What was your first video game?

[Timsup2nothin]

I lived through the era when they were first introduced, as some of the other old-timers here. But there were already arcades in the mall, with multiple machines, before I first took any interest in them. Defender seemed to be the hot game when I first bothered wandering into an arcade, but once I was in, there were a bunch of other games. And even some pinball games. (That was the early association for me: Oh, it's like pinball. Well, I don't play pinball, so I probably won't play these either.) Anyway, they had something called Tempest, whose play I couldn't even understand. Space Invaders. Centipede. Q-Bert, I want to say. Either Frogger or that came soon after. Donkey Kong came soon too. I myself was drawn to Asteroids, and a tank combat game that I think was called Battle Zone. But mostly Asteroids.

Pac Man was also a rage around this time. I remember a Mexican restaurant my family went to having a table-top version of it in the waiting area.

We convinced my dad to get an Atari 5200 for Christmas. It came with Super Breakout, as has been noted on this thread already, and it either came with Centipede, or Centipede was the first game we got for it. The joysticks went bad very quickly.

I still love Asteroids.

Battle Zone was very cool.

Being either slightly older or having at least taken an interest a little sooner I witnessed the battle in my neighborhood arcade between the pinball purists and the fans of the "video game fad that would never last".

 

[Borachio]

Link to video.

Ah, yeah. I remember that.

I also remember this on My Amstrad.


Link to video.

I must have played it... ooh... two... maybe three times.

 

[Kyriakos]

Amstrad had loads of amateur/simple games, and there were even books for the public to learn some of the coding language (aptly named 'Basic') so as to compile their own programs

I recall one such game, called 'Tank'.
It had two tanks facing each other, immobile on cliffs at opposite sides of the screen. Each new game had different positioning for the tanks. You had to enter variables as if controlling an artillery, so as to fire upon the enemy tank.
Such games were a nice visualisation of simple math concepts, back in elementary school. Overall they were very boring, of course...

 

[CaptainF]

The original Super Mario Bros. on the NES, when I was a 3 year-old.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

^Animation of the characters/scrolling was also similar in Karateka and POP ^^

Well they were made by the same person...

 

[Kyriakos]

Well they were made by the same person...

Even worse

 

[downtown]

Yeah, I think the first actual home video game I played was the original Mario Bros on NES, when I was 5 or 6. I might have played some computer games before that (Oregon Trail maybe? Number Munchers?) on the Apple IIe.

I didn't own a video game until Sonic 3 on the Sega when I was 9 or so, but I had played lots of DOS games before that on our 486dx.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I don't know the name. I don't know anything but a blurry fleeting impression of it. It was a console, and I think it must have been a kind prior to dominance of Nintendo and Playstation. Due to the time and the vague sense of it which remains with me.
It is a magical memory. The playing itself is mundane. Me and my brother playing, some pixeled things moving steadily up and the two of us shooting lasers out of it. I remember it being a lot of fun. But what makes this memory special happened after us leaving the game. It was the call from my brother that there were snowflakes outside, falling dawn. I remember getting up in excitement, running to our big upper living room window and starring at the flakes, softly descending. It is hard to put it into words, but this moment holds a power, which in its kind will never resurface. It seems like a symbol of the magnificence of the wonder of a child I had the pleasure to see and have the burden to carry its loss, forever.

 

[Gori the Grey]

It is a magical memory.

the flakes, softly ascending.

I think that if I saw ascending snowflakes, I'd regard it as magical too!

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Goad... I was so proud of that little story, since it was so sincere.... Descending...Descending!

 

[sophie]

The very first game I can remember playing is Dark Castle on the original MacIntosh my parents had. Mostly I remember the game being incredibly difficult (I was also really young). I don't think I ever beat it. I used to watch my dad play it a lot too:


Link to video.

After that I remember when my dad bought the first Age of Empires. I played the everloving crap out of that game. And the sequel.

 

[Josu]

I'm not sure, but this was one of the first


Link to video.


Wonder boy in an Amstramd CPC

 

[Crime Doesn't Pay]

Earliest one I remember is Army Men 3D.

 

[nerdfighter13]

the first one that i remember playing was Super Mario Land for the gameboy.

 

[Lay_Lay]

Magnavox Odyssey 2: KC Munchkin (better than Pac Man), Pick Axe Pete (better than Donkey Kong), UFO! (better than Asteroids).
At the time I did not realize our system was superior.
"Why didn't we get an Atari like everyone else?"

 

[Crackerbox]

Link to video.
The venerable Invasion Force for the TRS-80.

 

[Harv]

I can't even remember what the game is called but it was a war game and it only dealt with battles and not diplomacy and the like in Civilization I, which I also played. Trying to find it is a nightmare, since most search go to the movie War games, which is not what I am looking for.

Was it Empire?

Hmm. This isn't the first, but who remembers Starflight?

 

[Crackerbox]

The oldest is probably Pong.

Link to video.

The actual name escapes me, but a very early one was Tank Tics, I think. There was one which was pretty novel in that it was an overhead sword fighting game that tracked your joystick pretty cleverly, and you could make some pretty authentic sword movements from history. It wasn't very popular though.

Battlezone was immensely popular at the arcades in the eighties. It was the first immersive game in which there was depth as well as a possibility of the enemy being behind you, something you had to monitor a radar screen to spin around to fight. It was the first real advance in video gaming due to this and leading shots anticipating the speed of the enemy vehicle so your round would hit them. It still looks playable today.

Link to video.

 

[Arakhor]

I remember that tank game! You had to shoot steadily increasing numbers of tanks to gain levels, which only made the game harder and did nothing for your in-game ability. There was no save function either.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The original Legend of Zelda (with the shiny gold cartridge) was my first video game. I was quite young and not very good at it. I think I was 25 before I actually beat the game.