What was Your First Ever Computer Game?

[Jayw75]

Civ 1

 

[Wandering_Mania]

Even though I had an Atari 2600, I wouldn't count that as a computer.

But the game I would say was a Russian version of Tetris back in 1985 on an IBM PC. It had some quiz about Russian history you had to answer just to play the game, all the answers where in the instruction book, and we lost the instruction book. So only one answer did we know, and if it didn't ask that question we had to reboot the game until it did.

 

Then there was some sidescroller Anubis game that I can't remember the name of.

[Ijakor2]

one of my first

Am i realy so old ?????

feels like 2 years ago

Edited August 10, 2024 by Ijakor2
just a thought

[belegost]

On 5/23/2024 at 5:59 PM, D3vilizeR said:

I really liked a helicopter/tank shooting game as a child, I managed to find it once on Youtube, but I don't remember the name.

Fort Apocalypse?

[Wandering_Mania]

'Eye of Horus' that's the "Anubis" game that I played. The name just came to me.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited August 25, 2024 by Wandering_Mania

[Sir Walter Ratleigh]

As a kid we had the Atari 2600 and played it near constantly. When I was in the Service in the 80's one of the guys had an Apple 2C and we played Star Fleet 1 around 1986 I believe.

[legendarytoyou]

I can't seem to find it.  My very first computer game was considered niche at the time.  I think it was called, "The Raven."  It was a battle tank simulator of some kind.  Tried looking for it, didn't have much luck.  I'll keep looking because I'm having pangs of nostalgia.🥰

It did have a story behind it though.  Something about some alien invasion and the battle tank being the only means to repel it.

Edited August 25, 2024 by legendarytoyou

[LourensS]

It was either NFS: Most Wanted or AOE 3

[Lemurion287]

For me it was Pong. My orthodontist had the table version when I was a kid back around 1977-78 or so.

[Guest]

The first one I remember actually installing to play (rather than playing on a web browser) is The Sims 1. I got it at Thankgiving in 2000 from my cousin, who was bored of her copy. I was 5 and she was 17 I believe. I still have the disc to this day.

[Faolon]

 

[kurumi-nyan]

Does watching the windows maze screensaver count? First actual computer game would have probably been one of the built-in games like space cadet pinball or minesweeper. First game period was super mario land 2: six golden coins. A family friend gave it to me at a party because she didn't know what to do with kids and wanted to keep me busy. It worked, hah.

[Panther Benz]

If we talk about PC: GTA 3 was the first game that I played on PC (that was my neighbour PC), Serious Sam 2 was 

first game on my own PC that I launched, GTA VC was my first PC game that I played for a long time and finished storyline.

Before PC I had PS 1 and Sega Dreamcast, but I think I can't remember what was my first game on these consoles as I started playing when I was ~5 years old

[Hepar]

On 5/21/2018 at 12:15 PM, El_Duderino said:

(a.k.a. the "how old are you?" thread)

 

When reading the various forums and threads here on LL, one frequently gets glimpses of the diverse ages and backgrounds of the membership assembled here. Which got me thinking, just what was your first ever computer game that you've played? Be it on your own computer, or at a friend's house.

 

I'm deliberately saying "computer game" and not PC game, I don't want this to be exclusively about PC games but also include consoles, Amigas, Commodores, or whatever platform you may have had your first gaming experiences on. Heck, several members here are probably old enough to have played Pong when it was still brand spanking new.

 

Why do I start this thread? Because I don't have anything better to do and because I'm hoping that, if a few people contribute, this might bring back some memories of the good old times and some long forgotten games or maybe even allow us to discover some gems which we might have missed back then. 

 

...

 

So, allow me to begin...

 

My first ever computer game was Street Rod from California Dreams, from the late 80s or very early 90s. It is a car racing game set in the 1960s in which you buy a rusty piece of junk, tune it in your garage, take it for a spin to the drive-in and then do some illegal street races. The 16-color graphics and 8 fps (or thereabouts, lol) were the most amazing thing ever seen! That game was so much fun and I played it for years. I think you can still find it online and play it through a DOS emulator.

Arthur's Reading Race - Ice cream race

 

 

Great tool for teaching kids to read. You had no idea what any of this stuff tasted like anyway so it set the imagination running wild. Also, only now realizing the covertly sexual sound of the ice cream scooping at the end of the race. Released in 1997 for Windows and Macintosh.

Edited July 13, 2025 by Hepar

[DarkBlade13]

Probably a website with some basic games.

[Glennwood Road Ent.]

Gold Digger from the now defunct GameRival website in early 2000s

[creamypawzzz]

JumpStart 2nd Grade

 

[Chippy61]

Talking about pc games. the 1st I played was Duke Nukem on a IBM 286 with 6 byte of memory. Which was loaded onto DOS with 6 3" floppy discs

 

[Unflavored Sardines]

I don't remember which game is my first! In the last and only memory of me being computer-less, i was in some open baby cage thingy!

[Raven 54]

Pong, 1972, Atari....  

I saw this last week.

The Unlikely Story of the First Video Game          https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a20129/the-very-first-video-game/

Spoiler

The Unlikely Story of the First Video Game

The 1947 patent for a "cathode-ray tube amusement device" and the forgotten precursor to a revolution.

By Matt BlitzPublished: Mar 28, 2016 8:57 AM

 

CRT Amusement Device

The rapid rise of video games to $61 billion dollar business in 2015 all started nearly five decades ago with Ralph Baer's "Brown Box"—at least, that's the prevailing theory. Almost 20 years before Baer's breakthrough invention, however, and long before anyone ever heard of Pong or Mario, a Greenville, South Carolina engineer submitted a 1947 patent for a revolutionary new entertainment contraption titled the "Cathode-ray tube amusement device." Today, few recognize Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. as the inventor of the first video game system. But they should.

"It never registered that this would have been the first video game."

 

Salad Days of Cathode Rays

Goldsmith, born in 1910, got his start in electronics when he was only ten years old building an amplifier for his hard-of-hearing grandmother who was using an ear trumpet. (While she preferred the ear trumpet, the amplifier worked.) Through high school and into undergrad at Furman University, Goldsmith became obsessed with electronics, especially crystal radio sets, a new technology that had just become popular. In 1931, he went to Cornell to get his Ph.D. in physics, where he began researching a device that was becoming essential for electronic communications: the cathode-ray tube.

 

Cathode rays—beams of high-speed electrons leaving a polarized, heated electric device in a vacuum tube—were first observed in 1869 by German physicist Johann Hittrof and named by Eugen Goldstein. While the science wasn't fully understood at the time (the scientists thought they were seeing rays or waves, rather than electrons), this discovery became the basis for a slew of electrical innovations. Karl Ferdinand Braun, who would later win a Nobel Prize for his work with "wireless telegraphy," created the first cathode-ray tube, naming it the Braun Tube after himself.

 

 

Wikimedia Commons

Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. in 1984.

If you're old enough to remember the days before flat-screen TVs and computer monitors, then you remember how ubiquitous cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) became. A CRT was essentially the picture tube in a television, the component that creates and receives the beams of electrons that show the image. It's made up of three parts: the electron gun, the phosphor-coated screen, and the glass viewing surface. When electrified, the CRT emits a narrow beam of electrons that pass through electrical coils that deflect, intensify and direct the beam at the phosphor-coated screen (in a black-and-white TV, the phosphor is white). When struck by this beam, the phosphor screen produces visible light and creates the traditional tv glow on the glass viewing surface. As time went on, televisions grew in size and so did CRTs, leading to the bulky, heavy sets we remember from the 1980s and 90s. This is one of the reasons why the market moved towards the lightweight LCD and plasma screens in the 2000s.

Russian Boris Rosing was the first person to use a CRT in the transmission of black-and-white images, creating what could be considered the first primitive TV. Several years after that, the nearly simultaneous work of RCA's Vladimir Zworykin (who had worked for Rosing) and Philo Farnsworth led to the using of cathode ray tubes for transmitting recorded images in the first electronic television system. CRTs also led to the first early idea for a video game.

 

 

Walter Nurnberg//Getty Images

Mullards were the leading UK producers of cathode ray tubes during the 1950s, which were in demand by the growing market for television receivers.

The Godfather of Space Invaders

Back in Ithaca, Goldsmith needed a higher-frequency cathode ray tube for his oscillograph, so he contact a little laboratory in New Jersey run by Allen B. DuMont. Goldsmith got much more than a CRT—DuMont hired him as head of research, and Goldsmith joined a team that would change how the world entertained itself, from television sets to TV networks. In addition to working on the perfection of the CRT and pioneering color television by experimenting with red, blue, green phosphor, Goldsmith was part of the company delegation that brought DuMont's new fishbowl-shaped televisions to the 1939 World's Fair in Queens, New York. As President Franklin Roosevelt delivered his opening remarks, crowds of people huddled around the sets, all of them probably watching television for the first time.

Like many other companies during World War II, DuMont pushed pause on its ordinary business in favor of building wartime technology like radar and missile launching systems. At war's end, DuMont tried to transform its military innovations into commercials successes. This was likely Goldsmith's motivation when he began work on the what he would later call the "cathode-ray tube amusement device."

 

 

US Patent Office

Thomas Goldsmith\'s patent

Using radar applications, electromagnetic beams, and a CRT, the gameplay—at least what Goldsmith's patent describes—seem like an ancestor to Space Invaders or Galaxian. The player sits in front of the large contraption mounted in a closet and uses a control (later described as knobs) to "manipulate the trace or position of the beam." The point of the game was to hit targets, like pictures of airplanes that would be manually placed on the tube, using the beam. The patent specifically requests the player to make sure the beam's path departed from a straight line "so as to require an increased amount of skill and care." Even in 1947 people understood that every good video game needed explosions, with the patent reading, "the game can be more spectacular... by making a visible explosion of the cathode ray beam take place when the target is hit."

While Goldsmith's game idea was certainly ahead of its time, Alex Magoun, a historian at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, notes that the device was not what we would consider much of a video game today. "There's no computer, no microprocessor generating random airplane paths.They are just sticking targets on the picture tube and then using a couple of electromechanical controls to try to guide an electron beam. In that respect, it is not a fully developed technology by any means."

Magoun speculates that Goldsmith's invention was only a demo and no actual prototype was made. We don't know this for sure, but there are other reasons to belive it beyond the technological. "DuMont was constantly strapped for funds," Magoun says. "[That was] the whole story of that company from the 30s into the 60s." Sure enough, in 1960 Allen B. DuMont sold his remaining shares to Fairchild Camera, marking the end of DuMont Labs' short but influential run.

In the years following, Goldsmith's patent was more or less forgotten. Even when Spacewar!—probably the first actual video game— was developed at MIT in 1961, the designers led by Steven Russell were so focused on what came next, they hardly had time to look back.

 

Edited January 28 by Caveman 74

[Veladarius]

Pong

DigDug on my Commodore 64 (cartridge)

Atari 2600 - don't remember the first game, we had a lot of them.

[Pater Aelred]

Magnavox Odyssey

[43deadwood]

Space Invaders on a slot machine in the University Student Union bar - two games would cost as much as a pint of beer. A few years later a wealthy friend  bought an Atari console and we'd play pong. Late seventies my employer bought an HP 64B desktop and a mate wrote a text-based golf game. First PC games were Wolfenstein 3D and A10 Tank Killer on an Amstrad 1640 ECD (at work!) in mid eighties. As an aside when I started Uni there was 1 computer to service the whole faculty of engineering - it was card-fed and had 8k of memory!

[Silene9]

Nobody played farm games. i remeber somewhat like tetris. 

[Demonwise]

I know I played some MS-dos games way back. Don't really remember them. Probably played something on the Win95 and Win98. I think the first really memorable game had to be the god-tier, game-of-the-year 1998, Half-Life.