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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.

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.

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!

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.

One of my first computer game memories:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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



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

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.

I'm surprised no one has listed killing off the American Buffalo in Oregon Trail

Ravenpoe said:

I'm surprised no one has listed killing off the American Buffalo in Oregon Trail

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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.

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.

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That game is literally called snake

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.

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.

Tinwhistler said:

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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

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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.

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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.

My first is a crystal clear memory of playing the Spider-Man adventure game on our 8088 IBM clone.

GasBandit said:

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.

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That's the one!

GasBandit said:

It was so irritating how the pickaxe would only "appear" in your hand when you were standing JUST SO.

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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.

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.

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Thankfully they had that figured out when they ported it to the C64, which is where I played it.

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!).

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.

Null said:

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.

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Yeah, it gave 5 year old me SUCH nightmares.

GasBandit said:

Yeah, it gave 5 year old me SUCH nightmares.

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Especially with that noise.

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.

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.

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

GasBandit said:

I said oregon trail!

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Pfft, like I read your posts

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

Bards Tale I was a kick in the fucking balls. "Okay, you've set up your party, but you have zero equipment, the store is 5 spaces away, and 10 ENEMY GOLBINS SURROUND YOU THE SECOND YOU LEAVE THE ADVENTURER'S GUILD AND YOU'RE FUCKING DEAD."

I'm pretty sure that 50 foot span of Skara Brae was 10 feet deep in 1st level adventurer corpses.

Also, while not the first, my love of PC games can be traced to infocom games on the trash-80

Null said:

Bards Tale I was a kick in the fucking balls. "Okay, you've set up your party, but you have zero equipment, the store is 5 spaces away, and 10 ENEMY GOLBINS SURROUND YOU THE SECOND YOU LEAVE THE ADVENTURER'S GUILD AND YOU'RE FUCKING DEAD."

I'm pretty sure that 50 foot span of Skara Brae was 10 feet deep in 1st level adventurer corpses.

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Yup. That's why the first thing to do was always to create a bunch of player characters, add them to a party, pool all their gold and equipment to one person, sacrifice all the naked people, repeat, until you had enough of a proper starting budget.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Yup. That's why the first thing to do was always to create a bunch of player characters, add them to a party, pool all their gold and equipment to one person, sacrifice all the naked people, repeat, until you had enough of a proper starting budget.

--Patrick

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Capitalism!

PatrThom said:

Yup. That's why the first thing to do was always to create a bunch of player characters, add them to a party, pool all their gold and equipment to one person, sacrifice all the naked people, repeat, until you had enough of a proper starting budget.

--Patrick

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And then save scum until you made it to the goddamn equipment shop.

Ravenpoe said:

Capitalism!

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Nah. I mean, it's not like the survivors actually ATE the deleted players...

Null said:

And then save scum until you made it to the goddamn equipment shop.

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Hey nothing beat abusing DIIL to maximize your XP gain.

--Patrick

D I I L ?

Null said:

D I I L ?

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That was the code for the "Disrupt Illusion" spell.
See, there were summoner-type enemies who would do nothing but summon illusionary enemies to fight you, but you had a spell you could cast to immediately destroy all illusionary creatures (DISB - Disbelieve) which meant you got the experience for killing the illusionary creature without actually having to fight it.
Later, you would get the improved version of the spell, DIIL, which worked essentially the same way, except that you only had to cast it once and it would persist for the remainder of the battle, destroying all the illusions as they were summoned without having to recast it. So encounters with these conjurers/summoners were cause for celebration because you basically got free levels forever limited only by how long you wanted to prolong that specific battle (at least until they became trivial enemies for you).

--Patrick

This is the first game I remember playing. http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/facemaker

PatrThom said:

That was the code for the "Disrupt Illusion" spell.
See, there were summoner-type enemies who would do nothing but summon illusionary enemies to fight you, but you had a spell you could cast to immediately destroy all illusionary creatures (DISB - Disbelieve) which meant you got the experience for killing the illusionary creature without actually having to fight it.
Later, you would get the improved version of the spell, DIIL, which worked essentially the same way, except that you only had to cast it once and it would persist for the remainder of the battle, destroying all the illusions as they were summoned without having to recast it. So encounters with these conjurers/summoners were cause for celebration because you basically got free levels forever limited only by how long you wanted to prolong that specific battle (at least until they became trivial enemies for you).

--Patrick

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Yeah I never got that far.

For a vague memory, it was probably one of the math flash card games on the green Apple ][e's in school. My parents didn't allow video games, which is probably why I still suck at them. But I do remember Odell Lake and Oregon Trail from school. The first real computer games I played were when I went to college, which would've been Wolfenstein 3D shareware and company.

Heh, Odell lake. How do you win? Pick Mackenzie Trout. Congratulations, you won.

Another: Gremlins 2. Anyone else play this?

You roam the Clamp building from the movie with a few sources of bright light, clearing floors by scaring Gremlins away, but never finishing the job. And I mean that because floors would keep getting re-infested. It was endless.

The first SOLID gaming memory that I can recall is playing Muppet Learning Keys on the Commodore 64, with a special plug-in keyboard. Once I got past that point, I can remember playing a LOT of Pitfall, Spy Hunter, Pitstop, Epyx Summer/Winter Games, GI Joe... so many games.

Then we got an Atari ST, and I fell for the improve graphics (and what do you mean I don't have to listen to one or two 5 1/4" drives snarling away... what's this little hard diskette? You mean it stores MORE?). There was A LOT of Dungeon Master played on that, amongst a slew of others.

The first PC we had was a 386/33(? I might be misremembering). Ultima 6 was the game I recall most clearly as being one of the first played, and has DEFINITELY had a huge impact on my moral compass.

PC?

Sim City 2000 baby. No specific memory other than spending hours designing cities.

Mathias said:

PC?

Sim City 2000 baby. No specific memory other than spending hours designing cities.

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I wish I had a screenhot, but one time I made a map that was completely flat, except for a corner that was just one tall hill covered in waterfall tiles. My entire city was hydroelectric powered. It was far too easy, though I never did find the optimal layout for getting enough police, fire and hospital coverage for arcologies. To get enough money for that arcology experimenting, I got my city to a prosperous condition, left it on cheetah speed overnight, and then bulldozed and dezoned the entire amp. Still had 30k people living in my city of nothing. Then I tried laying out arcologies with nothing but underground rail for transporation.

I would love another Sim City 2000 style game. I liked Streets of Sim City, but one of my favorite games was Sim Copter.

sixpackshaker said:

I would love another Sim City 2000 style game. I liked Streets of Sim City, but one of my favorite games was Sim Copter.

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I was so fucking excited for SimCity 5, and then EA happened...

The overall game isn't too terrible, but those map sizes just plain suck.

Mathias said:

I was so fucking excited for SimCity 5, and then EA happened...

The overall game isn't too terrible, but those map sizes just plain suck.

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Cities:Skylines gave us what SimCity should have been.

After racking my brain, the only thing I can think of is a simple hockey simulator (Pass/Skate/Shoot) for BASIC that I remember playing on my Atari 400.

I mean, if we're going to go back that far, I also have hunted the wumpus on a friend's Ti-99/4a, Cosmic Conflict on Cranky's Odyssey2, and all that time I spent on 2600 Combat after school at the day care (not a commercial day care, just a family that watched a bunch of us kids after school). I just didn't start playing "PC" games of my own really until college, where I finally didn't have to depend on going over to someone's house to use their computer.

--Patrick

I recall playing Othello on a Timex Sinclair 1000. We also had a home pong machine in 1984.

We had a pong machine, but because of the title of the thread, I tried to limit my choice to the first actual computer game I remembered playing.

Hell, in elementary school (yeah, like 40 years ago) I used to play a math game on a teletype hooked up to what I assume was a mainframe. It would type out math questions, and I would type in answers. The teacher chose 3 of us from the whole school to be allowed to use the thing (supervised) during recess time.

Then again, for all I know, there was some teacher hidden in another office typing out the math questions

Cosmic Crunchers on the VIC-20. Pac-man clone. First I remember playing. We had an Intellivision too, but that doesn't count for this discussion.

But for IBM-PC, this old game called Donkey. Developed by Bill Gates. Yes THAT Bill Gates. And really really simple. But I was like 3 or 4, so that's OK.

My first one was playing Sokoban and Go on my grandpa's old DOS machine. I was like...seven, I think. Good times.

Eriol said:

Cosmic Crunchers on the VIC-20. Pac-man clone. First I remember playing. We had an Intellivision too, but that doesn't count for this discussion.

But for IBM-PC, this old game called Donkey. Developed by Bill Gates. Yes THAT Bill Gates. And really really simple. But I was like 3 or 4, so that's OK.

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That reminds me. I may have played a text version of Hunt the Wumpus on the apple before we got Apple Panic.



But I'm not really sure this qualifies as a "pc game" in the sense that most people use it today. And while this video is from 1972, I was 3 years old then. I played it probably closer to '77 or '78

Tinwhistler said:

That reminds me. I may have played a text version of Hunt the Wumpus on the apple before we got Apple Panic.



But I'm not really sure this qualifies as a "pc game" in the sense that most people use it today. And while this video is from 1972, I was 3 years old then. I played it probably closer to '77 or '78

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Heh, that reminds me of M.U.L.E. on the C64..

Eliza! How could I forget Eliza?

Of course, it stretches the definition of a "game", but I definitely remember playing it back in middle school.

GasBandit said:

Heh, that reminds me of M.U.L.E. on the C64..

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You know there's a M.U.L.E. board game now? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/182619/mule-board-game

And apparently there's M.U.L.E. Returns for iPhone. http://www.mulereturns.com/