Game Discussions What was your first exposure to video games?

Mole HD

Mole HD
Navigare Necesse Est said:
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".
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Berlin back then was a truly fascinating place, one that will always hold many vivid memories and experiences for me as a young soldier.

Spandau prison next door to our camp where Rudolf Hess was still alive and imprisoned, The Brandenburg gate, the Siegessäule, Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, many others...My overriding memory of Berlin back in the 70's were the oil derrick like bell towers everywhere and the eternal flame in Theodor-Heus platz. It was said back then that the flame was only to be extinguished when the two halves of Berlin were reuinited and the bells were to be rung all over the city. I was sad I never heard them ring when I was there.

Even back then, (West) Berlin was a place where everything went...a true 24 hour city where anything and everything was possible. I also remember standing at the top of the old NSA radar dome on the Teufelsberg at night, looking over the amazing cityscape of Berlin toward the east. The only lights visible in the east outside of the checkpoints and immediate floodlit area around the wall was the Funkturm at Alexanderplatz...the rest was in almost total darkness.

I visited east Berlin quite a few times when I was there...we used to call them 'flag tours' where we all dressed up in our best uniforms and went over to annoy the Soviet soldiers at Treptower park before walking around sightseeing in the Russian sector. We had a decent black market trading thing going with the Soviet soldiers so our frequent visits were as popular for them as it was for us.

We used to watch the daily changing of the guard ceremony at the Soviet war memorial...then hold up score cards...like the ice skating ones... marking their performance. :D

We always got on well with the Soviet soldiery back then, considering it was at the height of the cold war...but after all, soldiers aren't politicians, just the same young boys with guns...no matter what flag we stood in front of :)
 
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Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
The arcade cabinets were video games. Pinball tables were dexterity games. The borders kinda blur for me. They were all exciting - but I would never have thought that Donkey Kong would lead to entire worlds ready to be explored or new forms of narrative storytelling via games.
 

Darkfyre99

Darkfyre99

nigeljk

N
I grew up in Hastings, so we got 'new' stuff at the start of every season. Space invaders never really caught my imagination. Asteroid, how ever, consumed many 10p coins until I could clock it and by then you had so many 'lives' left you could leave it for a novice to get some real gameplay in.
I progressed onto Missile Command. Ours was a massive thing with a large tracker ball.
I got a ZX 81 and didn't use that for games, although there plenty. I leant Sinclair BASIC and then tried to convert it to BBCBASIC in the local department store which had a Bank of 'B's with mulitsync monitors.

The 'game' that changed everything for me was Aviator on the BBC. And then Elite blew my mind, and still does.
 

RooksBailey

RooksBailey
The Atari 2600 for me! I think my first passion game was "Combat", which was the pre-alpha for War Thunder. :LOL:

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As the old meme goes:

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Hank

H
Pong 1972 (neighbor had it)
Worm or snake circa 1977 TRS-80 (bought it a few months after release iirc)
One we played a lot was Missile Command 1980
Arcade game I learned to play all night on a quarter: BattleZone 1980 (if you didn't die, no time limit - a friend and I would tag team it and monopolize it for long time)
nuff said - yes I'm old

prior to 1972 it was chess or table top hex map military games with little pieces of cardboard
 
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