Your first gaming memory?

[MengJiao]

Console....Space Invaders on the Intellivision (or something like that?)
PC....original Doom
Board games.....AH's Panzer Blitz

  Boardgame...Bismarck in about 1966 when I was 11.  I could win as the Bismarck, but it was more fun enraging the KM player with Swordfish attacks and shadowing radar cruisers and then sinking the Bismarck with the Rodney or Nelson plus the KGV.

  Computers -- Various space games in the Mid-1980s and Ultima III and a flight simulator.  Not sure which was first.

[Oche]

Odissey 2 racing car and cowboy shooting games in a friend's house back in 1980.

[steve58]

Hhhmm, other than pinball and whatever else was in arcades at the time, I'd have to say Lunar Lander on a PDP-11 in college...

[Dolan50]

My first wargame was Battle of the Bulge by Avalon Hill which I got for my 11th Birthday.

I remember that I wasn't pleased that the Germans were pink and the Americans were baby blue and didn't think the map board was all that great either.I expected the Germans to be gray and the Americans green,but it was a wargame and I soon got over my initial disappointment and started learning the rules for the game.

I had a few wargaming friends back then so we pretty much bought and played everything AH put out in the 70s and up till we graduated from HS.

PCs weren't part of my childhood but I would go to the local arcade for any war themed shooting games and usually dumped most of the spare change I could scrounge that week there on Winter weekends if I wasn't blowing it in a Saturday matinee movie theatre.

[FarAway Sooner]

My first war game was Avalon Hill's War at Sea in 1977 or 1978.

My first video game was the original Pong.  I think that was 1975, maybe?  Unless you count the one Wumpus game that I played at the University of Oklahoma mainframe.  I still remember a friend of the family's loading up the card reader there...

Just to be clear, the original Atari was just "Atari".  The Ataris with numbers came much later, after the Commodore 64 and Vic 20 hit the markets sometime in 1983 or 1984.  I could Wikipedia it all, but this thread is about demonstrating innate geekdom rather than research prowess.   :P

My first computer game was playing Space Warp on my best friend's dad's TRS-80.  My own first computer game was Temple of Apshai for the C-64.  Sadly, they didn't make Hellfire Warrior for the C-64, so I had to settle for the prequel.  But man, did that graphical Sprite technology kick ass!   ;D

[Steelgrave]

Avalon Hill's Midway was my wargaming starter drug  8)  My first computer experience was some pixel fest dungeon crawler, the name of which I don't recall, but I played it on an ancient Atari a friend owned even before I bought my Commodore 64.

[Greybriar]

Pfft! I've been electronic gaming for so long I failed to list any other games I played prior to "my electronic gaming era."

Early on there were the children's games of Tag, Hide-and-Seek, Hopscotch, and Blind Man's Bluff. Later came Baseball, Croquet, Horseshoes, and several other games (not including Golf--it never appealed to me).

Early on I played card games--Pitch, Rummy, Pinochle, and even some Canasta and Bridge as well as countless versions of Solitaire. Marbles, Chinese Checkers, Checkers and Chess were some of the first board games I remember playing followed later by Monopoly, Stratego, and Risk, among many others.

[FlickJax]

Dogfighter arcade game - before that was a pinball fanatic
Binatone Pong had the pistol where you could shoot anywhere and still register a hit :)
Commodore Pet at school - Sea battle was my favourite
Vic 20 - loved my VIC....best games were Star Defence, Myriad and Arcadia
Spectrum - my first war games Desert Rats, Arnhem, Austerlitz and Vulcan.

[MikeGER]

at "highschool" (actuall in German Gymnasium 11 Klasse) we got a Tectronics 4015 for Computer Science as a volunteers add-on course  to mathematics


every member of the course got 1 or 2 hours a week access to the computer for him alone and has to put his name in a list/timetable to grab hours that ware available   

i remember three games:
one called 'Flugzeugkrieg'
(like asteroids ?,  with a small and big triangle putting out dots and you gave the velocity and could turn it with keys ... two players... it was the most popular one)
and Wetterkrieg
(it was a surface line with 'a hut' on it , and you gave in parametres hit return ...and with a little luck a tornado formed and took away your opponents hut)
and also a 'Balistikspiel'
(a random placed cannon on a line,  you typed in the parameters: angel and velocity  ... and has to get the cannon of your opponent on another side of a mountain.... then its his turn) 

later C64, then Amiga 500, then PCs from 386 to Core2duo now :)     

[Sir Slash]

First board game was the American Heritage series, Barrel Roll when I was 9 yrs. old(1965). Then on to AH's Waterloo & others. All the "Battles" games on the Intellivision, followed by Kampgruppe on the Commodore 128, Panzer General on the 3DO console, and finally Combat Mission on the PC when it first came-out. Wargames have been consistently kicking my ass since pre-puberty.

[bob48]

For computer games, it was Elite on the C64 - around 1976 ish.

Board games - at least in terms of hex and counter ones - Afrika Korps by AH,  maybe 1969, and before that things such as Diplomacy and Risk.

[Martok]

IIRC the tank game on the Atari 2600 that you guys mention above was Combat! and it came with the system.

One of my earliest memories is Pitfall on the 2600. Loved that game.

Pitfall and Combat! on my friend's 2600 are the first two video games I remember playing. 

For board games, Chutes 'n Ladders is the first one I remember getting into.  :P 

[Gusington]

Bawb, that had to be later than '76...'86 perhaps?

[bob48]

Bawb, that had to be later than '76...'86 perhaps?

Well we brought our C64 around then, and I played wire-frame grafix Elite for hours on end. It had a cassette tape drive to load the game until I eventually managed to get a 5.1/4" floppy drive for it. By the early 1980's we had up-graded to an Amega.

Nah - on second thoughts you must be right - it must at least mid 1980's - I must be getting mixed up. It happens with us olde folk y'know!

[W8taminute]

My very first memory of electronic gaming was when my friend let me play on his newest high tech gadget at the time: