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What was Your First Ever Computer Game?


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Yes as you surmised I am one that played pong waaay back in the mid-70s when it was the latest thing, already well into my teens. My friend had it early on and we played it a fair bit. A couple of years later I jumped on the Atari 2600 when it hit the market, have it still today. All the early greats (Combat, Indy 500, Night Driver, Gunslinger and so on); those early years were rather lean in the early-80s however it got much better. Yet my first real PC game would happen in about 1978 or so, my Uncle had an (at that time top of the line) IBM home computer. He got me hooked on a text based game along the lines of "Colossal Cave Adventure", I don't recall that actual games name.

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On 5/22/2018 at 12:13 PM, dark vergil said:

sonic 2, was the only game i had for a very long time

 

still remember my friend letting me borrow golden axe, that was when we realised more than one console exist, i.e he had a master system and i had sega megadrive lol

 

Hell yeah! Sega Genesis was my first console and I had it for years: Sonic 1 & 2, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Mortal Kombat 3

 

As for PC the first game I ever remember playing was this game called Riverworld. Anyone else ever play it?

 

 

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Ultima I (1980's)  Yeah I'm pretty old.   And it was on an Apple II.    Then I moved on to a Commodore 64.   MS-DOS..lol. 

 

I also played all the Gold Box AD&D games that SSI put out starting with Pool of Radiance and all the way through Pools of Darkness.  And their Dragonlance Gold Box series too. 

 

My first taste of PVP (Player versus Player) was in AOL's Neverwinter Nights.  Boy did I ever enjoy dropping a fireball on a unsuspecting party of fellow players or feebleminding them  "xxxx is STUPID!" was the ingame announcement when the spell landed and reduced them to 3 in intelligence which prevented them from casting spells. They could however use wands or read off scrolls.   The thing is, PvP was actually a bug in the game engine - melee combat wasn't possible against other players, but spell combat was. 

 

Their Finest Hour/Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe by Lucasfilm Games were two my all time favorites although I also played Falcon (mentioned earlier in this thread)

 

I'd also like to mention just about all of the Gabriel Knight games too, particularly The Beast Within. 

 

Ah..nostalgia. 

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Mine was Prince of Persia (1989), if Paint doesn't count as a game ^^" (I was EXTREMELY fascinated with the fact that you could choose a color and then it would magically appear and disappear, without living rips in the paper or after-marks, and the spray! I really liked that brush type).

 

For reference images:

 

 

prince-04.png

 

 

prince-02.png

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13 hours ago, Celedhring said:

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe

I played a game like this I think. You played the role of Luftwaffe Supreme Commander in an old SSI game. There really wasn't any graphics to it. You just had to maintain your air-force and balance between attacking England and defending the Deutsche homeland- in short, numbers and graphs. Boring by today's measure. But then I got Panzer General. That is something I would still play today even though it is old as fuck.

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On 5/26/2018 at 2:54 PM, KoolHndLuke said:

I played a game like this I think. You played the role of Luftwaffe Supreme Commander in an old SSI game. There really wasn't any graphics to it. You just had to maintain your air-force and balance between attacking England and defending the Deutsche homeland- in short, numbers and graphs. Boring by today's measure. But then I got Panzer General. That is something I would still play today even though it is old as fuck.

The game is called "12 O'clock High" made by Talonsoft, but it was made in 1999, so is that the game you are thinking of?   Also,  there was another game, with the same engine and concept but set in the early war called "Battle of Britain". 

 

Anyway, glad to see I am not the oldest (but up there) as I won't count my Atari 2600 games, nor the triangle game box that we got for Christmas in the late 70s, but the first computer game that I owned was "Balance of Power" the game of super power diplomacy.   My wife played "Defender of the Crown" where you played  a contemprary of Robin Hood seekign to unite England and of course rescue the Princess of your choosing.

 

Loved Apache 64 and Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator too!  Ah, the 80s  when only nerds and geeks played computer games!

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Being 21, I think I'm probably younger than a good majority of people here. With that in mind, I basically grew up on this generation's gems such as GTA: Vice City (my VERY first computer game), alongside San Andreas, NFS Underground 2, Prince of Persia (Two Thrones) and other shit of that kind.

 

I tend to get nostalgic from time to time, so I still keep these games stored on my PC, just in case I ever feel like reminiscing. ?

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8 minutes ago, fatbloke69 said:

A stand alone Pong Console (with 3 selectable game types) that my dad bought 2nd hand some time in the v early 80's

lWWJOtd.gif

Yes  what was that triangle game console called?   The game cartridges were metal as well.    It had a gun, a steering wheel and two knob controllers on each side of the triangle.

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5 hours ago, wokking56 said:

I don't remember a triangle console, however a quick search showed me this.

 

The Daewoo Zemmix, is this it?

 

Nope, I found it:

Coleco Telstar Arcade

 

image.png.24a39f847f8f90934960af85a028e5e1.png

 

We didn't play Pong....we played "tennis"  (aka pong just with a green backdrop). 

 

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On 5/26/2018 at 3:16 PM, Celedhring said:

 

Their Finest Hour/Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe by Lucasfilm Games were two my all time favorites although I also played Falcon (mentioned earlier in this thread)

 

Ah..nostalgia. 

I played the crap out of SWOTL, I had all of the addons too, many on 5.25" floppy disks (some on 3.5" disks). Lucasfilm also did a good Midway game (Pacific theatre flight sim) and a Battle of Britain game funnily enough called BoB.  I had all of those, as well as the Red Baron games (all 3). RB, RB2 and RB 3D (using the 3dFx api and cards - remember those?).

My first shooter was the excellent Wolfenstein 3D by Id Studios. The folks that gave us Doom and Quake.

While the first game I played was Pong, it was in the late 1970's, one of my uncles bought an Atari. I next experienced a computer in 1984 when a friend had a Apple II+ and a couple of games on that, one was a Star Wars trench runner (Death Star scene from IV) and a Pacific theatre strategy game also called Midway ( I think ). My next exposure was in 1993 when I was finally able to afford my own PC - a mighty 386sx33 with an AMD cpu (AMD made Intel cpu's under licence) with a massive 120MB HDD, 4MB system Ram and a fast 1MB Tseng Labs 2D video card. It was a BEAST.

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On 5/24/2018 at 3:39 PM, shariecriss said:

My very first computer based game was basically Pong, bought at Radioshack. It was a hand-held controller that hooked up to the TV with a few Pong-like games. There was a master controller and a second unit for a second player and a gun for shooting a white block that wandered over the screen. Searching Google for images came up with TV Scoreboard.

 

For me, I don't remember if it was radioshack but some pong only controller for tv (B&W) in the 80s

My first actual computer game was a "maze" in assembler on a DEC VAX 11/7xx I did for a class mid to late 80s

1st pc game was a text battle game written in basic - don't remember the pc anymore but was up to using 5 1/4 floppies LOL

then came atari, commodore, et al

be interesting to see what is here in 10 years let alone at 50 out to balance the IBM mag drum I first worked with in 1974

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8 hours ago, Lunsmann said:

My next exposure was in 1993 when I was finally able to afford my own PC - a mighty 386sx33 with an AMD cpu (AMD made Intel cpu's under licence) with a massive 120MB HDD, 4MB system Ram and a fast 1MB Tseng Labs 2D video card. It was a BEAST.

Reminds me of the monstrous 486 my Dad bought in 1994. Had good old Wolfenstein 3D and Wizardry 7 to convert me from a console gamer to the master race. My dad swore we'd never be able to fill up that 384 MB harddrive. My DOOM/Heretic modding work disagreed....

 

Crazy to think my current harddrive has roughly 20,833% the storage space. How times change.

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50 minutes ago, steelpanther24 said:

So......are there any young people in these forums.   A few of the younger ones were playing games in the 90s...but that means they would be in their 30s now.     Is modding an old person's (born before 1985) game nowadays?

Most of the modding communities I've hung out with tend to stay in the 20s age bracket. This community seems to be unique in that its filled with my fellow Gen Xers. Which is amusing in itself. You'd think a site of this nature would be populated with young folks while all the old timers recoil and do the "Total smut, those darn kids have no moral values" routine?

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35 minutes ago, MrEsturk said:

Most of the modding communities I've hung out with tend to stay in the 20s age bracket. This community seems to be unique in that its filled with my fellow Gen Xers. Which is amusing in itself. You'd think a site of this nature would be populated with young folks while all the old timers recoil and do the "Total smut, those darn kids have no moral values" routine?

Actually I find it strange that so many of my fellow baby boomers freak out over that stuff. Since it was all "free love, sexual revolution" and such way back in the 60s and 70s.

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41 minutes ago, MrEsturk said:

Most of the modding communities I've hung out with tend to stay in the 20s age bracket. This community seems to be unique in that its filled with my fellow Gen Xers. Which is amusing in itself. You'd think a site of this nature would be populated with young folks while all the old timers recoil and do the "Total smut, those darn kids have no moral values" routine?

<cue Theme song to "Camelot"> Gen X'ers....the last generation to view sex as salacious, rebellious and sinful.  Leisure Suit Larry would be received with a "meh" today. 

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16 minutes ago, steelpanther24 said:

Gen X'ers....the last generation to view sex as salacious, rebellious and sinful.  Leisure Suit Larry would be received with a "meh" today. 

A game were you play a sleazy little man desperately trying to convince women into having a one night stand with you? No I can think of some present day people that would be totally outraged by that. Probably the only reason you don't see articles about how LSL wasn't woke like they been doing to 80s film is that it was created by one of the first gaming studios run by a woman. Always amusing to see 3rd wave feminists put Roberta Williams on a pedestal being many of the games produced under her reign were hardly in line with 3rd wave ideals...

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1 hour ago, MrEsturk said:

Most of the modding communities I've hung out with tend to stay in the 20s age bracket. This community seems to be unique in that its filled with my fellow Gen Xers. Which is amusing in itself. You'd think a site of this nature would be populated with young folks while all the old timers recoil and do the "Total smut, those darn kids have no moral values" routine?

Having come from that long-ago time in a place far, far away ... well mid-western university in the 60s I would guess a lot of the old timers are thankful there were no cell phone videos of the 10 gallon Mazola parties ROFL cause they would be afraid of the blow back and their retirement funds.

seriously just another realm of pendulum swings as the ages change - conservative/liberal, young/old etc

noted on one of the sites I follow questions about what things humans have always done: sex, jokes about sex, jokes about fidelity, lamentations about the younger generation, the older generation, the changes in technology (horses to cars - penmanship/writing to computer/voice response) - some of this is in graffiti from Pompeii and Sumeria as well as Egypt and China

In current era it just seems to roll over faster perhaps due to the broader reach of our technology and media. In reading the posting I note that the older "first game" references seem to be equivalent games for a decade or two 80s to 90s but as gaming progresses into this century it seems there are shorter periods of reference to not just a specific game but general classes of games in terms of graphics and AI capability.

At some point I expect there will be a paper published examining the linkage between game types and generations.

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