Your first videogame and the memories of it.

[HMQuanstrom]

Elmo in Numberland was my first game, though I suppose my first "real" game was something like Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 for the Gameboy.

I recently went back to play the Elmo game and I feel like it connected a lot of dots for me. The environments in the game are empty and bizarre, the music is blaring but at the same time eerily quiet, and the mix of the kid-friendly feel with the uncanniness of it all is cool. It was a nice moment of nostalgia, I feel like it was a glimpse into the beginnings of my current tastes and I felt for a moment that I could almost remember what child me was thinking/feeling.

 

[jaedaen]

This is a solid topic. Mostly, when it comes to early memories, we remember terror, as I've gleaned from this world.

My (what you kids call PFP, what I call an avatar) is a reference to this game. It was called Forbidden Forest (before Harry Potter was a thing). It scared the shit out of me as a 5 year old, but I loved it. Watch the posted longplay of it. Great soundtrack, great early 80s horror, this game deserves to be remembered, despite its obscurity.

I remember the music scared me the most. I couldn't play the music after it got dark in the game, and I played at an easier difficulty than this so it got dark pretty early in the game. My brothers friend, fucking Ed Waltlington, used to wait until I was not looking and then turn up the volume to max which met with incessant screams from me, at which point he laughed lol.

Still, I could kick most of my brothers friends asses at most video games I had. I didn't have anything else to do at the time.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j86veyiIcS8

 

[remember_summer_days]

I think my earliest videogame memories are me playing Super Mario 64 on a PC, no idea how it got there since my parents aren't good with computer. I think it probably had to do with my uncle who was a computer guy but idk. I'm not sure if it was a port or an emulator either. Regardless, I had no idea what I was doing and could never get pass Bob-omb Battlefield. I remember being scared of both the chain chomp and King Bob-omp.

 

[LostintheCycle]

New Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo DS, my first ever game and console. I got it when I was six years old so that my parents could keep me occupied in the hotel lobbies and the airport.

Honestly played more of this minigame than the actual game (thank goodness I didn't turn out to be a gambling addict later in life)

I have a funny story from it though. Y'know it was my first game and all, I didn't really know what to expect. I played through all the levels for ages and ages, but they got quite tough reaching the end, I wasn't sure if I could ever get to the final level. Eventually though I made it, and when I beat the boss, I was ecstatic!
Then I learned that I had just unlocked the second world, and there were actually another seven I had left to go until I was done. I remember at that moment, I was absolutely mindblown that they had even more levels! Also I was seriously annoyed that I didn't actually finish the game. I never managed to finish world two.

Just wanted to throw in this bonus thing, it's not strictly related to the topic but hell I wanna share it.
When I was about ten years old I was playing a Lego game, and I started to wonder how videogames actually work?
I formulated this theory that the game disc was a massive photo album which contained every possible frame that could be displayed of the game, and would just display the correct photo that comes when you put it into some configuration.
My Wii would often freeze and play this loud sound; my theory for this was that there'd be some photos missing on the disc, and if you accidentally get the videogame into a configuration which there is no photo for, then it wouldn't know what to do, so it would freeze.

 

[napata]

Battle City on Game Boy, thinking about it unlocked quite a lot of core memories. It was a weird time because my parents got me this secondhanded GB, while others were already playing GB SP. To be honest, I can't actually remember the 'first' game, but it should be one of those games in the 100-in-1 cartridge.

 

[Legacy]

It's hard for me to remember the first. I was born to parents who were hardcore CRPG players who had bonded over D&D. I spent a lot of time playing these games before I even knew how to read. I think the first one I would have to pick is "Master of Orion", because my father played it and I thought the ships looked really cool. I also played a lot of TIE Fighter, Ultima, X-COM, and the Settlers series when I was that little. There was a lot of other random games thrown in there too that I'm sure I'm not remembering.


Settlers had a pretty complicated economy; I figured it out just by visual reference of what the buildings were and bugging my mother to explain the economy chains to me for the 100th time.

TIE Fighter starts with a joystick calibration that I would shamelessly wake my dad up in the morning to do for me and then play it blasting kids music on a stereo all morning. I would only play it in my older sister's room because her PC had windows 95 (mine was DOS and I didn't know how to read yet) so I had to be sure to use her stereo too

 

[SolidStateSurvivor]

I was very young, it was probably around 1999-2000, we lived in a dingy apartment at the time, and my room was covered in Phantom Menace stickers. My father let me play this game and I was instantly hooked on it. I had a huge Hotwheels/Matchbox collection so this felt like the most realistic manifestation of my imagination with those toys. I would spend the majority of my time just crashing the cars and getting into chases.

Driver 1, Driver 2, and later on Midnight Club and GTA III pretty much defined my early childhood, and to this day I still enjoy playing GTA V for the same reasons. God I can't wait for GTA 6 to come out...

 

[Elagabalus]

I have some vague memory it was some math game but the the first one I remember was watching my parents play Atlantis: The Lost Tales.

 

[wot]

Excluding edutainment games on my dad's PC, my first was Toy Story for the SNES when I was like 3 or 4. I remember never bothering with the second level just because it was timed. I never did beat it because by the time I was old enough to want to try making progress in a game, we'd lent it to some kid and our own SNES later got stolen, so mom let him keep it.

 

[kodeb8]

First game I ever played? Well that's a tough one. My older brother is 8 years older than me and owned both a SNES and an N64, my first game could've been from either of those, but I'm inclined to believe it was an N64 game, possibly Mario 64 or Ocarina Of Time. Oldest game I have memories of playing on the other hand, I have a very old fuzzy memory of playing Wind Waker, I just remember sailing aimlessly on the sea and being entranced by that alone. As for the first game that I bought myself with my own money, I believe that was Minecraft.

 

[Chipps]

The two first games I can remember playing were Ghostbusters and Pitfall for DOS on the computer that my dad owned when I was a child. This was probably around 92-93 or so. Honestly I just remember the games and couldn't even tell you what version or what their actual name was.

 

[Minecraft]

I only have a single screenshot in my memory of a mario kart ripoff but the console had a bunch of ripoff games and i think it was a NES clone but I don't remember any other games, i do remember breaking a sand clock by biting it while playing, was probably tryharding

 

[andreixyz]

Back in the mid 90's I was attending an after school IT programme, and was playing on a HC2000 (Romanian Spectrum ZX clone) a game similar to Bomberman. You were in a brown brick maze in a side-scrolling level, and you had to uncover the keys that would open the door to the next level. I remember you were chased by something similar to theater masks . I fondly recall the Q-A-O-P control scheme and how we connected the computer to a TV, as it had no monitor.

I am still looking for the game, and did find some things that feel close to it, but no cigar. The closest to it is Eric and the Floaters (youtube), but I still think it was a clone.

One vivid memory I still have from back then is that one day the teacher was late and we waited for her watching TV on the sets we used for computers (they were kept under lock and only she had the key), and that was the first time I saw "The Man Who Knew Too Much", one of my favourite movies to the day.

I just remembered something before that. I used to play Super Mario Bros and Dr. Mario on a NES clone (Eastern Europeans might remember the Terminator console -- pic attached) and that I'd always argue with my dad over who gets to play. I remember I asked mom at some point to play and she said "nah, I just like watching", so I think I invented twitch streaming in 1993.

 

[Razzle Dazzle]

Lego Star Wars, for PC. I used to play it all the time after school, but I could never get past the Kashyyyk level, because whenever Chewbacca would use the grappling hook, the game would freeze and the screen would cut to black, yet the game would still keep running. I always told my mother we should make a house call.

No sooner did I get Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, and enjoyed it even more, now that I could actually build stuff in the game just like irl.

Decades later, I bought the Complete Saga on Steam, and relived my childhood memories.

 

[Emmy Fitz]

I was born in the late 90s and before we got an Xbox, my parents had a Super Nintendo and played Street Fighter II New Challengers constantly. The defeat screens used to scare me lmao

 

[marxayniben]

This game is the first game I've ever played, as far as I'm aware, as it is one of the first memories I can still remember. I remember that my cousin installed it for me to play on my dad's computer, although I dont remember the game itself very well, I can say I did have a lot of fun playing it and it teached me the basics of video game controls. It's made by an obscure(?) gaming studios called InterAction. It is possibly the first game I ever played and also what got me into video games so much, probably.

 

[Razzle Dazzle]

Back in the day, I had an old Windows98 in the kitchen. I would play educational point and click games like Putt Putt, Freddie Fish, The Magic School Bus, Sesame Street, Richard Scarry's Busy People, Counting and Sorting with White Bear and Little Penguin, Elmo's Pre-School, Professor Zug's Bug School (can't remember the official title). But my first real video game was LEGO Star Wars from (2005). Seven years old and fresh outta second grade.

When 2008 rolled around, my parents got us a Wii system, and we had a jam inviting friends to play Just Dance 2, LEGO Rock Band, Wii Sports, and Smash Bros Brawl.

One day, the Wii gave up the ghost.

 

[endless_self]

my first game ever was Battletoads & Double Dragon on knock off version of NES. i played it when i was 5, i think?

prior to that, i absolutely had no idea that videogames even existed - noone from my friend circle was talking about them.
but when i cleared the first stage... lets say, i was hooked immediatelly!
next games i remember were browser flash games about mario.
and my first game that was installed for me by my uncle was Portal and Portal 2. those games played a massive role in my childhood and early teen years =P

so yeah. childhood gaming was pretty awesome =D

 

[Xmariokiler]

Dear god my first video game was hot wheels racing game on dvd from cereals and I fucking succed at it soooo hard I complited like 20% of the game despite trying my hardest. The goofy thing was that to like complite 1map you had to win like 3 times in a row so everytime I got to 2nd or 3rd when the game was loading or when there was a countdown to start, I would like geniually pray to god so I would win without trying the whole thing over again xd

tbh when it comes to riding in video games I was always very proficient in my ability to somehow crash in to the wall

 

[DyingIon]

Tough question because it all blends in. I remember playing + beating Pokemon Blue in 2001ish on my sister's green game boy color, and consider that my first game because I still have the original cartridge. I first picked squirtle, and for some reason restartd my file after awhile and chose Bulbasaur instead. To this DAY I still choose Bulby. Weirdest memory is walking through the underground path, pressing A for no reason and finding one of the hidden items and FREAKING OUT. That's when I learned video games aren't direct and can have more than meets the eye. Pokemon Gold, Donkey Kong Land (never beat it) and Super Mario Bros Deluxe followed. My older sisters also had a SNES and a N64, so I do remember Donkey Kong Country, Mario Kart 64, Smash Bros and other random games in my mind's eye but I wouldn't say I 'played' them back then. The first game + console that was ~mine~ was the Nintendo Gamecube in 2003 with Pac Man Fever that SUCKED lol. I hadn't even played Mario Party yet and even I knew it was a MP clone. Super Mario Sunshine made up for it as my second game though. Still a personal favorite, my gf is playing through it now casually and I give her tips on how to beat levels.