Not usually a fan of cross posting or stealing ideas but saw the same topic over at RPS and im genuinely interested in what you guys first remember......... lets not count Bob whos first gaming memory involves lions and christians
For me, the mists of time have covered which one of these came first but it was either GORF on a Vic 20 played at a friends house when i was 11, or it was Scuba diver on the C64 which my friend had on a Spectrum 48k, but i was delighted to find there was a cross over - when i think about it now it was s***e but at the time i would have killed my own mother to get it
For me- if electronic I'd say 'Hunt the Wumpus', played on my High-school's computer around 1979 or so. for home computer it would have been a TRS-80CoCo or Vic-20 and some kind of sub hunt side-scroller. After that came the Commodore 64 and 'real' computer games.
First console would have been a Coleco TelStar Pong/Hockey/Handball machine.
First "PC" would have been a ZX-80 my father and I assembled. I played top scrollers like skiing, and car racing games. Even learned to program on it. Dad splurged and bought the 16k expansion fer $200!
on a friends c-64 an isometric space game where you had to shoot down ennemy planes. and winter games!
Probably the original Atari you plugged into the TV. I believe it was the Atari 2600. There was pong like tank game I remember playing all hours of the night as a kid.
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fgamersxtreme.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F01%2Fatari2600.jpg&hash=9d19294d9da083f00c4e62902b7d602b1e9a2fb2)
Jeez ucgeek, you're going to really make us show our ages here!
First wargame: Avalon Hill's "Luftwaffe" when I was 12 in 1976. That was my friends copy. I first got "Blitzkrieg" from a 5&10 store.
First computer/arcade: original "Pong", then we too had the Coleco TelStar and then the Atari 2600.
First computer: My dad got a Ti99/4a first. I was in the Marines and stationed in Okinawa and I bought an Atari 800. My first computer wargame was "Close Assault" on the Atari. Later, I graduated to a Commodore C-128 and played a lot of the old SSI games.
Mine would have been the Atari 2600 when I was eight years old. We had the Tank game for it. My next one would be........Panzer General for the Playstation One. My first computer game, as I didn't own a computer until I was in my twenties, was Warcraft. Civ 2 if you count that.
Centurion: Defender of Rome and wondering how I was supposed to win the ship vs. ship battles, as no matter what I always seemed to lose.
Dune II and wondering why the Sardaukar wore pink/purple uniforms even though they were supposed to be so tough and manly.
Great Battles of Alexander the Great and my cousin being disgusted at the dead horses on the battlefield and delighted at being able to turn them off.
.
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.
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First computer / console gaming memory?
1978, playing Pong or something like it for about 30 seconds at the movie theater lobby waiting to go see Star Wars (again) the second time it came through town. I was horrible at it, but kept bugging my dad for more quarters to put in the machine.
At home, 1981, Ft Ord CA, playing Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 and thinking it was so cool to play the stuff from the arcade at my house!
First boardgaming memory? Dad dumbing down something (I think it was Third Reich) for me to roll dice with him when we lived in Germany in the mid-70s and I was about 4. Been wargaming ever since.
Console....Space Invaders on the Intellivision (or something like that?)
PC....original Doom
Board games.....AH's Panzer Blitz
Even before the 2600 I had a dedicated Atari Pong game hooked up to my TV. First computer was the Atari 400 with the membrane keyboard and cassette deck. My first computer wargame was Eastern Front, and the first game that really wowed me was Star Raiders. I also had all the Scott Adams adventures on cassette.
I remember playing Space Invaders at an arcade in 1979. In the early 1980s I remember playing Pac-Man and Donkey Kong on arcade machines.
The computer I played my first PC games on was an IBM 8088 clone with a monochrome monitor. That was in 1989. I don't remember what the title of the first game was that I played, but sometime after I upgraded to a CGA graphics card I played Pool of Radiance (http://www.mobygames.com/game/pool-of-radiance) and it was the game that really got me hooked on computer gaming.
Quote from: Rayfer on December 02, 2013, 09:18:33 AM
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.
Odissey 2 racing car and cowboy shooting games in a friend's house back in 1980.
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...
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
at "highschool" (actuall in German Gymnasium 11 Klasse) we got a Tectronics 4015 for Computer Science as a volunteers add-on course to mathematics
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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 :)
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.
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.
Quote from: Gusington on December 02, 2013, 08:50:36 AM
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
Bawb, that had to be later than '76...'86 perhaps?
Quote from: Gusington on December 02, 2013, 03:47:50 PM
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!
My very first memory of electronic gaming was when my friend let me play on his newest high tech gadget at the time:
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.handheldmuseum.com%2FMattel%2FMattel-Football.jpg&hash=b7024bbe09841790b89f7d7fb95800456e5bb758)
First board game was PanzerBlitz in the early 70's.
First computer wargame was B1 or B2. It was a text based game on a green screen monitor. Then came the V4Victory games, etc....all the way to my latest one - Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm.
Good Hunting.
MR
Hmm...
First "real" wargame - '78 or '78 - Avalon Hill's D-Day
First home computer game - '82 - Choplifter on the Atari 5200?
First mainframe computer game - '84? - Spacewar! on VAX\Unix at UofC
First 386 computer game - '89 - A-10 Tank Killer (although I think I saw a computer game of "The Prisoner" in perhaps '87 or '88)
First console game would have be Pong!
Quote from: Mad Russian on December 02, 2013, 04:23:36 PM
First board game was PanzerBlitz in the early 70's....
MR
That was my very first board wargame as well and I got it in the mid 70's. I worked a summer job mowing lawns and by the end of the season had earned enough money to buy the game!
My first wargame was "wizards of wor" on the Odyssey game system.
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First computer was my Commodore 64 and my first REAL WARGAME was F-15 strike eagle by Microprose
i could never get F15 to load, always crashed - i loved the look of the whole thing - this could have been my first forray into flight sims and it was not to be!!!
sent back to shop and swapped for some crap i cant remember
Star Trek on a DEC LA36 DECwriter II ASCII print terminal. :o see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/la36.html
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Set phasers (30-120):____
Those Mattel handheld sports games were the best!
Quote from: SgtRock on December 02, 2013, 06:33:58 PM
Star Trek on a DEC LA36 DECwriter II ASCII print terminal. :o see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/la36.html
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Set phasers (30-120):____
Oh man that was a great game! I remember that one. I must be old because I still remember how cool that game was even though it was all asci characters. Much more advanced that Zork was imho.
Quote from: W8taminute on December 02, 2013, 06:15:19 PM
Quote from: Mad Russian on December 02, 2013, 04:23:36 PM
First board game was PanzerBlitz in the early 70's....
MR
That was my very first board wargame as well and I got it in the mid 70's. I worked a summer job mowing lawns and by the end of the season had earned enough money to buy the game!
I was a sophomore in HS at the time. I was doing a lot of model tank and aircraft work and ordering through the Squadron Shop. In their catalog was an advertisement for AH wargames. It just so happened that they had PB on sale that month and I ordered it. When I got it I couldn't believe how much fun it was.
I have been mainly a tactical gamer at heart since that first game. I have and do play almost all levels of wargames but still prefer tactical games the most.
Good Hunting.
MR
Quote from: bob48 on December 02, 2013, 03:58:04 PM
Quote from: Gusington on December 02, 2013, 03:47:50 PM
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!
I don't think the C64 came out in quantity until somewhere around '83 to '85. I definitely remember playing Elite on it (or doing my best to). ;D But I think one of the first biggies I recall playing quite a bit on the old Commodore was
Telengard.
Quote from: SgtRock on December 02, 2013, 06:33:58 PM
Star Trek on a DEC LA36 DECwriter II ASCII print terminal. :o see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/la36.html
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*********E**********
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******K*************
Set phasers (30-120):____
OH MY GROG..............................
This was 1974 or so. My mom worked for the Nebraska County Extension Service and had a suitcase sized terminal with a stick-your-phone-handset-in modem. I played this game for hours.
If you can find a copy of Wintrek it is basically the same game ported to Windows with some prettier graphics.
Thanks for the memories........................... :'(
Vax 11/780 - Empire and Star Trek...
First PC.. Red Baron, Aces of Europe, Aces of Pacific.. Empire Deluxe.. Perfect General.. Silent Hunter
First wargame: I was 6 years old the ancient Avalon Hill "Civil War" title. Closely followed by Afrika Corps. Both in 1968
First Computer Wargame: A version of Civil War and Star Trek on an IBM mainframe in 1974.
First Console Game: Atari that many others had. Tank Pong was quite fun.
Windy's first wargame:
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Playing pong in 1978-79 on an Odyssey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey_Series
Played a few Atari games; Pitfall, Racing.
First PC game was Micropose The Ancient Art of War in The Skies. A fantastic WW1 air strategy game that let players set bombing targets or air interdiction missions, then play the missions in side-scroll perspective. I must've had weeks of game time.
My first FPS (TPS, really) was Seal Team. A Vietnam squad-based game that I remember being difficult, but had good character development, almost like an RPG.
Man alive, I didn't think anyone by me ever got the Telstar!
I started with that.
Sometime in the vicinity I took a computer class with the TRS-80 that had some dungeon crawler on it and also a Star Trek game that I recently downloaded for my Kindle Fire (W00t!).
Sometime around there we got the Atari 2600. Space Invaders and Asteroids are obvious first games. Anything by Activision was boss! Yes, Pitfall was the bomb. Remember when you could get some computer magazine and it would have a program you could type into Basic and then play on your computer? I would have my mom read me the code while I typed it in (or vice versa).
I had a Ti-99 and the only game I remember from that era was Tunnels of Doom. On a cassette where you had to have the volume set just right or it wouldn't load. But damn were those the days or what?! I remember playing that with my friends all summer long where we'd take turns at the controls and each of us would tell the guy at the controls how to move our character. God, what fun that was!
Moving on from there I got an Atari 1200XL and the first game I spent my "own" money on was Sublogic Flight Simulator for $50. My brother got the C-64 and we played the crap out of games by Epyx(?) and Red Storm Rising. I remember some game called "Morloc's Tower" that I never could figure out. On C-64 we played a bunch of the Olympics sports games in addition to RSR. On Atari I also remember some game by Grigsby about WW2 carrier warfare; google would turn it up; you had to point your carriers into the right direction to launch your aircraft...
Good times.
In the arcade, I was always a fan of Defender and an obscure game called Time Bandits. Oh, and Missile Command.
Quote from: Toonces on December 05, 2013, 04:46:58 AM
Man alive, I didn't think anyone by me ever got the Telstar!
I started with that.
Sometime in the vicinity I took a computer class with the TRS-80 that had some dungeon crawler on it and also a Star Trek game that I recently downloaded for my Kindle Fire (W00t!).
Sometime around there we got the Atari 2600. Space Invaders and Asteroids are obvious first games. Anything by Activision was boss! Yes, Pitfall was the bomb. Remember when you could get some computer magazine and it would have a program you could type into Basic and then play on your computer? I would have my mom read me the code while I typed it in (or vice versa).
I had a Ti-99 and the only game I remember from that era was Tunnels of Doom. On a cassette where you had to have the volume set just right or it wouldn't load. But damn were those the days or what?! I remember playing that with my friends all summer long where we'd take turns at the controls and each of us would tell the guy at the controls how to move our character. God, what fun that was!
Moving on from there I got an Atari 1200XL and the first game I spent my "own" money on was Sublogic Flight Simulator for $50. My brother got the C-64 and we played the crap out of games by Epyx(?) and Red Storm Rising. I remember some game called "Morloc's Tower" that I never could figure out. On C-64 we played a bunch of the Olympics sports games in addition to RSR. On Atari I also remember some game by Grigsby about WW2 carrier warfare; google would turn it up; you had to point your carriers into the right direction to launch your aircraft...
Good times.
In the arcade, I was always a fan of Defender and an obscure game called Time Bandits. Oh, and Missile Command.
I wanted a TI-99 but I am grateful that my parents overruled my wishes and bought me my wondrous Vic 20 instead :)
Quote from: Toonces on December 05, 2013, 04:46:58 AM
Good times.
In the arcade, I was always a fan of Defender and an obscure game called Time Bandits. Oh, and Missile Command.
in the arcade i was the king of 'Red Barron'
http://www.pinballrebel.com/arcade/atari/red_baron/red_baron.htm
and
Starwars to sit into: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(1983_video_game)
(IIRC, playing half an hour and longer -maybe even indefinitely, i cant remember- with one! coin)
and a little Battlezone to, but not in the high score list all to much so
Quote from: GJK on December 02, 2013, 06:57:24 AM
First wargame: Avalon Hill's "Luftwaffe" when I was 12 in 1976.
Ha! That was my first boardgame too. I remember buying it from a Toys-R-Us of all places, back in 1981 or so.
My first clear memory is when I was about 8 years old in 1977. My dad was a Marine officer working with computers on base in Quantico, VA. I was with him where he works for some reason, and he sat me down at a terminal where I played BASIC games including Stock Market and some bullfighting game.
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This Coleco TELSTAR was our first "home" system. All you could play on it was Tennis, a glorified version of Pong (there might have been an extra line or two in the display to make it so), and apparently it "only" cost $50 in late 70s money. The next system he bought was the Atari 2600. I still remember his eyes lighting up at the display at Sears that had a TV on an endcap playing some 2600 game, I can't even remember what it was now.
QuoteStarwars to sit into: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(1983_video_game)
(IIRC, playing half an hour and longer -maybe even indefinitely, i cant remember- with one! coin)
Yes! A friend of mine and I could play that for literally hours (we went for four hours one night; the arcade had to throw us out and he got pissy about how long we played on a couple of quarters). He was great at the tower portion, I was great at the trench portion, so we'd each do those parts, and trade off with the TIE fighter battles. We'd always start it at the Hard level to get that 800,000 point bonus. :D I remember we'd go see movies, play this game, and often have to leave it for someone else to play because the movie would start but we'd be far from finished with it.
In the mid-80s my grandfather had a Ti-99. I remember playing Hunt the Wumpus, which got old pretty quick. Fortunately for me, he soon bought an Apple II, which was my first foray into real computer gaming.