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What are the first games you remember playing?

Started by Barry Admin, September 06, 2017, 07:52:43 PM

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Barry Admin

It's many years since we last had this thread, should be good to reprise. One I remembered earlier was an Atari arcade game called Kangaroo. Released in 1982, I used to play it at the centre round here when I'd visit my Granny for the Saturday club thing, but I'd always have to wait for my uncle to finish playing first, and he was a beast as he lived right round the corner from it.

Suspect the earliest would have been something like 1981's Wizard of Wor, which I had as a Commodore 64 cartridge. 1980 arcade game originally. I think it had speech but will need to look into that more; certainly it seems speech was available with a "Magic Voice" speech module, so perhaps I had that? Having a quick look at the game on YouTube brings back to me how tense it was, and the simple but effective driving soundtrack still puts the shites up me.

My firsts were all Atari based. Spiderman, which if memory serves involved climbing a building while The Green Goblin dropped bombs and people opened windows. Keystone Cops, where you chased a criminal across a few platforms while jumping over trolleys and ducking planes, and Daley Thompson's Decathlon, which involved absolutely buggering your wrist on the 1500m. 

Consignia

When I were a young lad, me dad went bought a second hand Amstrad 61281, which came with a treasure trove of games. For a 5 year old it was like a dream come true. Although I can't remember the first or even decent proportion, here are few that stuck with me.

Killer Gorilla



I was completely oblivious to the fact this was a knock off off Donkey Kong for quite sometime. Despite being bolstered by other's glories, I was enthralled. There's just something about chasing a large primate up girders which is timeless. I believe this was the 4th game on a compliation tape, which mean't it took me a few goes at the tape to actually be able to load. Good things come to those who wait.

Chuckie Egg



More of a classic choice here, but just memerable. It acutally takes a lot of cues from Donkey Kong as well, being a basic platform and ladders game were you are hounded by a oversized animal.

The Young Ones



This one has a special place, since it came in a really posh box2. It was a bastard to load, so it was something brilliant when it acutally loaded. To a five year, old it made bugger all sense. Which was great because it sparked off a load imagination in my head as I tried to make sense of why these people were walking around breaking piggy banks, throwing bogeys and entering Narnia. Wasn't until many years later that I actually got to watch the fabled show, but I think this was one of the reasons it's my favourite comedy series ever.


1The best computer of the time. Fuck off Speccys and Commodore Twats.
2Relatively Speaking

Pseudopath

I'm pretty sure we had an Atari 2600 when I was a toddler, but I was too young to really know what to do with it. The first games I really remember playing were on the original ZX Spectrum. I think ours was on special offer at Dixons and came supplied with about 50 games (the bulk of which were crap text adventures or bizarre educational games like Make-a-Chip). However, it did include some stone-cold classics like Horace Goes Skiing and Valhalla.

The first game I remember actually completing (countless times) was probably Bruce Lee (der-duh-der!).


Barry Admin

Bruce Lee was absolutely fucking wicked, that big flying kick you could do.

Man, we sure have spent a lot of time going up and down ladders, especially in those days... I'd kind of forgotten how prevalent they were until Consignia's post, but Kangaroo had them as well.




biggytitbo

I'm pretty sure it would have been Jet Set Willy or Hunchback on the Spectrum and Spider-Man and Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600.


Maybe slightly before that one of those plug in pong clone TV games.


Playing games was so different in those days. You'd buy a 2.99 speccy or C64 game and no matter how awful it was you'd stubbornly play it and find something to enjoy because you had nothing else. I don't even think I had the concept of  bad game until I had an Amiga and obtained a stack of pirated games. There was no longer any need to sit through bad games becausehere was nothing else to play, so the tolerance level for crap plummeted.

Barry Admin

Remember Mad Nurse and Potty Pigeon? In the former you'd have to stop suicidal babies from offing themselves using plug sockets or whatever was at hand. Quite dark and funny as I recall. Potty Pigeon was a sideways scroller where you had to shite on cars, the C-64 version programmed by Anthony 'Ratt' Crowther. Oh man, what happened to him? I remember Captive 2, his masterpiece... playing it on an overpriced second-hand CD32 whilst experimenting with cigarette singles I'd bought on my paper round. He did that awesome video game version of Knightmare, too, using much the same engine as the captive games.

Looks like he quit the biz in 2011, but interesting to note he went on to work on Burnout Paradise and... Battlefield 2! (Console port.)

Kelvin

Probably Pac-man and Space Invaders. My dad put his back out one year, and spent weeks in bed with his work computer set up next to him. As little kids, my brother and I would go up and sit with him when he wasn't working, and take it in turns to play Space Invaders and Pac-man on his black and white screen. I can still remember that relatively short period of time very vividly, even down to the TV shows we were watching and the layout of the room. I guess I'd have been about 8 or 9 years old?   

Around the same time, he also borrowed someone's copy of Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter, and even though none of us were any good at it, I remember being thoroughly engrossed, loading up the different saves and seeing how long I could last by avoiding the Spider Droid, or whatever. Occasionally I'd stumble across something cool, like a giant talking head underground, and have absolutely no idea how to solve it. Again, though, the few sections I did play are burnt into my memory.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j44z0JIVh0

The real turning point was Cosmos Intergalactic Adventure, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkOCUdSJ8w

My dad got it free with a computer magazine, I think, and although I had played quite a few other free games by then, this was the first game that I truly fell in love with. Even when I wasn't playing it, I used to spend hours drawing the characters and levels, and my mum would get angry that I wasn't going outside in the sun.

Eventually we got a second hand NES with a bunch of games, and the rest is history. 

Barry Admin

Quote from: biggytitbo on September 06, 2017, 08:24:08 PM
Playing games was so different in those days. You'd buy a 2.99 speccy or C64 game and no matter how awful it was you'd stubbornly play it and find something to enjoy because you had nothing else. I don't even think I had the concept of  bad game until I had an Amiga and obtained a stack of pirated games. There was no longer any need to sit through bad games becausehere was nothing else to play, so the tolerance level for crap plummeted.

£1.99 Mastertronic games ftw! You've touched on something I almost started a thread about the other night actually. I was wondering if there were any games I really hated as a kid - games I would consider to be shit and annoying. I know I was very fussy with comedy ('Allo 'Allo and Russ Abbot pissed me off so much), but it does feel like it was different with games.

I always had drawers full of games, and there were some I just couldn't get anywhere in, but I'd eventually try again at some point. The video game adaption of the sci fi show V drove me to distraction as I could never figure out how to work the codes and get out of the first room, and I was desperate to. Sometimes the door would glitch and you could actually get around the ship, and it seemed really fun. I tried to return it to Boots at one point and think I was quite upset by the cunty salesman who said there was nothing wrong with it.

Barry Admin

Kelvin, you've got me checking out a Police Quest playthrough on YouTube. Those were cracking but I think my copies would always crash at some point, or the Amiga disc would die and after making that sort of flapping noise. Can barely remember anything about Space Quest, but did love those games too.

Eight Taiwanese Teenagers

Got a Spectrum 128 +2 presumably in 1986 as that's when a package came out with the first games I remember playing:

Punchy - a weird game with some very odd primitive voice sampling
Alien Destroyer - space invaders
Treasure Island - this was a very odd seeming game too
Crazy Golf - boring but probably the only one 5 year old me could play
Disco Dan - can't actually remember this one. Maybe it never loaded.
Oh Mummy - I can still remember the insane repetitive music

biggytitbo

Quote from: Barry Admin on September 06, 2017, 09:04:17 PM
Kelvin, you've got me checking out a Police Quest playthrough on YouTube. Those were cracking but I think my copies would always crash at some point, or the Amiga disc would die and after making that sort of flapping noise. Can barely remember anything about Space Quest, but did love those games too.


Kim justices video on police quest is ace. I could never get into those sierra ones, the moon logic and punishing difficulty was just too much, plus playing adventure games on the amiga towards the end of it's life was an exercise in masochist anyway, I seem to remember monkey island 2 coming on about 14 floppy discs and requiring constant swapping.

kittens

word rescue, spellbound and henrietta's book of spells. all learning games for DOS provided by parents. no wonder i'm so smart now. just spent ages looking at vids of them on youtube. they look fucking awful

QDRPHNC

It think the first game I ever played was Horace Goes Skiiing - came free with the Speccy 48k.

biggytitbo


Thursday

Pac Man? Fuck that shit! CD MAN



Windows 3.1 Tetris



Commander Keen being the first substantial game




Also I don't remember many of the games, but I remember the box art for this



studpuppet

A friend of my parents designed North Sea oil rigs, and consequently the first home computer I ever saw in 1981-82 was his Apple II with 5 1/2" floppy drive and a small square green screen monitor. His kids had two games:

Swashbuckler!

Choplifter

Mister Six



FEUD, in which you controlled a blobby wizard wandering about picking up plants to make spells to zap another blobbly wizard, who's doing the same elsewhere in the map.

I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, but it all seemed very magical. I seemed to spend a lot of my time on the Spectrum wandering around complex maps with no idea what I was meant to be doing. Tir Na Nog, that was another one. Dun Darach. Marsport. Heavy on the Magick. Some thing where you're wandering around a CIA-type building trying to... stop a terrorist?

Never beat a single one, but I kept going back to them.

Got FEUD on this Your Sinclair covertape - which means, oops!, my first ever game was actually the demo of Ivan Iron Man's Super Off-Road.

FUCKING GET A LOAD OF THIS:

JoeyBananaduck

I had the latter.

Other's I remember being among the first were Chuckie Egg, Bounty Bob Strikes Back and Treasure Island Dizzy.

newbridge

Spacestation Pheta, among other early 90s Mac games. There were more fun games, but this always seemed the most impressive because it was the only game my dad would actually play on occasion.



cptspalding

That would be Donkey King on the Dragon 32. I don't think I was very good at it on account of only being 3 or 4 at the time.

I do remember the amazing feeling the first time that I somehow got to the second level of games (this would include Chuckie Egg from the same period), how the whole layout of the screen would suddenly change and how I would meet my swift demise due to not knowing what to do.

I remember my Amstrad CPC 464 days better but this was a couple of years later.

Viero_Berlotti

Our first console was an Intellivision around 1981-82. Can't remember the first game I played on it, but these stick in my memory:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain


Astrosmash


Boxing


Then we got a Spectrum 48K and I definitely remember JetPac being the first game I played on that:

ASFTSN

Quote from: Kelvin on September 06, 2017, 08:40:18 PM

The real turning point was Cosmos Intergalactic Adventure, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkOCUdSJ8w

My dad got it free with a computer magazine, I think, and although I had played quite a few other free games by then, this was the first game that I truly fell in love with. Even when I wasn't playing it, I used to spend hours drawing the characters and levels, and my mum would get angry that I wasn't going outside in the sun.


I think I've mentioned this to you before on here, but this was mine too, probably with the same version your Dad got, first episode shareware?  I remember being blown away when I first played episodes 2 and 3 for the first time, especially the level where you fly around on a little hover disc thing instead of jumping.  So many good/frustrating times, really lush colours and art style.  That body-horror level after you fall down the monsters gullet has always stuck with me! 

samadriel

My first game was Pitfall for the Atari 2600; pretty good as Atari games go. My second might have been Double Dragon, which was alright, but impossible to finish; I watched a play-through on YouTube recently, and the game was so long, the guy had to load a save state every time he got hit so he'd have enough health to last the vast distance up until the end. It actually had an ending too, albeit a very short one.  I was enchanted by gaming from the beginning, and would often draw pictures of games I'd planned out in my head, complete with blocky Atari graphics.

Quote

Defender, or a cheap knock off of it.

My Dad set it up on the old BBC Acorn purely to keep me out of mischief whilst he concentrated on his marking (he was a teacher). The game itself was far beyond my skillset and comprehension but the fact that pressing space bar produced a cool laser noise was enough to keep me amused for an hour or two. For years all the games I (occasionally) played were far, far too difficult for me to get anywhere with, it was only in the 16-bit era that I discovered there were computer games that wouldn't sadistically kill you within the first 30 seconds...

TheManOne

A rip off of Simon called Merlin.
A say a rip off - it actually had many more game modes than Simon, but it looked like a calculator.

EDIT - after searching online, I've now discovered I must've been playing a rip off of Merlin. Double ripped. Still, it was ace.

EDIT EDIT - Oh! It was Atari.


ASFTSN

Quote from: TheManOne on September 07, 2017, 09:46:58 AM
EDIT - after searching online, I've now discovered I must've been playing a rip off of Merlin. Double ripped. Still, it was ace.

A rip off of Merlin that was a bloody tease, apparently.

Cuellar

Maybe this bastard at grandparents house:



There was also something at primary school, and I associate it with Encarta, but maybe that's just because I was stupid, but it was pirate based, and one of the tasks involved defending your circular fort from cannons(?). You'd sort of circle the perimeter with your blunderbuss and shoot into the wilderness when cannons appeared. Can't for the life of me remember anything else about it and it's driving me nuts.

AsparagusTrevor

I used to play arcade games before getting a home system of my own. I remember Double Dragon featured pretty heavily, me and my friend shovel 20p pieces into the machine to try and beat that ugly bastard.

I inherited my uncle's Commodore 64 as a Christmas prezzie when I was about 7. My mum had got it refurbished at a computer shop, back when you used to have to go through doors to buy things. I remember peeling off all the 'warranty void if removed' stickers they'd stuck over the screws. It was one of the early model C64s, all dark beige and chunky.

Anyway, the first game I remember playing on it was Ghostbusters. I remember, after what seemed like about 9 hours of loading, it blew me away as it had REAL SPEECH on the title screen. It would shout "GOWS DUSHDERS MWHAHAHAHA" before a bleepy version of the iconic theme-tune would start, and play on a loop throughout the whole game.

The game itself was very low on spectacle, it was more like a weird simplistic strategy management thing. You'd buy equipment and drive around a map of the city, looking out for buildings that started to flash, meaning they were haunted. Then you'd drive to the building and try to catch the ghost. Sometimes Sta-Puft would appear and fuck up some buildings. Looking back it's surprising that such a low-action game managed to keep a young child's attention.

Pseudopath

#29
Quote from: Barry Admin on September 06, 2017, 08:49:20 PM
£1.99 Mastertronic games ftw!

Apart from that terrible Speccy version of Action Biker (featuring Clumsy Colin). That's the only game I actively hated as a kid and I played some right dross.

Quote from: CuellarThere was also something at primary school, and I associate it with Encarta, but maybe that's just because I was stupid, but it was pirate based, and one of the tasks involved defending your circular fort from cannons(?). You'd sort of circle the perimeter with your blunderbuss and shoot into the wilderness when cannons appeared. Can't for the life of me remember anything else about it and it's driving me nuts.

What year are we talking? Are we going back to the 80s (in which case it was probably a BBC Micro game) or 90s (more likely to be a DOS or early Windows game)?