RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Games and Tech Your first time

Can you recall your first ever gaming experience? I mean the first actual video game you ever played and the machine you played it on.

Was it a life changing event or an anticlimax?

It was one of these four games for Nintendo. I can't remember which came first.

Metal Gear
Zelda
Super Mario Brothers
Paper Boy

A couple of my friends had BBC computers. Frogger and stuff like that.

Tie Fighter. Beverly hills cop.

Oh dude! I forgot all about my friggin' comp games!

It was either Defender, Overkill, or a game which I can picture perfectly but can't remember the name of.

Pac-Man on the Atari 2600.

I remember my dad having an older console that I would watch him play, but my first memory was playing smurfs for the colecovision.

my video gaming history

kc munchkin on the odyssey II system.

Atari 2600. Centipede. Age 3.

I'm sure it was some form of pac-man.

I'm almost positive mine was Pong, which automatically attached to the black & white TV. My stepsister kept saying "hit the ball", but the only round thing I could see was the knob on the controller so I smacked it. Yes, I was rather young. I eventually found a way to make the ball (as in, the tiny square dot on the screen) bounce in an infinite u-turn like pattern. This, of course, was before the pause feature even existed.

Thank goodness for technology.

It was one of those old gaming systems with something like 4 or 5 inbuilt games like Pong & Space invaders!

Gotta say though it was the Commodore C16 that got me hooked though years later!

Some Atari adventure game. A little guy in a castle or something.

I guess my first experience of computer gaming came when my grandparents bought us a BBC model B for Christmas one year. I was eight or nine years old at the time.

The BBC was the betamax of home computing – a quality machine made unobtainable by its high price, meaning that it lost out to other cheaper computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum. It owed its longevity to the fact that schools purchased them in scores.

The first game I played may well have been Pong which came bundled with the ‘Welcome’ cassette (no disc drives in those days) or it may have been a game called Kingdom, also on the cassette, which was an early sim-city style game with primitive blocky graphics in which you had to divide your resources between feeding your people and, uh, defending the dyke in order to prevent flooding.

Games were ridiculously cheap in those days. Spotty teenagers used to write them in their bedrooms. I know from the get go we had Super Invaders (Space Invaders), Killer Gorilla (Donkey Kong) and a text adventure called Sphinx Adventure that took ages to load and only accepted a limited number of two word commands which you could only determine through trial and error. We also had a game called Frenzy that initially didn’t work but which I fixed a few days after Christmas by throwing the cassette hard against the wall of the study. After that it loaded perfectly every time and became a personal favourite.

The game which finally hooked me and marked the crossroads where I would squander all the hours that I could have used to become a famous writer or a pioneering scientist was Elite. I obsessed over it for years and actually still play on a PC port, but that’s another story.