Gaming History

[Azure79]

So tell us about your personal gaming history, how you got started, what got you hooked and how you got to playing what you are now.

 

I think the first electronic game I ever played was something my father called Donkey. He was an engineering student and took me to his lab one day. I was around 6-7. He set me in front of a computer and launched a game where a vague donkey shaped object would have to avoid obstacles to the left or right as it sped up a street. All you had to do was press left or right to make the donkey avoid the obstacles. I remember it being fun back then.

 

Then my father got his hands on an Atari system, so I spent many hours playing Pac-man, Donkey Kong and Pit-fall and some other games we had. My father would destroy me on Pac-man, which always sent me into fits of rage.

 

My few other friends had those coleco video game systems and we usually played Donkey Kong Jr.

 

After that in 1987 or so, my grandmother came to visit and bought me a NES. She is still my favorite person to this day. I logged a lot of hours into the NES over the years, trading games with friends, going over to check out the latest game someone had, sharing secrets, reading Nintendo Power. Those were good times.

 

Strangely, my father started to disapprove of my gaming habits and eventually took the NES away. He wanted me to study more and get good grades. Hey, my parents are Asian. So I've never owned a console after the NES, until I got a PS2, which was a few months before the next gen came out, so quite a while. All the good times people had with the SNES, Genesis, Playstation, etc, I missed. Also we moved back to Korea, right about when the SNES was hitting, and consoles weren't that prevalent over there at the time.

 

But it wasn't all in vain however. My father wasn't adverse to buying me a computer, so soon I discovered an entirely new library of games to play. These games were a lot more interesting than the NES. I started with the shooters first, playing Commander Keen and then Wolfenstein then onto Doom and Quake as the years went by. Then I discovered adventure games and then strategy games and finally one fateful day I tried Baldur's Gate and have been mostly into RPGs since. Also living in Korea for years had its benefits for my gaming. I played a lot of Taiwanese games based on the novels of Jin Yong which were basically very linear RPGs, I played a lot of sRPGS developed by KOEI and by developers in Korea. I still have a copy of The War of Genesis 3, which is a superb Korean made SRPG. I had a chance to make some cool Japanese friends during highschool and they introduced me to some pretty cool games as well.

 

All in all, looking back at it, it was great. Share some of your history.

[Hurlshort]

The first game I remember being really in love with was The Black Cauldron by Sierra. It was on my Dad's Atari ST and I was amazed when he told me he finished the game. He told me about it like a story, and I spent the next few months trying to complete it as well. We had a few other games that we played together, Crime Wave and Mean Streets being my favorites.

 

I got an NES at some point, and I enjoyed it, but I still think my best times were on the PC. My dad later got a 386 (DX I think, but I forget). He bought me Monkey Island one year for Christmas, and that was a huge surprise. I remember looking at the box and thinking it was going to be no fun, boy was I wrong. When we finally got a sound card, I replayed Monkey Island first and it was fantastic.

 

My family even took a trip to the Sierra company office near Yosemite. I got to see Quest for Glory III in development.

 

In 7th grade I got into trouble with my grades. I was playing Space Quest III at the time, and I lost my computer access during the weekdays. It was a very smart decision by my parents, it motivated me to improve my grades, and it got me excited to rush home on a Friday to play games. I'd say that taught me discipline as much as anything else.

 

I remember the first game I purchased with my own cash was Wing Commander.

[Gorgon]

Amiga 500, upgraded to an incredible 1 megabyte of ram. It still beat any DOS based pc game hands down when it came to graphics. Two joysticks and late nights with too much cola IK plus , Speedball 2, Sensible soccer, among others.

 

Ahh amiga, to run a half decent word processor you would need 4 or 5 diskettes, which would have to be inserted at arbitrary times to keep the program running. Didn't have a native harddisk.

Edited September 25, 2008 by Gorgon

[Tigranes]

Strangely, my father started to disapprove of my gaming habits and eventually took the NES away. He wanted me to study more and get good grades. Hey, my parents are Asian. So I've never owned a console after the NES, until I got a PS2, which was a few months before the next gen came out, so quite a while. All the good times people had with the SNES, Genesis, Playstation, etc, I missed. Also we moved back to Korea, right about when the SNES was hitting, and consoles weren't that prevalent over there at the time.

 

I remember that, what with the anti-console import policies (directed at Japan of course). My cousin had the Dreamcast and N64 as soon as they came out, but they were bootleggish.

 

I played the original Sonics (1,2,3) like a madman when I was a kid in the '90s. I think I started with the Genesis. My aim was always to learn the levels so well that I could play through the whole game without EVER stopping or slowing down - I maintain to this day that's the only way to play Sonic.

 

Left Korea and came to New Zealand in '97, when I was introduced to Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV (KOEI), which got me hooked into strategy gaming (specifically, historical strategy gaming). I believe my move made me miss the Starcraft craze, too. Also, the Playstation came out soon with a lot of hoopla and some pretty effective marketing. After a brief stint with the original Pokemon Blue on Gameboy (hey, I was 10), Final Fantasy VII basically made me get the console, whatever the means.

 

I think I actually played FFVII, FFVIII and FFIX for about 2-3 years. I couldn't afford any other game, and I didn't see much point when each one would take up to 100 hours to clock. The stories were extremely engaging to someone my age (or rather, VIII and IX were just fun enough; VII was really engaging at the time), and I don't know, the grind wasn't bad.

 

Anyway, I also had the habit of flippiing over game magazines in bookshops during that time (heh, not so much the internet), and the previews for Shadows of Amn caught my eye. I hardly knew about D&D (being a Korean and 12 years old, of course), but this was clearly an RPG, and it looked infinitely more complex and interesting. I recall thinking hey, these guy don't line up to fight, this is much better! Back then I was still a poor kid, so once it came out, every day after school, I'd go straight to the local EB, and play the game for an hour before they kicked me off. I did that for 2 months until I could afford the game; so that's what, 60 hours? And I never even got out of the dungeon! I usually spent about 40 minutes at character creation stage, and they never let me save, anyway. I could recite Irenicus' lines by the end, though. (Actually, I can still recite all of his cutscene lines...)

 

At the time I was also introduced to Planescape: Torment. A gentleman a friend of my mother knew, this +40 fellow, insisted that it was an infinitely superior experience. I tried it; well, I recall thinking the text is awesome, but still too much, so skipped half. Already knee deep in BG2, the towns seemed tiny and the combat was abysmal, and I passed. Played BG2, then TOB, then BG1, for about 2 years straight, I think. I also picked up some strategy games - Age of Kings then Age of Mythology, specifically.

 

By then I was in the middle of high school, Neverwinter Nights was taking goddamn forever to come out, and I needed games similar to the BG series. It was also then I started really surfing the web seriously (thank God, what if I posted in those forums at age 13?). So found out about Torment & Fallouts, tried 'em, loved 'em, then NWN came out, OC was a crock of guano and went back on shelf after 3 days.

 

Basically my gaming interests just expanded from those early games I found great - all the way u pto, say, Total War/Civilisation series, Final Fantasy Tactics or Elder Scrolls. Oh, yes, and I had a 8-month love affair with Diablo II. God that was fun.

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Let me see, I remember the original NES, MS-DOS, Windows 3.1x, and other icons of early gaming like AD&D. They got me hocked and I've been playing ever since.

[Pidesco]

My dad's Spectrum 48K, 25 years ago, was the origin of my gaming addiction. No gamer is a real gamer unless he played games from a tape recorder.

[Dark_Raven]

Games at the local arcade place. Pac Man, Ms Pac Man, Centipede and others. A lot of quarters were spent.

Than we got an Atari 2600.

Later on there was NES and Sega Genesis. Good times with the Mario and Contra games. Paper Boy and the best of them Tetris. Tetris is awesome.

PC games started when I got my first computer. Diablo and Fallout were the first games I bought. I stick around with RPGs mostly.

[Gorth]

Got a Commodore 64 in '83

 

I had been playing around on the highschool computers during my second year there and got myself moderately interested in programming. Didn't think much of it as a career though, as the machines were big and heavy (cast iron?) and cost more than a luxury car.

 

Then one day, my dad came home with this colourful pamphlet advertising the C64. The thing had sound AND colour AND a staggering amount of memory. Adding to that, it was only a 1000$. Selling everything of any value and getting a night job over the winter, I managed to afford not only the C64, but also the tape drive and my very first game, "Gridrunner" by Jeff Minters Llamasoft

 

After that, I bought a few more games, including a 'cartridge' game (probably my first and only console game). The Hobbit was what got me into reading Tolkien and many an afternoon was spent playing International Soccer or Beach Head

 

Plus, it gave me a platform that enabled me to start programming at home. I learnt a lot from those old computer mags, like Byte and Your Computer. The latter usually had the source code for games for various platforms. The best Pac Man game I've had came as a "Type it yourself" game

[theslug]

Started out on the nintendo to super nintendo to the n64 to ps2 and pc and finally xbox 360.

 

Basically the earliest and most memorable games I remember were duck hunt, mario, street fighter and ridiculous amounts of golden eye. Up until then I was just a regular console playing youngin until I was about 9 or 10 and I was at my brother's friend's house. There I saw the single greatest thing I had ever seen since late night hbo; Warcraft 2. That really sealed the deal for me getting into gaming as a teen when we would actually be able to mildly afford this stuff. It kept me interested long enough to meet a friend of mine at around 14 or 15 who had an (what I thought) awesome computer and I was totally blown away by some like first person dueling star wars games, warcraft 3, battlefield 1942, and a bunch of other stuff. Now I got my 360 playing halo 3 and when cod 4 was new I was gaming on that with my PC. Now I don't really game that much at all and I'm kind of not interested in it anymore. I'm just waiting for that game to come along to give me the next shot of heroin and hook me up all over again. I'm hoping its either diablo 3 or sc2 or maybe something will surprise me.

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

My first game was Pokemon Blue on the Gameboy Color. Just remember the fact I'm sixteen.

 

Other than that I played a few old titles for a while on the PC, then moved on to the XboX and now to the 360. Halo really made me start gaming seriously.

[Deraldin]

I started playing Commander Keen when I was three. Those stupid slugs with their green glowing nuclear poop and that glare scared me. Anything that moved faster than those guys really scared me. After that I recall playing hotseat games of Empire Deluxe against my dad and my uncle. Those were some really fun games, even if I wasn't as good at the strategy aspects of those games as they were. I remember building my first battleship in one game and sending it out alone. Ran into a sub in the middle of the ocean and spent the next 15 turns running my brand new battleship away before I finally lost that sub. From there until I got my first copy of Command and Conquer Red Alert (burned for me by my uncle), the vast majority of my gaming was limited to shareware like Galatix, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures and various other games that I only have vague hazy memories of now.

 

First console was an N64 that was bought as a joint Christmas gift by several relatives for myself and my brother. It was such a huge surprise that I didn't believe that I actually got it until the next day when I woke up and it was still there. All I asked for was a gameboy and I was told "Not a chance" for that, yet I somehow got an N64. Turns out it was a fluke that I got it. When my grandparents called to see if this would be an okay present, my dad picked up the phone and said sure. He my mom picked up the phone, as I was later told, she would have instantly said "no way".

 

Now I have a Wii and a pretty nice PC for all my gaming needs. I hope to have a 360 at some point in the near future as well.

[Azure79]

Tigranes: Yeah, you just missed the Starcraft phase. It was just picking up then. Those were pretty good times too.

 

I started playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms starting from 5 and am currently playing 11. I think they should revamp the game engine into something like the Total War series, but we're talking about KOEI here so I don't have high hopes. Though 11 is still extremely addictive.

 

You should try the sRPG series from KOEI that center on Zhuge Liang or Cao Cao if you haven't. Those games actually got me to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and eventually other Chinese literature.

[Guard Dog]

I had an Atari 2600 as a kid (in fact I still have it) but I really loved the big Arcade games. Pac Man, Mrs. Pac Man, Frogger, Defender, Contra, and my all time favorite Xenophobe. I was never into D&D type games until I built my first computer, a 486 DX4-100 with an 80M hard drive that was the size of a cigar box. It used Dos 6.0 and Windows 3.1 (remeber the days when Windows was a shell, not an OS). Anyway I bought Dungeon Hack and Black Sun to play on that old PC and have been hooked on those kinds of games ever since. Until Oblivion that is. After that one I decided I'd had about enough.

[julianw]

The first computer game I ever played was one of those fighter plane shooting games based on DOS. I was a middle schooler in China at the time and we get cleaning duty every Saturday afternoon. I loved cleaning either the library or the computer lab which means I could read manga or play computer games... good times.

 

First RPGs I ever played was Baldur's Gate II and Dungeon Siege. When I realized how much more enjoyable BG2 was comparing to DS, I became an official Bioware and Obsidian fanboy and have at least tried every single one of their games since.

 

I also played several Taiwanese cRPGs. They had great story. I used to play them with a neighbor girl together since she was just as addicted to them as I was. We would take turns and switch whenever we got our character killed. I remember she was crying during one of the ending scenes cuz it was so sad...

[LadyCrimson]

Hmm....Breakout/Pac-Man on the Atari, which my dad bought. Don't remember what year/what age, late 70's/early 80's. Watched friends play arcade games but never played much myself. Nothing much after that. One day when we were bored, hubby and I bought one of those first Nintendos in the late 80's. Didn't buy many games and it last long. Still have it in a closet.

 

Largely ignored electronic games for a while, despite going to a lot of computer conventions etc. I remember once getting hooked on auto-cad and spent hours designing 'rooms' with it...the precursor to my liking city-building games? heh...Then hubby came home w/a copy of Doom/Wolfenstein, which all his co-workers were playing, and that was that ... I was addicted to pc-games.

[theslug]

Hmm....Breakout/Pac-Man on the Atari, which my dad bought. Don't remember what year/what age, late 70's/early 80's. Watched friends play arcade games but never played much myself. Nothing much after that. One day when we were bored, hubby and I bought one of those first Nintendos in the late 80's. Didn't buy many games and it last long. Still have it in a closet.

 

Largely ignored electronic games for a while, despite going to a lot of computer conventions etc. I remember once getting hooked on auto-cad and spent hours designing 'rooms' with it...the precursor to my liking city-building games? heh...Then hubby came home w/a copy of Doom/Wolfenstein, which all his co-workers were playing, and that was that ... I was addicted to pc-games.

Autocad is pretty awesome. I made such a sweet house in drafting but it would have been awesomer if we had computers that weren't 5 years old and a newer version of autocad that could ray trace higher quality stuff.

[Rosbjerg]

The first game I ever played was the original Leasure Suit Larry when I was quite young.. I can't remember exactly when, but late 80's or early 90's.

 

After that my dad bought me and my brother a NES and we played a lot of games! turtles, duckhunt, mario brothers 1 and 2, Defenders of the Crown (I loved strategy games after that) .. you name it.. My father must have spent a fortune come to think of it.

 

Then me and my brother saved some money to buy a Amiga 500 .. We played so many different games - don't ask me how my brother could afford them all, but as far as I could tell they were all legal.

 

Then in 94 we got a PC, I think it was 386 80 Mhz or something. And here I started playing all the different games I could get my hands on that came out in those following years.

 

I started prefering strategy games, like Warcraft, Dune etc. But I got really hooked on RPG when I played the original Baldurs Gate. After that I've mainly played RPGs or RTS/TBS games (EU/HoI/TW etc).

[Walsingham]

My first game was Manic Miner.

[Kelverin]

Pong from the 70's started it for me. (see pic) My dad brought it home from Sears. Then of course there was the many, many, many hours and quarters spent at the local arcade on the weekends about 30 years ago playing Space Invaders, Batter Up, Galaxian, Crash 'N Score, Breakout, and various pin ball games. Then in 1988 came Pool of Radiance on the PC and I have never looked back.

[SteveThaiBinh]

My family even took a trip to the Sierra company office near Yosemite. I got to see Quest for Glory III in development.

*burns with envy*

 

I can't remember the first game I got for my Commodore64, but among the first were Colossal Cave, Adventure Quest and Dungeon Quest, all text adventures or 'interactive fiction'. I also remember The Mystery of Silver Mountain, which you had to type in in BASIC.

 

 

 

Silicon Dreams had flame-throwing weedibots.

 

 

And of course Eureka!, five adventures, none of which I ever managed to finish because it had no save-game facility.

 

 

250K of pure mystery!

 

Once I got a PC, it was Sierra adventures all the way. King's Quest II was probably my favourite at the time, though I rate the Quest for Glory games higher now. My first RPG was Ultima 6, and Ultima 7 remains the only time I have ever bought a computer specifically so I could play one particular game.

[mkreku]

I, like many others here, started in 1982-1983 (can't remember exactly) with a ZX Spectrum 48k. My first encounter with computers were probably arcades, but that's so early I can't even remember it. Anyhow, I scraped together enough cash to buy a Spectrum one summer and the very first game I ever bought was Jetpac. It was awesome. Still is. Back then, games cost from $7 to $22.. so you could actually afford to buy them yourself as a kid. Now the games cost $90+ each in Sweden..

 

Anyhow, I had a rich friend and when he saw that I had a computer he immediately went out and bought a Commodore 64. Which of course mopped the floor with my poor Spectrum. I still played a lot of games on my Spectrum but no RPG's. In 1985 I switched to a CMB128 (a souped up Commodore 64 that never amounted to anything).

 

The first RPG I remember that got me hooked was Pool of Radiance, but since that was released in 1988 I'm pretty sure I've forgotten some other obscure titles. But Pool of Radiance was special, as me and a friend played together huddled in front of my 14 inch screen. I remember sitting in school daydreaming about the adventures that awaited us when we got home. That game was truly epic.

 

After the Commodore era ended, I lost interest in computer games. I occasionally played on friends computers (stuff like Daggerfall and Fallout), but between 1992 and 2002 I didn't own a computer of my own. In 2002 I bought my first own PC! And here I am.

[Hurlshort]

250k of pure mystery! That's awesome!

 

Doe anyone remember the Tex Murphy series of adventure games? That was a great series, it's funny how I always think about Lucasarts and Sierra, but those Access software games were huge for me. "Countdown" started off in a mental hospital, and I still remember getting caught and being given a lobotomy.

[Moatilliatta]

The first computer that I played games on were the one that my dad wrote his thesis on. I don't know what kind of computer it was but I played pacman clones, commander keen, cosmos cosmic adventure, crystal caves, secret agent, Bio Menace and Wolfenstein 3D. Probably a lot more games as well that I simply don't remember.

 

Later on I somehow got a snes (I honestly have no idea why or when and have never asked) and that was co-op heaven for me and my friend. We played Legend, Super Mario World, The lost Vikings, Street racer, Turtles in Time and Mortal Combat. All good fun.

 

Even later on I got a decent computer and started playing games like BG1 and later 2, Diablo 2 and especially Heroes of Might and Magic 2. I'm saying especially here because it would lead to my friend getting HoMM 3 which lead to us becoming crazy about that game and playing it in hotseat mode. Many weekends were wasted doing just that.

 

I would then over the next few years get interested in gaming as a hobby more and more, part of which was getting acquainted with the internet and through that Fallout (which I had owned for some time as a free game from a gaming magazine) and then fallout 2 and PS:T later on. I actually have a memory of starting up fallout much earlier in my life and being beaten to death by molerats shortly after leaving vault 13. I didn't play anymore after that.

 

I only started getting back to consoles in this generation with the 360.

[Gfted1]

Gaming for me started in the heady days of mall arcades. I would literally spend hours in there playing Gauntlet and this one where you drove a spy car. Home gaming started with pong, then the Atari 2600, then the Commodore 64. I got my first "real" computer while in the Navy, a rocking 75MHz Acer, and as a special offer offered something called Windows 95 as a free upgrade when it came out a few months later. Doom, Hexen, Heretic, Duke Nukem, Rise of the Triad...spent hours and hours playing until I would have to quit from vertigo induced nausea. Then one day a friend loaned me Baldurs Gate and it was all over for me. When I wasnt playing BG I was thinking of playing BG. Im not into shooters anymore and now Ive been on the WoW needle for years.

[taks]

we had a pong machine. i used to go to the mall with my friend and line up quarters on the donkey kong machine. somewhere around 300k was my record. never got into pac man, however, but i was around when it came out. galaga was my other fav... we knew how to trick it to play forever without the baddies shooting at you (after a million or so points, it was hard even without shooting). i'm going to get myself an original DK machine and see if i can't break a million.

 

taks