Your First PC Gaming Memory

ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

PC Gamer has a fun little article: "Tell us your first memory of gaming on a PC." I thought it might be a fun thing to discuss amongst ourselves.

If you're a filthy casual who doesn't do PC gaming, you can substitute with an inferior memory with console gaming. :p

Here's what I posted in their comments:

King's Quest 1.

Back then, my family couldn't afford a computer (they were only starting to become a common household item at the time), so my only gaming up until then was Atari or NES. But one time, we visited an old friend of my dad's. While they chatted and played cards upstairs, their son (a few years older than me) showed me their PC. In particular, he showed me King's Quest 1.

What made it so memorable for me was, while he let me figure out the puzzles (and answered questions or gave hints), he narrated all the text in a dramatic tone.

I've been hooked on adventure games ever since.
 
WasabiPoptart

WasabiPoptart

I got a computer around 1993. First game I tried was Star Wars X-Wing. I didn't like it. I'm not good at flying games unless I invert the controls. My boyfriend at the time used to play it endlessly. Meh.

But then I got DOOM. Oh yeah! Fuck you X-Wing I'm a space marine beating up assholes on Mars! *ahem* I liked playing it a lot.

Also, my first console gaming experience was Pong when I was about 7 years old. Get offa my lawn!
 
Cog

Cog

I didn't have my own computer until college. But before that, my first experience with a game on pc was Prince of Persia. I never thought about gaming on my pc until I discovered emulators.

My first console was an Atari 2600. It was the first time I didn't sleep all night. I don't remember what happened to it.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Does a Vic-20 count as a PC? To me it's kinda straddling the line between PC and console. You could code on it, but it was a self-contained box that connected to your television, and a lot of the games were on cartridges. I don't even remember much about the games we had. There was a text adventure game about pirates, and as a kid I couldn't even reliably get out of the first locked room you start in. There was some sort of sub attack game we couldn't play properly because we didn't have paddle controllers. I know there were others, but I can't remember them. The only other program I remember was an animated fireplace graphic my dad typed in from a magazine and stored on cassette tape. He'd load it up for us at Christmas.

Then came the PCjr. We had more games for that. Including Castle Adventure, which used ASCII characters as graphics.

I can't remember what the player character was, maybe a clover/club, but small and big spiders were two sizes of asterisk, ogres and demons were the faces, there was a vampire you had to beat with a cross, treasures to collect, puzzles to solve, an underground passage that flooded when you took the treasure. It's a shame this game isn't better remembered. Which is probably because it came out the same year that King's Quest did. They're both mixes of text adventure with some action elements, and the only advantage Castle Adventure has is lower system requirements.

I found gameplay video:
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

There was a Carmen San Diego game where you pretty much needed a stack of books next to the computer to figure out clues for. I remember always, always losing.
 
Frank

Frank

My family had a TRS-80 when I was a kid and a boatload of games.

So, I began playing games like the classic Dino Wars:



and Dungeons of Daggorath:



and a super weird oil drilling game called Wildcatting:



Also, we had a tape deck for it that played Puyon off of a cassette tape.



We had about 20-25 games for the damn thing. I couldn't even begin to tell you which I played first, just that this old beast was my beginning in gaming.

For ACTUAL PC gaming, my best friends as a kid had a sweet PC setup since their dad was into BBS's and crap in the 80s. Dude was always way ahead of everyone I knew when it came to computers.

We played a lot of Knights of Legend, Wing Commander, crud like that together.

Knights of Legend was so sweet.

 
drawn_inward

drawn_inward

My absolute earliest memory for PC gaming was the TRS-80 and Madness and the Minotaur. I played it with my mom and really dug it. And, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, again thanks to mom. There were a few more text based games, but those two really stood out.

When I was a bit older, I remember playing Oregon Trail, Carmen San diego, King's Quest, Police Quest, Wing Commander, Doom, etc, etc. Then, I was lost in games after that.
 
Dei

Dei

My grandfather loved to early adopt technology, and I used to play games on his Commodore 64 until he handed it down to me.
 
Null

Null



Okay, not actually the first, but one of the ones I miss most. I think it could be upgraded to be a pretty good "Skyrim in Space" type RPG.

You had six races: Humans, Donsai (genetically engineered blue-skinned warriors), Arcturians (mantid-like humanoids), Valkyrian (bird people, good technicians and psychics), Praktor (shapeshifters), and Manstrak (reptilians, basically dwarves but big and scaly).

The game balance was, as per a Michael Cranford game, terrible. But with a modern production mindset and some attempt at making it possible to actually get through the game, and it could be really quite good.
 
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GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I've been PC gaming literally for as long as I can remember.

I don't remember what came first for me, my uncle's Commodore 64, on which I played such classics as Blue Max, Rescue on Fractalus, Forbidden Forest, Apple Panic, Mad Nurse, and Crush Crumble and Chomp?

Or was it the Apple 2 computers (or more likely Commodore PETs) that were just making their way into classrooms around the time I was in kindergarten/first grade? I remember playing Word Munchers, Gertrude's Secrets, and of course, Oregon Trail. Naturally, later came Lode Runner, Barbarian, Castle Wolfenstein, and more.

When it comes to the IBM PC and its clones, however, I definitely remember the first games I played - they were a collection of arcade games translated into color ascii "graphics," and renamed to duck copyright issues. Arkanoid became "Brick Breaker," Centipede became "Bug Blaster," Donkey Kong became "Gorilla Gorilla," and there were more. The software was so ancient, it didn't even run on dos - it had its own bootloader, so to play, you had to boot the computer from the 5 1/2" floppy. It even had a "boss key" which brought up a convincing spreadsheet, so you could ostensibly play at work :p



I've been playing arcade games even longer than I can remember, my father holding me up to the controls and letting me play. The same uncle with the C64 also had an Atari 2600, which he hooked up to a 13" TV in a dark room which then projected through a really thick glass lens onto a special screen on the wall, letting us play space invaders on a glorious 60 inch screen... the pixels were as big as 50 cent pieces :D
 
Soupy

Soupy

I was a Nintendo guy for my first video game experience; but I remember when my family got a 486. The two games that stick out most to me was F-19 Stealth Fighter and F-15 Strike Eagle II. Devoured the manuals and spent a ridiculous amount of time on those games.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

Ravenpoe said:
I'm surprised no one has listed killing off the American Buffalo in Oregon Trail
Click to expand...
Some of us don't get good games as our first experience.

After Carmen San Diego was something that was ... Lines? I don't remember the name, but it was a DOS game that you tried to make your snake or line or whatever as long as you could without bumping into some piece of yourself. There was also some treasure hunt learning game ... man, did I hate educational games.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Zero Esc said:
Some of us don't get good games as our first experience.

After Carmen San Diego was something that was ... Lines? I don't remember the name, but it was a DOS game that you tried to make your snake or line or whatever as long as you could without bumping into some piece of yourself. There was also some treasure hunt learning game ... man, did I hate educational games.
Click to expand...
That game is literally called snake
 
sixpackshaker

sixpackshaker

I remember hanging out at ComputerWorld, playing Castle Wolfenstein on a Yellow Monochrome monitor.


Then a friend of mine has a Coleco ADAM. I remember playing Buck Rogers from a cassette tape drive.

Even earlier I owned my only console. Pong. And it was the rip off Pong game from Sears.
 
Gared

Gared

I have no idea what computer system it was, but the first game I remember playing was a spelling game where you had to spell words from letters being dropped from a hot-air balloon. It was a cartridge game, plugged into what looked like a keyboard got fat or was stung by a bee, and hooked up to a TV. I also remember a bunch of the games @Frank posted, but in yellow monochrome. I didn't get a computer with a color monitor until we got our first 486 back in '93 or '94, but that certainly didn't stop me from enjoying games. Of course by that time my friend, who's dad was really into computers and computing (and who did some programming work for WSU's ag science department), had Ultima IV and V and Wing Commander and this odd castle exploration game that was oh so very Win3.1-ish.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Tinwhistler said:
Click to expand...
It was so irritating how the pickaxe would only "appear" in your hand when you were standing JUST SO.[DOUBLEPOST=1510591074,1510591015][/DOUBLEPOST]
Ravenpoe said:
I'm surprised no one has listed killing off the American Buffalo in Oregon Trail
Click to expand...
I said oregon trail![DOUBLEPOST=1510591556][/DOUBLEPOST]
Gared said:
I have no idea what computer system it was, but the first game I remember playing was a spelling game where you had to spell words from letters being dropped from a hot-air balloon. It was a cartridge game, plugged into what looked like a keyboard got fat or was stung by a bee, and hooked up to a TV. I also remember a bunch of the games @Frank posted, but in yellow monochrome. I didn't get a computer with a color monitor until we got our first 486 back in '93 or '94, but that certainly didn't stop me from enjoying games. Of course by that time my friend, who's dad was really into computers and computing (and who did some programming work for WSU's ag science department), had Ultima IV and V and Wing Commander and this odd castle exploration game that was oh so very Win3.1-ish.
Click to expand...
The keyboard with cartridges you describe could have been a Commodore 64, spectravideo, or atari 800XL. The word balloon game you describe doesn't ring a bell though.

I'm betting the win 3.1-ish castle exploration game you were playing was a Rogue clone I also played the hell out of called Castle of the Winds.

 
Tinwhistler

Tinwhistler

GasBandit said:
It was so irritating how the pickaxe would only "appear" in your hand when you were standing JUST SO.
Click to expand...
Also, as one of the very-early computer games (1981), it was written before the technique of page flipping was really solidified as a best practice, so all the screen redraws happen on the visible graphic page. The flicker was crazy bad. Ultima and Wizadry came out the same year, and suffered the same issues. But since neither were action games, it wasn't as noticeable.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Tinwhistler said:
Also, as one of the very-early computer games (1981), it was written before the technique of page flipping was really solidified as a best practice, so all the screen redraws happen on the visible graphic page. The flicker was crazy bad. Ultima and Wizadry came out the same year, and suffered the same issues. But since neither were action games, it wasn't as noticeable.
Click to expand...
Thankfully they had that figured out when they ported it to the C64, which is where I played it.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

My earliest videogame memories are of playing on a Macintosh Plus. The two most memorable were Dark Castle (see below) and a game who's name escapes me, which was a many-games-in-one compilation where the selection screen was a creepy family portrait (sort of like the Addams family?).



Those are all just fragments, though. My first complete and cogent memory was of playing Duke Nukem 3D with my dad on his Mac Performa. He did the moving and aiming, and I was in charge of shooting the monsters (but not the strippers!).
 
Null

Null

Finally someone else who heard of Rescue on Fractalus! When the Jaggies would jump up on the screen and start smashing your canopy used to scare the piss out of little me.
 
sixpackshaker

sixpackshaker

I really miss the 8-color Pirates! by Sid Meier. And I was such a total fan boy of everything MicroProse and Sid Meier did during the 80s.
 
Null

Null

There was another Lucasfilm game that could be done perfectly now.

Koronis Rift. Basically, you were a salvager who detected a white-hot radiation reading from a probe, leading you to the legendary world of Koronis Rift - an ancient testbed for alien weapons and technology, a world laid to waste. You land in your vehicle, search for technology in abandoned hulks, fight off defending automated saucers, and upgrade your vehicle with, or sell, the advanced technology you find. In other words, it's a loot-based rogue-like game set on an alien planet.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Man, I don't know what my earliest is. Pong and the like, but I played those on one of those pre-console console thingies.

Zeliard is definitely one of my earliest games finished, though.



And one of my earliest games on PC....probably Drug Wars

 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I think my FIRST computer game was some text adventure for Apple ][ named "Dungeon" or some such. It was written in BASIC, which meant you could press CTRL-C and then list the code if you wanted, but the developer had anticipated this and so had encoded all the game text in ROT13. I remember my excitement when I figured this out and so could decode all the text. Also later there was Karateka, Montezuma's revenge (I think), and Lode Runner. I didn't have my own computer until after graduating from college (except for my TS1000 but I didn't have any games for it) but college is where I discovered Mechwarrior II, Dark Castle, Bards Tale I and II, Breach, but most of all Starflight, the first game with a giant space to play in AND also the first game I ever played that had an idle animation.

I'm sure I'm leaving some other ones out, but that's all what comes to mind.

--Patrick
 
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