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Pong, the father of video games, turns 40 this week. Things have come a very long way in 40 years, but let us forget Call of Duty and look back. Unfortunately, Pong wasn’t my first ever gaming experience, that honour was gifted to the awesome Nintendo Game and Watch Safebuster, released way back in 1988. What was yours? Where did your love for gaming get its kick-start?
What Is The Nerdiest Game Ever?
What Games Are You Playing This Christmas?
What Was the First Apple Product You Ever Bought?
I believe the first full on PC Video Game I played in my youth was Sid Meier’s Civilization II in 1996, I remember being about 8-9 years old. Good times. I still have the game. It runs on an old PC I have lying about somewhere in my bedroom.
Civ games are awesome, I just don’t have the time to spend on them these days — too much investment as it were. Another classic from that time which I wish I could play on a phone or tablet was Theme Hospital. That thing was awesome.
Agreed completely on Theme Hospital. Currently swearing profusely at EA for their inability to update Sim City Deluxe to work on JB!
Chuckie Egg on an Amstrad CPC464!
Blimey, that’s going back some.
It’s either Chuckie Egg, or possibly this…
Wow! Chuckie Egg! That falls into the category of things that were in such remote recesses of my memory that I’m surprised my brain hadn’t discarded a long time ago.
http://www.zazzle.co.uk/chuckie_egg_shirts-235703189051318712
I may need this t-shirt….
i had one of those amstrads too, but yes pong was my first game
I’m not sure it was the first game I played, but it is the first game I remember playing, when I was around 4 years old, Price of Persia, the original one, running on what I guess must have been DOS.
My mother was playing it and got stuck on a certain part of it. I had been watching her and when she had to stop playing for a moment for whatever reason it was I started playing and jumped off the screen following the ‘mirror’ prince, something my mother didn’t think you were supposed to do.
I remember her being mad for a couple of seconds upon returning and seeing me standing on her chair playing the game, but suddenly realising I had ‘unstuck’ her
Prince of persia for me too. Good times.
Actually on second thought, the first game ever was this handheld game, there was only two buttons left and right. Ninjas would jump off from a building and you had to get under them and block them. Seems odd but that was definitely the first for me.
Mario, when I was 3.
Even before my brick game with like a million games in one.
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/brick-game
Air Fox on the Amstrad CPC6128…..that, or a game where you need to push space bar to cross the road and nothing more.
Any one remember a (possibly educational) game called Diamonds?
Red screen with yellow stick figures and you had to complete challenges??
No idea what machine it was running on, similar to the Amstrad I believe.
Been searching for it for years.
Are you thinking of Spin Dizzy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindizzy_%28video_game%29
No, correct era though. It was such a rare game as there isn’t a trace of it on the web. It was literally a bright red screen through out and you had to control a yellow stickman through challenges to get Diamonds.
You’d have challenges like getting through a maze, weighing up a see-saw etc
Aw come on! You must have had a turtle in your freaky universe too? We had to program him in Logo and watch the poor results of our crap codes.. Something like
100 Forward
90 Right
100 Forward
90 Right
100 Forward
90 Right
100 Forward
90 Right
(Yes kids who read this, this is how us older people drew squares in our time!)
*Killigrew Juniors was my dimension I’m afraid!
I didn’t have a console in my house till I was 15. My brother and I have an almost 10-year age gap between us and my father was not as generous as he is now. As soon as my Brother was born he mellowed a far bit and decided to get us the PS2 slim when it was around. So far my brother has worked through 2 PS2′s, 1 PS3 and is currently working through (to death) with another PS3 and an X-box 360. Kids man.
Super Hang-On, Mega Drive, 1995.
Oh my god, I remember that game. Man, the Mega Drive was properly awesome. So many great games. Altered Beast was one of my faves, that and Streets of Rage. Still play that on my iPhone.
Alex Kidd in Miracle World.
And then Fantasy Zone.
I didn’t play the original Pong but I did play a variant on a Binatone console at a cousin’s when I was very young. An Uncle ran a pub so I played a lot of Space Invaders, Breakout and Scramble there. Plus I got an Atari VCS one year as a Christmas present.
Pong on an old Binatone…showing my age!
Played original Pong, both on an original sit down games cabinet and later on a binatone games console my elder sister bought with the first wages from a Saturday job in woolworths http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1038 this was top of the range since it had 10 games. As for computer games, probably the earliest I can remember was monster maze on the ZX81.
Well, the first ever video game I played would have been Pong which back in those days in NZ could only be found at the Airport in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch. If video games existed elsewhere in New Zealand back then, I was too young to notice. (We are talking 36 or so years back)
It all changed in NZ when Space Invaders arrived (which in that country preceded and was bigger than Pac Man) around 1979 and I got truly hooked on this game. By the beginning of the 80′s, Auckland had a number of decent sized video game arcades which I always visited before & after the movies, and within or behind every fish&chip shop was a few standup machines or the odd table top.
I had a calculator back then from Casio which had a basic computer game, and borrowed a few rudimentary electronic devices that were, sort of computer games, plus I had a friend with an old Atari set that would play Pong, but it all changed again for me in ’82 when I borrowed a friends ZX81. finally I could play Space Invaders & Pac Man at home!
1983 and I sold my drum kit (full sized thing that drove neighbours as far as 8 houses down absolutely mad) and bought a ZX Spectrum. Of course I had Space Invaders again, but it was Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy that really hooked me.
Moving to Australia and the Sinclair computers were not as popular (and the video arcades were actually smaller than in NZ for some odd reason) when I blew up my ZXSpectrum measuring voltages on the rear bus connector whilst running various Poke commands (I was trying to figure out a way to program a robotic hand I was trying to build at the same time) I ended up with an Amstrad C6128 (dumbest machine I bought) and later an Amiga2000 (my first multitasking machine with a windows style OS)
Neither of these had much games that interested me, so it wasn’t until I bought my first PC in the mid 90′s that gaming took off again – and in quite a big way. Now I was enjoying especially 3rd person worlds like Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Half Life etc along with LAN Parties and online.
I was back in a band again, but now playing bass and gigging, and when we weren’t connecting our computers together to play Quake2, we were using our computers for multitrack recording and this new thing called MP3′s.
The last big game I was really into was the Red Alert world, and that started 10years ago in Germany with my wife. I just don’t really have time for games any more.
But writing this post, I had a sudden flash back to sitting at my friends house back in Auckland in the early 80′s having nicked a couple of bottles of beer and playing Manic Miner whilst getting mildly pissed listening to Queen. It was almost like I was there. Hell, I could even smell the melted cheese toasts we had just thrown in the oven.
4×4 Off-Road Racing on Samsung SPC3000!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boTagvObVxE
Not sure what the first was, something like frogger or asteroids.
The first game I remember being addicted to was called Daredevil Dennis. It ran on the BBC Micro and pretty much just involved hitting the spacebar to jump over things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acKm7V-joeo
Great sketch from Gameswipe by the consolvania guys about Retro games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOtao-6QYxE
There’s also a full episode of consolevania about retro games that’s worth a watch if you have the time to dig it out. I don’t.
First video gameplayed ? Sheesh that’ll have been the late 70s – probably Space Invaders in an arcade. First console? A crappy Binatone thing with Pong on it, then my first real console – an Atari 2600 VCS in ’81. Old, old, old!
Earliest games I remember playing are conan and transylvania on an Apple II. Earliest pc gaming I remember is karateka, ultima, and probably anything and everything else that came out in the 80s. It was such a small pool of games then and almost everything was awesome.
Call of who?? Duck Hunt on Video Game System KL-235 (Famicom Clone, mainly sold in Eastern Europe). It was the Wii of it’s generation. IT HAD A FRIGGIN’ LAZER GUN!!! and 2 slots for your 2 ergonomic controllers!! Even though you had to posses inhuman strength to eject the cartridges, it still whoops the crap out of a PS3 with its own controller. Best part…. still got it.
That’d be Missile Command and/or Pong on an Atari 2600. Did also have a handheld space invaders game – all brown and beige plastic, chrome joystick and loud bleeps. Ah, the good old days.
one of the pong variants or pong itself when i was a nipper.
also had a few ninty game and watch games.
first computer was a BBC model B, then Amiga 500 etc…
Treasure Island on the ZX Spectrum, i remember it so well as i was only about 7 and i remember saying to my mam that i thought the baddie characters were being controlled by a family friend on her spectrum at home. it always stuck with me because at 7 years old I predicted online gaming.
Earliest game I can remember playing? Good god man! I’ve played so many!
It would be a toss up between:
Home – 48k Spectrum with Daily Thomson Decathalon, Jet Set Willy, Chequered Flag or Dan Dare. The first I ever owned though (my own and not shared with my brothers) had to be Operation Wolf though.
I think though the first game I experienced was at Primary school on the BBC Micro we had in class. Podd the red thing who did things you told him..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G090ju-DpqU
Blimey, now you are going back in time.
I remember playing Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner on the Sinclair ZX81.
But the game for me back in the day was Sorcery on the good old Amstrad CPC. Even though the apprentice chap probably had no idea about computing and programming, he did set off a lot of kids on the right track to IT…
ahhh, Podd, remember that well. You wouldn’t have happened to have had a game called ‘Diamonds’ in class?
Yes yes! We had Diamonds! I’m sure we had some other equally educational titles too.. Oh!!! And a turtle! Oh how we loved to make him draw crap patterns that were completely wrong on perforated paper.
…….. a turtle? We either went to the same school (Thameside Primary School) or you live in some sort of cloned dimension.
Anyways, nice to know someone else actually knows what Diamonds is, awesome game!
Prince of persia on a Compaq portable III, though must be said it was old when I used it XD
All i can say is Elite on the BBC b
It was probably Jetpac: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetpac
Or the incredible Batman by Ritman and Drummond: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(1986_video_game)
Or Pacman, also on the ZX Spectrum. Whatever it was, I can’t remember but it was almost certainly on the Speccy
Depends on how you define “video games” I suppose. If those handheld single-game devices with B&W screens count, then it was Donkey Kong. Technically, the first game on a computer was chess, but the first “video game” was “Test Drive.” First console game was Mario, probably a little before I played test drive.
Binatone TV Master with light gun in 1977, a machine which I still have and in working order. This means I’ve been a gamer for 35 years since the age of 4 and I’ve pretty much owned or played every home gaming system released on the planet since.
Awesome.
I can’t really remember, I think it was Space Invaders Cocktail Cabinet.
My first home game I ever played was (I believe) Oh Mummy on the Amstrad CPC 464.
I loved that game enough to make a homebrew version of it for the Nintendo DS: http://retroremakes.com/nostalgia/2007/07/26/oh-mummy-ds/
Ah! Pong. Yes that’s my first video game experience. We had (and still have probably) a console. Little flimsy red buttons on the paddle controllers, and a silver knob. Not sure if it was an actually Pong, or a variant.
Moved on to Atari 2600 which I definitely still have, and then an Atari 800 (expanded to 48k, of course!).
Those names posted above bring back memories, Jet Set Willy! The first game for my 800 (that I actually bought!) was Zaxxon…
Yep – it was pong. Some time around 1974 I think. In a motorway service station, with my Dad. And it pretty much sucked.
Six year later I was writing combat simulators for fun – they weren’t interactive – you just typed RUN and it gave you a blow-by-blow account of what was happening in a small unit engagement. By comparison in the last six years I’ve gone from COD 3 to Black Ops 2, which is just about no progress at all.
It was Xenon 2 Megablast on my Dad’s Atari ST. I don’t think I ever got past the first level.
The first game that was ‘mine’ was Pokémon Blue on my Game Boy Colour. Still got the cart, still play it.
Loom, for me! I tried to get it running on an emulator a few years back but couldn’t get it to co-operate; might have to give it another shot after reading this
although pong was the first game i played
most memorable for me were ‘Impossible Mission’ on commodore 64 and ‘Liberation’ on the Amiga CD32
Stay a while. Stay forever. Muhahaha!
many many late nights were had with liberation, it was the first game i ever got so engrossed with that caused all nighters
Would’ve been Pong on an Binatone. I think this model: http://www.thepcmuseum.net/games_details.php?RECORD_KEY%28games%29=id&id%28games%29=11&PHPSESSID=c5946ed5d0af23d9801c11a5251754d2
I’m pretty sure I played some arcade classics in the mid to late 70′s, Pong and Space Invaders most likely, but I can’t swear to it. The first game I can 100% guarantee is Hunt The Wumpus on a Commodore PET in about 1980.
God, I’m old *sobs*
Moto Racer on my family’s first PC. Actually bought it on ps1 a few months ago for a bit of nostalgia, it’s still as good as I remembered.
Pong and still playing it…
http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/pongs/Pongs.html
Nearly wet myself playing Schizo Pong..