So how old are you people then?

[Lephys]

I forgot about Nibbles!!! 8D! The original Phone Snake! Haha.

[Sensuki]

I think the first PC games I played were Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, Jazz Jack Rabbit and the Aladdin Sidescroller game on my next door neighbor's PC.

[Malekith]

I'm 25, but i played my first games only 8-9 years ago. I think they were Warcraft 3 and Baldur's Gate 2

[Kjaamor]

I'm old enough to know better, but I've spent long enough gaming to not.

[ManifestedISO]

I remember honing poor posture skills in the mid-late eighties in front of an Apple IIGS, playing Marble Madness, a killer WWII-Pacific game called Wings of Fury, and an obscure adventure game, Dream Zone, developed by the same people who would go on to form Naughty Dog. 

 

Before that, it was all Atari, all the time, except for the green Mattel handheld football game ... beep beep .. beep .. beep beep beep

 

In less than two weeks, I'll turn for&*%#@two.

 

Edit: Oh, wait, and California Games, on the IIGS. I remember thinking, damn those coast hippies, playing hacky, surfing, skating, doing all this fun stuff 'cause it never snows down there, unlike up here, in the mountains, the rocky Rockies. Now look at me, a god damn coast hippie. 

Edited October 22, 2014 by ManifestedISO

[Karkarov]

The watershed is: Did you play Pong and became mightily impressed by its potential and never since looked back? 

 

Semi-watershed: Did you get the "Vectrex is great"-easter egg in WL2?

Where does it place you when you actually own the pong system?  You know... the console with the controllers attached that can literally only play three versions of pong?

[Cantousent]

Hey, did anyone mention the SSI gold box games yet?  I can't remember!  Anyhow, I loved the Pool of Radiance.  No, not PoR2, the PoS.  I mean the ol' skool SSI game.  At least I think it was SSI.  Remember making your little cheesy avatars for your people.  There was this one fight with tons of skeletons and your magic user would toss out a fireball and... FWOOSH!  All gone!

[Ieo]

SSI? The Summoning box is sitting on my bookshelf right here...

 

 

I haven't met anyone else who's played this, though. And no idea what happened to our Champions/Death Knights/Dark Queen of Krynn SSI/TSR boxes. That kind of makes me a little sad.

[Silent Winter]

Started on arcade pong / space-invaders,

home console of pong offshoot games then onto the BBC-B.  Mentioned all this in the other thread but I played most of the home computers at friends' houses.

Personally had the BBC-B, Amiga 500, PS1, PS2, Modern-PC

Cassette loading - unfun times

 

Anyone else remember painstakingly typying out the BASIC code to play space-invaders on your BBC/Spectrum/Whatever?

(Or just:

10 PRINT "HELLO"

20 GOTO 10

30 END

RUN

giggles) (hey, I was in primary school)

[mstark]

Woah, I'm part of the biggest demographic for PE on both counts. Neat.

[IndiraLightfoot]

This was two of my first CRPGs, in 1982, AD&D Cloudy Mountain and then Treasure of Tarmin, cartridges on Mattel's Intellivision,

the latter with FP-view, overland maps, D&D, you name it.

I was really excited when playing these babies for days and days on end:

 

 

 

 

 

 

[lightblade75]

Hi everybody out there! Quite interesting to see how old are you and what games you played first....

 

I am 38. (OMG!).

 

My first computer game I played with my grand pa and my uncle back in 1982 when I was round about seven years old. It was a kind of role playing game called "Sword of Fargoal" on the VIC 20.  Shortly afterwards I got a C64 with disk drive and tape. The first games I played were Motor Mania, Burger Time and Kaiser ( a German kind of economy and war game) and of course Archon.

 

My first cRPG (except Sword of Fargoal and Sword of Kadash) was The Bards Tale I on the Amiga 500.

 

Maybe I will post a photo of my cRPG collection....

[PrimeJunta]

First computer game I played was Hunt the Wumpus on a Stanford University UNIX mainframe in 1977, when my dad was there as a visiting researcher. Some days I stayed in his office, and the Wumpus kept me good and quiet.

 

Since this is all about bragging rights, I decided to count my gaming career from that, to just squeak into the "36 years or more" category. 

 

The first game I really got hooked on though was rogue in the early 1980's. Played that from my dad's dumb terminal phoning in at 300 baud.

[Gorth]

We need a 40+ thread. No kids allowed

 

Edit: Had the original Pong. First real computer of my own was a C64 in 1983.

[IndiraLightfoot]

We need a 40+ thread. No kids allowed

 

Edit: Had the original Pong. First real computer of my own was a C64 in 1983.

In that very same year I got my first computer as well - and yes, it was a C64.

 

And in 1986, I still recall my love for the silent floppy drive 1541C.

[Guest 4ward]

does anyone here remember the spectrum zx?  Played manic miner to no end, i loved the spectrum zx, just the keys were really of bad quality and i wore them out. Had a Schneider (Amstrad) CPC after that with a cassette deck and somehow managed to spill an entire can of a cola on it but the Amstrad still worked. Then played games like wing commander, lemmings, Indianapolis 500 on the 286 and 386 sx pc. Also played elite plus back then and am a proud backer of elite dangerous Last game I played was the shadow sun from alan miranda’s Ossian studios on the ipad, it’s a cool little rpg for the ipad.

[Jarmo]

does anyone here remember the spectrum zx?

 

Me, a friend, a Spectrum, two QuickShot joystics and a weekend with The Way of the Exploding Fist.

Not my longest ever gaming binge, but the only time I actually got blisters in my fingers.

Edited October 22, 2014 by Jarmo

[Gorth]

 

does anyone here remember the spectrum zx?

 

Me, a friend, a Spectrum, two QuickShot joystics and a weekend with The Way of the Exploding Fist.

Not my longest ever gaming binge, but the only time I actually got blisters in my fingers.

 

 

A friend and I got so good at that game (on the C64) that a single match could last virtually forever until one of us keeled over from fatigue. That was because you could block incoming attacks 100% of the time and effectively turn it into a game of tic-tac-toe. As a computer in a movie once said, the only way to win is not to play... or hope you had more coffee than your opponent.

[Ink Blot]

I'm trying to remember the module with the crashed space ship in the mountains. 

I think that was Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. My buddies and I played as many of those old TSR modules as we could get our hands on. Somewhere in a storehouse there's a box with all my old AD&D hardcover rule books, a ton of TSR modules, and the original box set that Monte Carlo provided an image of upthread. (I'm picturing that end scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, as I've no idea where my parents stored that stuff).

 

Anyway, as for the topic, I turned 50 this year and my first game was (I think) Pong which a friend of mine got as a gift. I think we were 13 years old? Can't recall for sure - it may have been when I was 14 or 15, but 13 seems about right. We were all completely blown away by that game. Anyway been gaming for a while since then...

[Cantousent]

Yeah, my inky friend, I would have been 8.  Then again... I'm younger than you.  bwahahahaha  :Cant's looking at the ceiling while polishing his halo icon:

[Ink Blot]

Yeah, my inky friend, I would have been 8.  Then again... I'm younger than you.  bwahahahaha  :Cant's looking at the ceiling while polishing his halo icon:

My lawn... get off it, whippersnapper!

[Karkarov]

First games ever played is being discussed eh?

 

Well my first game was Pong on the aforementioned Pong System I owned.  Boring.  Then I think the first game I played on my uncles computer was some version of pre nintendo Donkey Kong.  Once I acquired my Atari (in the end I had a 2600 and a 2800) my first game there was either Dig Dug or Galaga.  I was best at Dig Dug and Centipede though, sadly if I played today I would probably only make it about half way before getting taken out for the final time but as a kid I could actually beat every level of all of them without dying even once.... of course this just caused the game to start over and laugh at you in their never ending cycle ;p.

 

Then the first really good (don't even think about shooting me) game console game out... the Nintendo Entertainment System, aka NES.  First game I played there was the Legend of Zelda.  First game I actually beat, you know that didn't just start over and actually never ended?  Don't laugh it was balls hard people... Ducktales

 

After that it gets more hazy.  I know my first SNES game was the same one as everyone else Super Mario World, and on Genesis it was actually Sonic 2, the first legit great Sonic game.  It was also the last legit great Sonic game.  Strangely even though it is tons more recent I couldn't tell you past that my first games or which I beat first.  I think for PS1 it was Resident Evil but that's about it.  I do remember around that time I finally got my own PC and all I ever did was play Oregon Trail, an ancient version of Jeopardy, Ultima games (tons of Ultima games), and Castles 2 which I would always win by exiling the Pope.

[Ieo]

Well, 2nd poll is "how long have you been a COMPUTER gamer," not consoles.

 

Still waiting to see if anyone else has played The Summoning by SSI (or its prequel, which I didn't play).

 

The first computer games I remember were for the Apple II+. Oregon Trail, something about fishing, and...Legend of Heracles? It was a Heracles thing. And Paws, the typing game! I'm not sure if that counts as a game.

[Nonek]

I remember one of the other first games I played, and quite enjoyed, was a text adventure called Warlord I believe. Something to do with stopping the Roman expansion into Pictland. The one that really blew me away however was Dun Darach, a game about Cuchulain, utterly amazing were my thoughts at the time.

[Cantousent]

Still waiting to see if anyone else has played The Summoning by SSI (or its prequel, which I didn't play).

 

I've been thinking about this, and the cover looks so familiar and I looked up the game and I seem to remember one with hand movements, but I'm like Karkarov, a little hazy on some of the stuff from that far back.

 

I also agree that pong was dreadfully boring, but it was a step.  There was a really old game that was so simple it's laughable now, but kind of addicting back then.  You started with a set amount of grain and a set amount of people.  You planted grain and stored some in granaries and had a certain amount you fed to the people.  Your population would grow, and you had to figure out how much to feed the people and how much to plant, plus rats could get in and eat your grain out of the granaries, so you couldn't hold a huge amount and you were never sure how big a crop you'd get.  I think it was called Kingdom or something.  Nothing but text where you'd input the amounts at a blinking cursor.  lol  Sounds like work now.