Game Discussions What was your first exposure to video games?

I wanna say this as far as I can remember ...

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I remember Battle Zone? on arcade mesmerising me with vector gfx. This fascination carried on up today. It is a simple 3D tech that allows the mind to wander and decorate its barren surfaces.
 
Battlezone !!! I remember it well.
That was one of my first arcade game successes. A local cowboy bar near where I worked had one in the back. Battlezone was a game that you could play as long as you did not die. A friend and I would put a quarter (or 50cents iirc) in it and play as long as we wanted (tag teamed it so we could take turns going to the bathroom to drain a beer or 2).
Once you learned to Not Die you could play forever (back up when you see them drop and shoot like crazy).
After a while you'd get bored, but it was a new adventure and fun. After the boredom sat in, we'd watch the crazies try to ride the mechanical bull. Yeehaw !!
 
I do recall that there was a time, when Asteroids first came out, when I held the top score at the arcade.

It lasted a couple of weeks, until the other players caught on to how it worked (you had to use counter-thrust to stop, and aim your thrust vectors as needed to move about. In other words there was no friction, which I understood right away because I was more science-y than the regulars).

That was my brief moment of gaming fame. I'm the only one who remembers, of course :p
 
My earliest memory of a computer game was a text only D&D game (late 70s).

I think my first 'video' game was Wizardry, a wire-frame monochrome D&D like game played on my Apple II computer (early 80s)
 
On ZX Spectrum my favourite game was Kennedy Approach and I could never figure out what "hold right/left at VOR" meant. I always tried to make them do it over the beacon. Only decades later on C64 emulator I found out how to do it. I think there was also a rudimentary flight sim you could hotseat: one pilot, one weapon officer. Latter could move missile aquire reticle about. Should have been an option in Gunship.
 
One early game on a machine I cannot member was some lunar landing thing. Vector gfx on greenscreen monitor in very little format. I was little boy and a dad showed us around at his workplace and demonstrated it at a birthday party. I dreamed to land ships ever since.
 
I do recall that there was a time, when Asteroids first came out, when I held the top score at the arcade.

It lasted a couple of weeks, until the other players caught on to how it worked (you had to use counter-thrust to stop, and aim your thrust vectors as needed to move about. In other words there was no friction, which I understood right away because I was more science-y than the regulars).

That was my brief moment of gaming fame. I'm the only one who remembers, of course :p
I held the high score on the table top Defender machine we had in the corporal's mess for nearly a year before the machine was thrown out and replaced with a pool table. I was stationed at Sennelager at the time, left my regiment a year later to go off and do other stuff. I still hear the sounds from that game in my sleep...awesome :D

 
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I held the high score on the table top Defender machine we had in the corporal's mess for nearly a year before the machine was thrown out and replaced with a pool table. I was stationed at Sennelager at the time, left my regiment a year later to go off and do other stuff. I still hear the sounds from that game in my sleep...awesome :D

So it was you why the MP stormed the place at Paderborn with truncheons back then?
 
Mhm, gotta take what's on offer. That's why we shoved you lads to Westphalia...
I must admit...I much preferred Berlin as a posting...although it was very different back then before the wall came down. A friend of mine who had been stationed up at Spandau in the 70's like I was, went back a few years ago to see how Berlin had changed...he got hopelessly lost, ended up at the Soviet war memorial in Treptower park...which used to be in the East. Fortunately, he knew the route from there back to the crossroads at Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse where checkpoint Charlie used to be the gate back to the American sector. Back in the 70's, if we ever got lost driving around the city, we just followed the wall around until we saw some landmark or checkpoint we recognised :)
 
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I must admit...I much preferred Berlin as a posting...although it was very different back then before the wall came down. A friend of mine who had been stationed up at Spandau in the 70's like I was, went back a few years ago to see how Berlin had changed...he got hopelessly lost, ended up at the Soviet war memorial in Treptower park...which used to be in the East. Fortunately, he knew the route from there back to the crossroads at Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse where checkpoint Charlie used to be the gate back to the American sector. Back in the 70's, if we ever got lost driving around the city, we just followed the wall around until we saw some landmark or checkpoint we recognised :)
Yeah, wall came down and it was a special time. Ppl would move there to get out from home. Rents were low in the east. Nights were cold because noone ordered coals for winter. Clubs springing up in the most impossible places. I'd drive to Berlin in my car and pick up impossible passengers. Ppl would just converge there, things were happening. They took the wall down in no time and only left a minor section standing. If you wanted to experience subculture, underground, muzak, big city lights and 24h days - Berlin was the place. Aufbruch is the word - there is no English equivalent - maybe "setting out on journey".
 
Adventure in 1980 on a PDP 11/45. Apparently this and zork are all derivatives of a text based game called 'Colossal Caverns Adventure' released in 1976.

That (Colossal Cave Adventure) was definitely my first computer game, back in 1977 or 78 IIRC. My dad had brought home this massive typewriter-like machine and a ream of computer paper so he could work from home for a while. It had no screen, it just typed text onto the paper, and you put your phone’s handset into a cradle, so you heard the bings and bings of and screeches from terminal as it communicated with the mainframe at the other end of the line. He let me play that game one time, and it turned out hard to get me to stop. I was devastated when he had to return the terminal, though I was soon distracted when my parents bought me this new fangled Dungeons and Dragons game for Christmas. :)
 
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