The first videogame I ever played was a communist version of
pong. That's right, I'm oldschool. I was also born in a communist country, so we were a bit behind when it came to consumer electronics (to say the least).. For one of my birthdays my parents were somehow able to buy me a pong machine, with 9 or 10 pong variants preprogrammed onto a box. So.. It was a black box with 9 or 10 buttons to pick the variant (1 paddle each, 2 paddles each, obstacles on the playing field, etc.) and the only other button was an on/off button. It came with two controllers you could only spin left or right - designed for pong. So.. all you could do on this thing was hook it up to your TV and play pong. We had a tiny b&w TV so it was fun but I didn't really play it that much from what I remember. I preferred to play outside.
When we moved to Germany my parents were again somehow able to buy me an Atari800XL computer. My first computer! It came with no drives at all - no disc drives, no floppy drives, no harddrive, etc. no OS. You boot it up and you get BASIC and can start programming. It also came with a tape deck from which you could load in programs and run them. Some of these were games! My parents also bought a joystick as part of the birthday gift, and at some point they bought me a game.
NINJA. This must have been my first real video game, cause c'mon.. commie pong was barely a game. Eventually we figured out that it's possible to copy tapes with games on them and that the copies work perfectly.. We had little money as refugees seeking political asylum, unable to legally work in Germany, so this little loophole allowed me to play more games on a regular basis, rather than just always playing Ninja.
Blue Max was one of those first games I really liked and played a lot. It wasn't long though before I discovered
Panther, which was my favourite game for a while. River Raid has to be mentioned here too as one of the firsts, but everybody knows River Raid.
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