My First Computer Game

I got an early start on PC gaming, starting probably around age 7 when my brother would sneak me into his university lab. The PCs there were 286s with black and white monitors, but there was 1(!) 386 with a color screen that everyone coveted.

I remember playing the original Prince of Persia, Doom/Doom II, Blake Stone, Wolf 3d + Spear of Destiny. And Scorched Earth. God I loved that game

Anyone know of this game where a boy gets his dog stolen by aliens or somesuch thing and he goes on a mission to get his dog back. It was a sidescrolling platformer.

As far as I can remember it has to be Age of Empires, Star Craft, Command & Conquer, War Craft.

My first game was on PC, the wonderful DOS game Captain Comic from 1986.

It was a side-scrolling shareware platformer like a lot of games were back then. I never got very far in to it but no one is very good at computer games when they're 4 years old.

But the first game I actually completed was probably either Commander Keen Ep.1 or Jill of the Jungle Ep.1 - can't remember, was an awful long time ago.

The first PC I ever bought myself came with SimCity and Myst. It was a whopping 90Mhz Pentium with a 15" display for nearly $3000.

That night, my wife went out with friends as I sat down to try SimCity. When she returned several hours later, I was still sitting there - barely noticed she was gone.


But way before that was me and my trusty Atari 800. Can't remember the first games I played on it, but always loved the old EA games like Archon, Hard Hat Mack, and such....not to mention Zork, Lode Runner, Jumpman, and many others.

It would have to be one of those Star Trek games with the ASCII "graphics," where you enter in commands at a command line prompt, flying around a grid to fight a Klingon invasion and defend starbases.

Something like this: http://cplus.about.com/od/starttrekconversion/ss/startrekproject.htm

Or this (playable version?): http://members.aol.com/rrobe71907/stgwb.htm

Ahh I don't know how I could've forgotten MechWarrior 1 I remember when I got my first pentium the game ran like a monkey on crack, there was actually a util to massively slow the cpu so the game could run normally

That game still rocks!

Other than a tic-tac-toe game for the C64 some of the originals that I had played for my PC was A-10 Warthog, Zork, Stellar-7, Stunts (w00t!), Scorched Earth (still play it once in a while), Wolfenstein 3D, SimCity (Shift-FUNDS hehe), Doom, Duke Nukem 3D (BEST Multiplayer Game EVER FPS), WarCraft (I & II)

Star Flight. First attempt was on my Tandy 2000, which did not work. The 2000 is MSDOS compatible, not true PC compatible. Second and first working try was on my Tandy 1400LT (2 FDD) which had a composite video out, which went to my VCR then to the TV. Certainly better than CGA 4 color.

I think my second PC game was Pool of Radiance. I won that by accident, which really annoyed my roomie who had been trying for 3 years on his C64 for which he bought a $1200 external HDD.

Early 70s: A copy of ELIZA running at the Univeristy of Florida (on a paper-based terminal). Only got to "play" with it a short while one afternoon, but it left a lasting impression. It's probably where my work and play computer fascination started.

Early 80s: What the frak was the name of that text-only dungeon crawl thing that ran, I think, under TSO (on an IBM 3033 mainframe, or maybe it was the Amdahl)? Adventure Something, Something Adventure, something different? I was doing D&D regularly back then & spent a lot of time trying (& failing) to beat that dungeon.

The first PC games that really put a hurtin' on my wrists were SimEarth and SimCity. In '91 I was living in a college dorm and a wonderful, evil man showed me the original Civilization. I still spent plenty of time watching friends play things like Star Control back then, but that was when I learned I was a 4X freak (took a couple of years after that for the genre to get a name).

For PC, War Craft: Orcs and Humans.

For NES, I believe I started on Mario (duh) but I quickly got Final Fantasy second-hand from a relative, and never looked back!

Some of my first computer games... lets see now... Doom, Age of Empires, Half Life, Starcraft, Homeworld, Deus Ex, Tie Fighter, and Diablo. Those we some great games.

Now I know its computer game but what the hell my first console games were on the Super Nintendo though. Zelda, Metroid, Soccer (US team Mr. White so many red cards and that the only real sport game I really like lol), Starfox, Mario, etc...

Those were some good times. Now all they need to do is make a modern Tie Fighter, Homeworld 3 or A mmo of it, and a Diablo III. Also I can't forget a Gal Civ III. Now that would be great.

The DOS version of Lemmings was my first PC game, methinks. And Discworld a year or two later. Then Age of Empires came a couple of years further. I mostly played on the NES prior to gettting an actual PC for myself in '98 though.

Not the first games but the ones I remember most clearly are, Faery Tale, Elite, Rogue, and EGA Trek, Oh and Xenon 2. I think I remember some of them best because of the difficulty level at the time, I dont think I Ever beat Faery Tale *goes to find a copy so he can have another go*

If others have gone into console territory, I shall go into arcade territory and say Defender, awesome game, even if it did occasionally (ok fairly frequently) make you want to pummel people.

Back as a kid in the 70s I played the old Star Trek text game on a teletype.

I got a PC in 1983 and played Microsoft Decathlon. But before that I played a ton of junk on my friend's TRS-80 Model 1.

-HM

Maybe this forum could help me find the one other person who ever had a real computer game spectator habit. If you make me take the controls, the list gets narrow pretty quickly. The only arcade game I ever mastered was Time Pilot, but I loved knowing and watching some of my town's top Defender, Deluxe Asteroids, and Donkey Kong players.

On a TI-99/4A me and the kids would type in DOS programs out of Computer Age Magazine (still have a few of them).

I remember the text based Star Trek games, Commander Keen, Spiderman vs. Dr. Doom, Commando.

Age of Empires was a mega jump in gaming....

A second hand copy of Sim City 3 was my first PC game.

lol nice everyone. lots of good times remembered. i can remember occasions where our JH school was one of the few with a PC computer lab. we had 286's running Windows 2 and they had games like Golf and TicTacToe. by that time i was already playing more computer games than most could name on our screaming fast 386sx/16mhz with a whapping 5mb of ram. so we convinence the teacher to let us bring in games toward the end of school. i come in with a stack of games like wolf3d, battletech, and some other spare shareware junk. fun times. of course she wouldnt let us use it!

i probably spent the most hours of my youth in game with the original Wing Commander. In the last decade, hands down it was Freelancer. So many hours....

I don't remember my first game, but it would have been something keyed in (and converted) from a book of BASIC games or from a magazine. Probably Hammurabi or Trek, possibly Life.

My first computer was a Southwest Technical Products Corp kit built around a Motorola M6800 CPU and 4Kb of RAM. No disk, but I did have a cassette tape interface and a 40 x 20 character video display connected to a TV.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to my rocking chair......

I'm sure I played a lot of basic type games, but the first space strategy game I can remember playing was Stellar Crusade on my Tandy-1000. The original Bard's Tale was another I played a lot back then. Back before hard drives: loading DOS, then loading the game and saving to a 5&1/4 floppy - hard to imagine now.

That would be "Colossal Adventure" (aka "Colossal Cave", "Colossal Cave Adventure", or even just "Adventure") I'd guess.

Damned annoying dwarves - all seven of them!

Age of empires. I still remember the time I had to go away for dinner in a multiplay and the enemy pinched all the stone from right under the nose of my tower wall...

I still have it installed actually. I love XP's backward compatibilty with it. (Glances over at copy and wonders if he could fit in a game now he's got all nostalgic.)

I was really Lucky


I got a 486 boxed with Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis . Little did I know I was about to embark on two of the worlds greatest PC games of all time.

Guilty. I would watch the Mortal Kombat players for hours, trying to figure out the fancy-pantsy moves. Never could.

Who am I kidding? I still suck at a game if I don't have a keyboard and mouse. But I can watch a good player of a good console game for hours. I swear, I enjoyed just watching my brother play Gears of War more than trying to play it myself.