah, I remember playing Pong. I can’t remember what we played on, but it definitely had those paddle controls where you turned a knob, so probably an Atari 2600.
Either an early arcade machine, or a “TV game” – we had a Grandstand TV Game 2000 with a light gun and paddles. “Ping pong”, “Squash”, shooting…
Same dude!!! I was trying to remember the name of it when I read your comment. Then I got a ZX Spectrum.
…then I played Star Raiders (I think) at my grandparents neighbours.
…then I had a Commodore VIC 20 (with 64kb RAM pack…), Amstrad CPC 464 (with floppy disk and a mouse kit!), Atari ST, Amiga 500 (with a 20MB hard drive) then my first PC, a 486 DX4-100 with 1024MB (!) HD and a QUAD-SPEED!!! CD-ROM.
Then a string of PCs and Macs. Woot. 🙂
My best mate had pong console when I was in primary school….OMFG I’m old >
A shitty knockoff of Pong that was on a machine so primitive that it had 2 sliders, a coax out and a power cable and that’s it. It didn’t even keep score, that’s how bad it was. I remember the machine being about as big as my head, being made mostly of metal and being so heavy that you could bludgeon a rhino to death with it if the need arose.
Mind you I was 4 or 5 at the time so it was probably no heavier than a 360 and wouldn’t have been as big but it was definitely cheap crap.
Woops, not meant to be a reply!
The oldest games I have real memories of playing would have to be Warcraft 1 and 2. They’re probably not my first games played, they’re the only ones I remember playing when I was 6-7 year old when they were released.
Something on an Atari….
First memory was when I broke my leg playing cricket (don’t ask) and my uncle gave me Command & Conquer as an early birthday present because i was moping around in a cast.
It was either Sonic 2 or Duke Nukem 3D
It was either Pacman at the arcade or a super old game on computer that loaded from a cassette tape and looked surprisingly like the image in the article.
Oh man what happened to all those old-school arcade machines? The ones where you had to sit down to play them and they kind of looked like a flat table.
Pac-Man LCD console in 1982. I still have it, and it still works.
Something on Atari 2600.
Most likely Pacman or Space Invaders.
The oldest one I can remember playing at home was on the Atari 2600 we had, it would of either been pitfall or one of the combo game ones with pong, missile command or possibly the 2 on 2 ice hokey game.
Before that I may have played an arcade galaga or astroids but those memories are a bit jumbled, I was only 4 at the time.
Moonbugs on the IBM XT … I think … memories are hazy.
I may be winning the old man contest here.
Back in MY day we had to programme our OWN games. None of this ready-made gaming malarkey. I remember coding for hours just to make the PC speaker make noises like water flowing from a tap, or a fart or a super high pitched whistle that only a dog could hear, and then doing IF THEN GOTO choose-your-own-adventure stuff.
😉
Probably would have been between 6 and 8 and it was civilizations 2, it can be safely said I was entirely stumped. Thankfully my Dad swapped that for a friends Age of Empires 1. 1000% more kid friendly.
When my father bought our first computer (XT with 40Mb HD, which was astronomically huge at the time) there were a few cheap games included, the first one I played was labelled “NINJER” on the disc. It was a sidescrolling platformer where you as the titular Ninjer had to climb a tower and back down again. I don’t remember much else about it, I don’t think it was even particularly good for its time, but that was the starting point of my lifelong hobby.
man i remember our first computer with its massive 40Mb hard drive and insane 8MB of RAM! running DOS 6 if i remember and windows 3.11. DX/2 at an insane 66Mhz, with a fully sick sound blaster for life like sound. Having to use different boot disks so the ram would be configured differently for different games… those were the days…
Our first computer was even MORE insane… it had 64KB of RAM (enough for anybody, right?) and NO hard drive and a massive twin 360KB floppy drive (which took 3.5″ discs but could only read up to 360KB capacity – none of this 720KB or …lol… 1.44MB).
Earliest games I can remember playing are Heartlight. SMB, Missile Command and Ski Free, considering how early aged I was I have no recollection over which one exactly if these are them at all.
My memory on this might be a bit hazy as it was a while ago. I think it was the mid-1980s on a Tandy TRS-80 computer. I had an electronic magazine that had a BASIC version of Space Invaders. I slowly typed that into a store computer before playing. I didn’t really have enough to pay to play in arcades and the store people were happy to have people make their computers look like fun. God. Those were awesome times.
You are my new childhood hero. Holy crap some of those BASIC programmes were buggers to type out!
I was the youngest of a large set of cousins, and they had an old Atari, so i remember seeing Pong and all those other really old games, going up to Eye of the beholder, Prince of Persia, Star Control, Jones in the Fast Lane, Scorched Earth…
I mentioned the first time I played a NES, it was at my friend Damien’s house and I remember him firing up the Mario/Duck Hunt cart, and seeing the initial selection screen and being asked which I wanted to play. To which I responded “the monkey one”, apparently deciding that Mario was a monkey.
I don’t actually remember playing the game itself, and think there’s a distinct possibility that I just sat there and watched him play the games/show them to me instead.
The first I remember was when I was about 6 or 7 and my Dad showed me a Space Invaders clone by Broderbund Software on the Apple IIc. My gaming life was pretty much born fully grown in that moment.
Uncharted 2…..just kidding it was mario bros on NES.
QBasic Gorilla.Bas on my dad’s first laptop. I thought I broke his laptop when the game froze.
1981 – I was 23 and just purchased an Apple IIe, it was a new game with the strangest title which fascinated me – Castle Wolfenstein..!!, and my interest in gaming never stopped, now that I’m 58 I still keep logging hundreds of hours with my favourites.
Dark Forces.
My mum believed that video games would make me into a violent serial killer… so I didn’t get to play them until 1995…. I was 14 or 15, and I had to save up to buy it myself.
I can’t remember exactly which but my earliest memories of games are the following:
Mario/Duckhunt
DigDug
Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure
First game I remember playing was Odd Job Eddy on our Spectrum +2 128K strange game about a repairman http://www.retrogamer.net/retro_games80/oddjob-eddie/ never completed it but just remember spending hours playing it.
I really don’t know. Probably something in an arcade somewhere. The earliest memory I can conjure up is a Space Invaders machine but it wasn’t new and mysterious to me even then, I must have seen something earlier. Maybe a hockey game on an intellivision or colecovision?
Double Dragon at Kyle Phillips’ house when I was 5. He had a game genie so we had infinite lives.
Technically it would’ve been the Mario/duckhunt combo on the snes my grandma got to entertain all 30 something of the grandkids. I don’t remember much because I was a tiny baby and I’ve probably killed a lot of my early memories from banging my head into things and whiskey.
The first game I remember playing was Doom II back in 1997, my parents had finally scraped enough money together to buy a second hand computer, it was practically garbage, but it ran and came with a few programs installed. So here comes tiny 8 year old me having never seen a computer before because the town we lived in was smallish and fairly poor and holy hell I was mesmerised. It was like a tv … but you could do things and the screen would react, I was having a blast on this rediculously hot summers day still being blown away that a word processor or paint was a thing because wait, you mean I can do all this stuff and not waste paper or my pencils? I’m sold, tiny 8 year old me was living in the future I always dreamed about.
Then when my time was up my older brother jumps on and fires up Doom II and I hear the music for the first mission and it draws me in and I ask him if I can have a go because I’m a little brother and by god I will get my way damn it. So he rolls his eyes and lets me sit down and shows me how to move, how to fight … HOW TO WIN!!! I see the blood and guts and I’m entranced by this wizardry. Like genuinely cannot look away, stunned into silence as I go around fighting possessed soldiers and oh shit it’s a demon and it’s throwing fireballs, dude I can’t beat that, run, run away and maybe it’ll leave us alone. … I beat it, how? it was a demon, you were just a dude with a handgun. LOOKOUT THERE’S MORE OF THEM! WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THERE WOULD BE MORE!!! IMMA FIGHT! YEAH I DID IT!!! SO at this point I’m as hyped up as a tiny 8 year old can get when they’re doing something they consider literal witchcraft and magic, never before seen by their tiny human eyes then I see the big exit door and pressed space and that sound … by satan that glorious glorious bajooooom sound of doors opening in doom 2 stuck with me. If everything before that was me slowly reaching for a shovel to dig myself into this gaming hell, that sound was like burying dynamite and blowing it up. Just bury me in this hole with my door sound and I’ll be happy.
So I get booted off the computer for hogging it and it began a lifelong obsession with video games
easy, transformers on the atari 2600, i thought it was amazing at the time
Don’t think it was the first but one i do remember is the old athletics game on NES with the game mat.
Was either Doom or Rise of the Triad, i remember both were installed on our computer.
While this is not the first video game I ever played, it is my strongest gaming memory: Tomb Raider – The Last Revelation. This game got me excited about video games.
I am sure I played some games on a Sega console before this, but I don’t have vivid memories of those.
Something on the commodore 64, could have been commando, international karate, river raid…who knows they all rolled into one in my head! Needless to say they all left an indelible impression which has lead to a lifelong interest in videogames.
Space invaders (I think, I was 3 or 4 at the time).
My Uncle had the arcade machine in his garage and I remember having to stand on a milk crate to play it.
I think it was on an Atari 2600, space invaders. I’m not sure on the console though it’s long gone.
The first game I remember playing was either the original Donkey Kong on the Intellivision (which was a pretty crappy port) or Q*Bert, also on the Intellivision.
Aztec on Apple II.
I think it would have been either defenders of the Crown or Wolfenstein 3d.
I probably played something at someone else’s house prior, but my earliest clear memory was being given an Atari 2600 with a bunch of games as a present from someone for xmas. This was the early 90’s, so the NES and Master System were out, but not very popular yet.
Plugged it in to our ancient TV that was in a box with fake wood vinyl covering. My favourite game was Enduro! Which was a car racing game with what I thought was the best cover art of any game ever! [Man, the cover art on those early games was the best!]. I also had Atlantis, which was another fun and super hard game.
As far as PC gaming, my earliest memory was being at a family gathering [again, early 90s] with a bunch of cousins and booting up leisure suit larry on an Amiga 500, and spending a good 30 minutes trying to get through the “age verification” questions at the start. Good times!
Frogger on a 286 clone.
Chivalry on the green screen apple 2E
Apple had some pretty awesome games at the time (what happened?)
Hanimex game console with gun and could play Pong and some sports games from the 70’s.
First coloured Space Invaders I saw was at Rottnest Island in 1978 of all places!!
Probably River Raid, on the Atari 2600. Probably. Although there may have been a spelling game that predated that, played on the TV via a cassette deck, which seems incredibly archaic now.
Something on the Atari 2600. Probably “Defender” but I also remember a skate boarding game and a tank game…
Pretty sure it was DOS game Mixed Up Mother Goose. My sisters and I would sit together and play it for ages. I have no idea how we got so much replay value out of it.
1992 my dad brought home a 386 for the first time ever!
The only games that were installed for Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 (My dad work for an airline and they were testing it for “training purposes”)
and Grand Prix CIrcuit by Accolade… Man i played that game a lot!
Hey I remember that game
Very first videogame I played was a tiny game&watch-like one about a mother bird that had to feed her babies worms while avoiding bees and snakes. I loved that game and raked incredible scores, my hands a blur of muscle memory as the game became ever-increasingly harder and faster. I wish I knew what happened to it, as I would never willingly parted with it.
I loved those things. Mine was Submarine Battle. https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2748/4337615400_ffcde79620_b.jpg
Given to me by a friend of the family and played for about the next 12 months solid.
You inspired me to check around and I found it! http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Casio/BirdFamily.htm
Oh man, those little LCD games, did they come before the apple for me. Now you have thrown my thoughts into disarray
The original nintendo ‘Game and Watch’.
My parents got me four of them at once.
Mickey Mouse
Helmet
Popeye
Parachute
I can’t remember which I played first.
Joust for the Atari 2600. And then UFO and Tanks part of the 32 in 1
http://www.atarimania.com/2600/boxes/hi_res/32_in_1_game_cartridge_atari_pal_cart.jpg
…is this some kind of trick to know how old Kotaku readers are?
Nothing makes you as old as seeing somebody respond with minecraft on these kinda questions
Space Invaders.
The original coin-operated version on one of those sit-down table type cabinets. 20c a game, which was a lot of money at the time back in the late 70s.
OH GOD I’M OLD 🙁
Greenhouse Game & Watch from Nintendo.
It started it all.
Wow, that brings back memories. Mainly of me begging my mate to let me have a go at school…
My dad gave it to me. Because he didn’t want me to watch him playing DOOM on the ’64. He’d send me to my room and I’d spend the entire afternoon gaming. Mum didn’t like it, mum still doesn’t like it. But now dad doesn’t like it either because I’m better than him at the new and old games.
Pitfall 2 or Centipede on the 2600 or Ghouls n Ghosts on C64, I’m not really sure.
It was either Shark, Shark or Burgertime for the Intellivision some time around 1985 or 1986.
I had a pretty rough first time playing ET on Atari at my friends house.
MouseTrap on the Colecovision.
Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Master System.
It was either Chaos or Dizzy on my mates Spectrum.
First game I ever owned was Alex Kidd on the Sega Master System.
It was either the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Colossal Cave/Adventure, both text games, on a WANG supermini.
Still miss Adventure some days. Thing is, it wouldn’t work as a modern video game either, my imagination has done better than any dev could ever do.
The first game I remember playing, or at least the one that hooked me, was the original Wizardry on a friends Apple (IIc i think). I bought (edit: my parents bought at my demand) an Apple II shortly after and played lots of games I thought were incredible. Like Montezumas Revenge…
… and Wasteland.
atari 2600… games like defender, missile command, NASA, berzerk, star raiders, warlords, ET, asteroids
PC games such as crystal caves and arkanoid
all at my aunties house at 2-3 years old
Some game about making lemonades. I was way too young to know or care what machine it was. A quick google search led me to believe the game was called Lemonade Stand and it appeared to run on the Apple 2.
I think it was either Moon buggy/moon patrol or Double dragon outside the shops.
Eesh… probably Space Invaders on a cocktail cabinet at the local shops?
I lobbied my parents for a video game system for pretty much all of the last half of 1981 for a video games console for Christmas, and I was promised one. Atari or Intellivision – I didn’t care which.
I was so excited to unwrap… a Hanimex TVG 8610C (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hanimex_TVG_8610c_%28Picture_2%29.JPG).
It played 8 versions of Pong and a target shooting game. I wasn’t a particularly happy bunny. I wasn’t even that upset when dad got pissed and trod on the Player 2 joystick so that it bent and from then on you had to play by grabbing the joystick way down near the ball.
I didn’t get another console until I could buy my own SNES in 1993.
The first game I played I cannot recall the name unfortunately.
It was on a Commodore VIC20 and I remember playing it with my parents assistance.. I think I was about 4 as the details are very sketchy. I think it was about farming or exploring a farm or something like that. The only really clear memory of it is scorched into my brain was the ending. As when you entered the command to quit, it would take you to a full screen picture of a white (8 bit I assume) Owl and it would make this really creepy noise and occasionally wink (once a minute or so – I think).
For some reason that Owl image & sound scared the living sh*t out of me and probably caused more nightmares than anything else (let alone computer games) when I was small.
If anyone knows what that game was called – from that very poor description, sorry – I’d love to give it a go on an emulator. But it wasn’t a popular system (no-one else I knew or know to date had one), so I doubt anyone would.
Other memorable games from a bit later on (still on VIC20) Space Invaders and a game called Tutankhamen, which was probably the best game we had. Even more so when we discovered the Master System control pad not only fit, but worked with the VIC20..
As cliched as it is.. Pong.
I think it was Pitfall! on the Commodore 64, or maybe Summer Games.
2 years old:
Pokemon Fire Red. first game i ever owned after my friend got leaf green and wouldn’t let me have a go.
Probably Super Mario World on the SNES. I was so bad at it that I never wanted to play it though so I just watched my friend play it. First game I ever completed was the flash game N (back then it had 3 tiers of levels, not 9). we had dial up at the time and even though I had saved the page to be playable offline I was only ever allowed to play for 1 hour at a time for fear of missing a phone call. Suffice to say it took a long time to finish that game.
Either TV Pong or the original Donkey Kong Game & Watch
Chronology is weird and non-linear for me.
First vidya-related memories in no particular order because I’ve no idea what came first:
– being passed over the fence from parent to neighbour so I could play Super Mario World on their SNES.
– Playing Galaxian on the PC I helped dad build (I held the screwdriver while it wasn’t in use).
– Huddling around that one kid with the Gameboy at school, hoping for a turn at Super Mario Land before the batteries ran flat/the lunch bell rang.
– Turning on the MegaDrive for the first time and being in absolute awe of that SEEEEGAAAA display screen (Sonic The Hedgehog).
– Master System II, oh my god there’s so many? Alex Kidd, Shinobi, California Games, Golden Axe, Paperboy, some top-down spy-shooter-racer with a transforming vehicle.
Shit, I was a really fortunate kid.
Zeppelin – C64
Sasa :Spectravideo 64
Keystone Kapers on Atari 2600 in 1991.
I was 5 years old, in hospital with a broken femur unable to move, but able to pick up a controller and play the shit out of the Atari they had on the paediatrics ward. It was all Keystone Kapers, then broken up with some River Raid and Frogger. We got an Atari 2600 and that was the start of the console progression for me and my brother.
What a time to be alive!
Terra Cresta on the C64 was the first for me