First video/computer game you ever played?

[nikki]

What was the first video/computer game you ever played, and (on betajaen's request) what's your first favourite game?

For me it's Monster Truck Madness. On our first Windows 95 computer.

[haffax]

For me it was "Hase und Wolf" (Rabbit and Wolf) based on Russian comic show "Ну, погоди!". On a Poly-Play arcade machine.
The game basically is an east-german pacman clone.

See here: http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?let ... me_id=9070

[SpannerMan]

I used to be addicted to arcade machines when I was a kid. Dont know the first one I ever played but I bet it was Pacman.

The first game bought for me was probably Frogger on my Commodore 20.
The first PC games I ever "obtained" for my first PC (386) was Mortal Kombat, Test Drive and Dune II.
The first PC game I ever bought was Syndicate and it rocked my world!

[Vectrex]

The earliest memories are of the Hanimex 'Tv Game' a relative had http://www.old-computers.com/museum/com ... t=2&c=1267
I also remember seeing Space Invaders and thinking 'what's this thing?'
Then I got my Atari 2600 and I was sucked into the 80's computer games void.
"Monster Truck Madness".. I feel sorry for kids who didn't go through the 80's, it was awesome

[jacmoe]

My first ever game I played the crap out of was Master of Magic (C64)

Video:
http://www.veoh.com/collection/C64Longp ... 77kW6tmejR
Review:
http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A ... %3Fid%3D80

The music from that game still haunts me. In a good way.

I drew maps of the dungeon by hand, and had a lot of fun

Later, it was Wolfenstein 3D ..
And Daggerfall..

[jjp]

Superfrog on Amiga

[mkultra333]

I think it was Space Invaders, but it might have been Pong. I was about 9 and it would have been in a pub or pub/restaurant.

[nikki]

"Monster Truck Madness".. I feel sorry for kids who didn't go through the 80's, it was awesome

I'll be saying something similar for kids who didn't go through the 2000s.

[betajaen]

Took me some time, but I tracked it down. First computer I had was a BBC Electron; I had it on Christmas Day ~1988/9. I remember quite well there was a Introductory cassette with some games and applications, I just ran it on a BBC electron emulator. My first computer game ever played was a find the key on the keyboard game! A far cry from Pacman, Superfrog or Syndicate but it was the 80's and it was my first computer.

Perhaps we should modify this thread a little; What is your first game, and what was your first favourite game?

Mine; Repton!

[reptor]

I don't remember.

It was possibly some Amiga 500 game. My friend had an Amiga 500 before I got my own, Commodore 64.

I remember playing Populous and Test Drive on the Amiga. My friend fell asleep next to me. He was probably happy that I got my own computer.

I don't really know what was the first game I played... it probably isn't one of those two. It was in the 1980's and I can't remember very well so far back. I was born in 1978.

My favourite PC games during the early years, once I had gotten a PC, were F1GP (Microprose) and The Secret of Monkey Island.

I remember I had a 120 MB hard disk drive. As some time passed and the games I had got bigger, I had to wipe out almost everything else to install just one game! Oh how funny it is to think about that now.

[mkultra333]

All this reminiscing led to me remembering that I used to play a game at an ice-skating rink, and I think this was probably a year or so before Space Invaders. That game was Bazooka, released in 1977 by Project Support Engineering.



Note the cool plastic bazooka controller.

[betajaen]

I remember I had a 120 MB hard disk drive. As some time passed and the games I had got bigger, I had to wipe out almost everything else to install just one game! Oh how funny it is to think about that now.

Our first hard-drive was a 200mb one, that fitted inside the A1200. If I remember correctly it was a birthday present. My dad partitioned it into four, and I was allowed a generous 100 megs. I even managed to install Workbench on two of the partitions so; We could both have our own OS/Desktop stuff without interfering with each other. Playing Monkey Island 2 on the hard-drive for the first time was pretty awesome, no more swapping 12 discs to play!

Now I have two hard drives each 5,000 times bigger than that!

[nullsquared]

Battle Tanks on the NES.

Hm... Was it battle tanks? Perhaps it was called something else. Not sure.

[nikki]

First hard disk I remember us having (maybe my dad or mom used some before, I don't remember) was 3 GB.

[Fish]

The Coleco Telstar Arcade shooting game.

[nikki]

First hard disk I remember us having (maybe my dad or mom used some before, I don't remember) was 3 GB.

Well, I just can't resist.

In 1987-88 (I believe) I was selling Seagate ST-225 (20 MegaByte) hard-drives for USD 399.00, and ST-238 (30MB) for around 599.00 as I recall. And that was without a controller card. It was MFM / RLL then. Motherboards in those days did not come with "integrated anything," you had to add it with a card. If you were smart, before you turned your computer off, you ran a utility that parked your hard-drives heads so it would not crash your HDD if you bumped or moved your computer. Ahhh, those were the good ol' / bad ol' days indeed.

I was just reading Tanenbaum's OS book today and he said in the 'ancient days' computers only loaded a single process into main memory, so every program had to have device drivers (well, at least devices it plans to use) built-in.

[Kojack]

First game overall: I think it was asteroids (arcade), but it might have been pacman (arcade). It was definitely one of those 2, I can remember playing them for the first time, but I can't remember which was first.
First game I owned: Maze A Tron on the Intellivision. Damn, I can't find any youtube footage. They only have Tron Deadly Discs which I got years later.
First non console game I owned: Androne on the TRS-80 Colour Computer 2.

I remember I had a 120 MB hard disk drive.

My first hard drive was 20MB and cost $550au (got a discount from the normal $700au. It was the A590 (think that was the name) for the Amiga 500.

The game was a text-based "game" called Bedlam.

I never played Bedlam, but I did play the other Robert Arnstein text adventure game Raaka Tu.

[mkultra333]

I still have a working Amiga 1200 with a whopping 6 meg of ram and 20 meg harddrive. Well, sort of working, I have to bang the harddrive to get it started or it just sticks. Meanwhile my cellphone has 2 gig of memory, plays movies, and has games my A1200 couldn't handle in it's wildest dreams... although there is some overlap, since I have the Activision 3 game pack on my mobile that includes Hero, which I also had on my A1200.

Edit: As a child I used to go to the electronics shops at the mall and stare in awe at the TRS-80s they had.

[twilight17]

Does Chip's Challenge ring a bell?

[Kojack]

Of course while pc users were using TSRs, amiga owners had true pre-emptive multitasking.

[trnrez]

Started my gaming on Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros for the ole NES.

[betajaen]

Of course while pc users were using TSRs, amiga owners had true pre-emptive multitasking.

Don't forget Amiga Screens Kojack!

For those don't know, a Screen is a "desktop" with a resolution and colour depth. If you had multiple programs running, you could assign a program to a screen to run in a different size or colour depth than the others, and switch between them extremely quickly. The twist is that you can do split-screen and pull a screen down (like dragging a window vertically) to reveal the screen behind it regardless of the colour depth, resolution or other things.

PC hardware is yet to do such a thing.

[nikki]

Of course while pc users were using TSRs, amiga owners had true pre-emptive multitasking.

Don't forget Amiga Screens Kojack!

For those don't know, a Screen is a "desktop" with a resolution and colour depth. If you had multiple programs running, you could assign a program to a screen to run in a different size or colour depth than the others, and switch between them extremely quickly. The twist is that you can do split-screen and pull a screen down (like dragging a window vertically) to reveal the screen behind it regardless of the colour depth, resolution or other things.

PC hardware is yet to do such a thing.

AmigaOS' microkernel design is interesting. Seems to have been popular among Multimedia guys.

Does Chip's Challenge ring a bell?

Yeah, I think that was my second game. Came with Windows 95, right?

[betajaen]

Didn't you guys call your computer chips "Betsy and Frank and Goober" and such? I guess history has proven the Amiga and its OS were ahead of its time. But then, why did it die so early? Because of those chip names? Oh, I think I remember, didn't a merger gone wrong happen or something?

Yep. Motherboards was named after B-52 songs and the chips were named after women. Paula, Gayle, Agnus, Denise and Lisa.

Commodore is usually blamed for Amiga's downfall. They didn't really understand what the Amiga could do, thus didn't market it correctly.

[Kojack]

Don't forget Amiga Screens Kojack!

Yep, the copper (graphics coprocessor) in the agnus chip could use a "copper list" to change various custom chip settings (like screen resolution, colour depth, palette, sprite pos, location in ram of the screen buffer, etc) when the raster beam of a monitor reaches a specific location on the screen. The copper list worked in parallel to the cpu, it was a finite state machine which ran inside the gfx chip.
Gameboy Advance and DS coders will find that familar, they still use similar effects (with the horizontal blanking interrupt).

Yep. Motherboards was named after B-52 songs and the chips were named after women. Paula, Gayle, Agnus, Denise and Lisa.

Later on they added the male chips Garry and Ramsey, but most were female (what else would you expect from a computer called Amiga, which is spanish for girlfriend).

The Amiga died because Commodore was run by idiots.

I could go on for hours about why the amiga kicked pc and apple ass... but that's off topic.