Your First Game

[Consignia]

<reignites the Great C64 / Spectrum War of 1984>

Fuck you! The Amstrad CPC was the clear champion.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Spectrum? C64?

Acorn BBC Micro mate.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Fuck you! The Amstrad CPC was the clear champion.

Prffft. They weren't even in the running. I'd put an Atari 800 above the Amstrad CPC.

Acorn BBC Micro mate.

Nah.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Nah.

Yes.

They're arguably even better than modern computers, because when you chuck a BBC Micro monitor at someone, it kills them.

[lazyhour]

Squirm, Thriller and BMX Racers were the first games I remember us having on our first computer, the Commodore 64. Haven't heard the sounds of these games for at least 15 years now, and my god it's - as sick as a pike says - a Proustian rush to hear them now. Squirm's sound design was just brilliant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XluYiOwwhbs

I like this thread cos it makes me feel simultaneously young and old.

[mcbpete]

This behemoth:

Yeahhh, that was my first memory of a computer game too (though I may well have had a go at my brothers ZX81 before, alas my memory doesn't stretch back that far). I'm still on the hunt for a copy at a decent price on the ol ebay, they do come around quite regularly but they always seem just that little to much to justify picking one up.

One of the first computer games (i.e. not LCD/handhelds) I remember trying to play was this on the Commodore 16 -



However, see those blue blobs with a face ? To my 4 or 5 year old brain that was a manifestation of pure evil and I would have to run out the room for my brother to play it. It didn't help that whenever you got attacked by anything it sounded like an electric power drill boring into your skull....

[Papercut]

Another Astro Wars here - I must have had that when I was six in 1982, followed by Firefox F7 six months later, and a C64 the Christmas after that. I loved Astro Wars at the time, but even at six I knew it was a lame Galaxian clone. The first games I had on the C64 were Loco by Alligator, and Star Trooper by Melbourne House. I've only just noticed that Star Trooper seems to take a lot of it's design from Sega's Astro Blaster, which is another game I played a lot.

I still own all of these...

The first games I played would have been Space Invaders, Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Pac Man and Galaxian when I was 4 - 6 on holiday in Rhyl. I remember having to stand on a chair to play Galaxian, and being utterly amazed the first time I watched someone clock 10,000 points (not difficult at all). Before Astro Wars, a few friends had 2600s with Adventure, Combat, Missile Command, Haunted House, Centipede, and Popeye. I played Missile Command the most I think.

After that, but post C64, I lusted after the high production values of Atari 8-bit computer games my cousin had, LucasArts, Infocom, and Atari titles, until accomplished SID composition kicked in and some kind of UK dev scene emerged. Until then, the C64 mostly had crappy arcade knock offs and inferior Atari or Apple ports. Somewhere between Crazy Comets and Sanxion I fell in love with the C64, and the Atari market crumbled.

[Exit]

The first game I actually owned was the Nintendo Donkey Kong 2 Game and Watch (an eerily flawless rendition of which, along with most other similar handhelds, is available to download from http://www.zophar.net/gw/donkey-kong-ii.html).  It was eminently superior to the pisspoor games brought in by my junior school classmates at the end of term.  Never used it as a watch.

More excitingly, we bought a ZX Spectrum back in 1983 or so, and acquired a handful of games to go with it.  I distinctly remember starting with Horace and the Spiders, The Hobbit and Chuckie Egg.  The latter is still an agreeable and playable game, and a marvel of simplicity.  How I longed for more than eight levels, though.

Parenthetically, I find it faintly depressing that, when hearing music from that era, I recall the games I was playing at the time, rather than some splendid array of outdoor pursuits that would probably have constituted a more gainful and healthy use of my day.  I say that at the age of 38, still sitting in front of a computer.

[Sexton Brackets Drugbust]

Jet-Boot Jack. I was ace at this as a kid, racing through the levels like nobodies business. Tried to play it recently and found it nearly impossible. Modern gaming has softened me.

[turnstyle]

I had this notoriously difficult game on the Commodore 64. That version didn't have different ranged weapons or directional attacks, and also didn't have the collectable projectile weapons. I died a lot, only got to Shredder once and he beat me in about 5 seconds.

A friend of mine at the time had a NES and he bought the game. I played it and because I was used to the crippled C64 version I found it much easier and even managed to beat it.

Incredibly, I beat Turtles on the C64. I bet I couldn't do it now.

It came as part of a special Movies boxset. Other games were Back to the Future 2, the dire Days of Thunder, and Gremlins.

My first games was Snapper, on the Acorn Electron. On a flipping instant loading cartridge, no less!!

I also remember Grannys Garden, and agree it was pretty scary.

[bomb_dog]

on the C64. Great fun.

...and originally...



That was a goodie from 1980. Wonder what happened to it.... (sigh)....

[A.A]

Atari boy, I was. First game I got was Tennis. Just amazing stuff. Sports games these days could learn a thing or two from Atari Tennis...

Also, River Raid was amazing. And a game I think was called Frostbite, where you jumped across  ice to build an igloo; whilst avoiding birds and the like.

This is it...



There was a damn polar bear that was a bloody nuisance in the later levels.

[Ginyard]

My favourite memory regarding the Atari console was the Raiders of the Lost Ark game. That was bitch difficult. I don't think I ever completed it. Great if you want micro-seizures though, with all its mad flashing.

Somewhere in my loft there sits on old ZX81 complete with a 16k cartridge and an adapted dummy keyboard. I had a few games for that, like chess (which was decent all things considered) and one called Monster Maze. But I think I was more interested in programming it than playing it. My dad and I created a game where you had to drop blocks into a moving pot. Its latency would make you want to blow your brains out today, but it was great fun at the time.

The spectrum was obviously better (I remember Horace goes skiing very well) but it was like tapping on a row of rasoplasts and the contacts could be temperemental. It all looked cheap compared to the swanky Apple IIe my uncle had. He had some great games, like The Bards Tale  -  very addictive for a kid. Lucky I didn't live with him as I'd have done nothing else but sit at his computer.

[Jemble Fred]

The first game was probably something like Horace Goes Skiing or Underminer (Arkanoid) – certainly, it was on Vic-20.

But the best thing of all was a programme which generated sentences when you fed it nouns and verbs. So my first real computer memory is me and my brothers getting a Vic-20 to suggest that our next door neighbour done a poo in a donkey's handbag, or similar. We started laughing circa 1983, and I finished when I did my GCSEs.

[Ginyard]

We used to do that at school on the beebs. Nothing better than coaxing a Hawkingesque 'wanker' out of a computer.

[non capisco]

The Nintendo 'Donkey Kong' Game and Watch, featuring an embryonic moustacheless Mario. I spent a whole family holiday in Wales antisocially hogging my cousins' one and then weeks wheedling away at my folks to buy me one for my birthday. I can still remember the basic sound effects and 'music' to this day. (Brrrp brrrp brrrp brrrp brrrrrrrrr!)

[Viero_Berlotti]

I'm surprised there's been no mention of the Intellivision yet.

I think the skiing game was the first game I played:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5qRtZHr0Nk

My Dad was an early adopter though, and when he got the Intellivision, there wasn't many places in the UK selling the games. So I remember there was this man that used to come round every couple of weeks that he'd rent games off, the 'computer game man' as he was known. Fuck knows where he got the games from or how he ended up going round to peoples houses renting games.

[Space ghost]

I wish wood effect panelling was the norm on the current gen of consoles.

[BlodwynPig]

[madhair60]

There was a damn polar bear that was a bloody nuisance in the later levels.

I FUCKING LOVE FROSTBITE

[A.A]

http://www.vizzed.com/vizzedboard/retro/game.php?id=4065&system=a2600&name=Frostbite

Who doesn't love this, really?

I've been at it for too long already...

[Jemble Fred]

It looks like Frogger. Never heard of it before, was it Atari exclusive?

Atari's a bit of a closed book to me, my course was, crudely:

Vic-20 > Spectrum > Amiga > SNES&Mega Drive > N64&Saturn > Dreamcast&GBA > Xbox > Xbox 360

We did have a 3DO and a Sam Coupé, but... that's our problem.

[Cohaagen]

I vaguely remember playing Frostbite (and Pole Position) on my 2600, mainly the "boieee" noise as you jumped from floe to floe. I can remember a total of one line from the manual: "maybe he's the ghost of Peary!?".

Still have my 2600 at my father's house.

[sirhenry]

I'm amazed that no-one's mentioned Jet Set Willy yet. I still remember my annoyance at finally working out that the only way through one level was to just run straight through at full speed from the moment it loaded.

[NoSleep]

My first home computer[nb]About the same time I was playing Colossal Cave on the Apple II at work.[/nb] was an Atari 400 and I had cartridges for Miner 2049er, Donkey Kong & Star Raiders, all of which got played extensively. Before that I remember we had a version of Pong for the TV, and some shooting game for the TV, with a rifle attachment (can't recall really getting too much into it, though).

[Beagle 2]

I guess I can't get any earlier than "Beat the Bug Eyes" (1982), which my dad had to copy out of a book in BASIC exactly or it wouldn't work on our old sinclair cheese wedge thing. Here's a screenshot:



In my memory you had to key in a grid reference when the "eyes" appeared, but as there isn't one there, maybe it was just pressing space or something. With hindsight, my dad was a patient man to go to the trouble of fucking about typing it in for me to play it for about five minutes and then fuck off bored to watch Bonanza.

[HappyTree]

10 PRINT "Happy Tree! ";
20 GOTO 10

There was a time when this was the most exciting thing in the world.

[mook]

10 PRINT "Happy Tree! ";
20 GOTO 10

There was a time when this was the most exciting thing in the world.

the semi-colon made the world of difference kids, a world of difference.

[GedsHandcart]

Wizardry 1 on the Apple II

[SetToStun]

Christ, I know I've answered this one on here before but now I'm beginning to doubt my own memory, it was that long ago. We definitely had a "Pong" clone which I think was either Atari or Intellivision. It had about four games on it: pong; squash (pong with both players at the same end and a wall at the other); four-player pong (I think); some sort of "football" game which was just pong with bits in and smaller goals and one other which utterly escapes me now.

We upgraded to whichever console came with a duck-shooting game (the light-gun looked like a Luger and could be turned into a rifle by adding placcy bits) and then to something in colour which played the Kickstart game. Apart from handhelds like "Battlestar Galactica" that was that until we got a C64 and the immortal "Last Ninja" ("Aztec Challenge", "Apache AH-64A" and "Blue Max" get honourable mentions). By that time, however, I was long since working and had nowhere near enough time for games.

Once I was married and settled down I got a MegaDrive (the guy in the shop made me swear I wouldn't tell any children before he gave me the blood and cheat codes for Mortal Kombat) and that was, again, that until I got my first PC at home in the early nineties. "You Don't Know Jack" was a firm favourite on that - post-pub with mates, a brilliant laugh. A series of PCs followed, as well as the PS, PS2 and X-Box but since then I've not really bothered with games. I may go mad and get whatever console is flavour of the month if/when me and the other half buy a house and get a bit more room for junk.

But in terms of the first game that dropped my jaw and made me want to play on and on, it has to be Flashback on the MegaDrive. I was utterly gobsmacked. the only game that's ever come close since was the original Deus Ex; I've bought three copies of that already and now I'm seriously considering getting another one and hooking up the laptop to the big telly.