What was the first computer game you played?

Beld

Banned
B
First games I played were on my uncles commodore64, I was too young to remember now what games they were, one of them involved little pixelated men doing kirate at each other, first game I was old enough to really remember playing was Kings Bounty on an old B&W apple classic.
 

ricp

R
I think called Meteor on the ZX81. I think it came on cassette, although I don't remember exactly, however I know I never typed it in and there wasn't many other options to get games onto the ZX81!

It was written in BASIC, relied on ASCII graphics and literally was nothing more than a circle in the middle (I am guessing some form of planet/star) a square that you controlled (you ship) and was in an orbit of the circle and an asterisk (presumably the eponymous Meteor) would enter into the screen and either get caught by the gravity of the circle, complete a few decreasing orbits then disappear into the circle, or it would shoot off back out of the screen. All the time you had to keep your ship from both getting too close to the circle or being hit by the meteor.

Quite a bit of maths involved when you think of it. Not that I did at the time I was only 10.

Anyway, I managed to hit one of the keys when playing and broke the game leaving me at the command prompt. I somehow managed to get a list of the code (the Sinclair's had keys mapped to BASIC commands so it was more luck than design) and I marvelled at the inner workings.

That was how I became a coder. I now develop web sites and web apps.
 

Monarch Black

Monarch Black
We had the Pong console when I was a kid then an Atari 2600, but I guess my first PC game would be Artillery or one of the similar games. It was a while ago. Like Ricp, I know my first games were on cassette tape drive.
Artillery_apple.png
 

Ommasaur

Ommasaur
I first played pong as a kid, but the first COMPUTER game I ever played was a Scott Adams adventure, The Count. And I was forever after hooked.
 

Surly_Badger

Surly_Badger
Spacewar on a DEC PDP-1 at the Johns Hopkins Uni summer fair in 1970. They had 2 seats and would let a player keep their seat until they lost. I nailed down one of the chairs for almost an hour. :)

Then there was Star Trek on my computer club's Apple II. After that I did the whole Origin trajectory: Wing Commander, Privateer, and MOO, and the Lucas Arts X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and XVT. Even dabbled a bit in EVE. I guess I've played some space games!! When I learned to code, in college, I ported Peter Langston's EMPIRE to a Gould SEL running UTS-32 and spent a lot of time playing that, and rogue, and later hack. [Edit: I also coded on MUDs in the 80s; if you ever used UberMUD or UnterMUD or any of the MUD engines with a disk-based persistent store, that was my code]

My best/worst gaming "derp" moment was in one of the Wing Commander games, when you are supposed to drop the Temblor Bomb on Kilrah, I fought for hours to get through the Kilrathi navy and slew many many of them for what seemed like hours. I complained to a friend about how awful that mission was and he said "that'll teach you to read the mission briefing" -- apparently there was a stealth device you were supposed to engage and the mission was a milk run, my hours-long battle with the entire Kilrathi fleet was a completely stupid waste of time.
 
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KulKulcan

KulKulcan
Ommasaur said:
I first played pong as a kid, but the first COMPUTER game I ever played was a Scott Adams adventure, The Count. And I was forever after hooked.
Click to expand...

On PC it would be would have been some kind of text adventure.... But the first game I went and purchased for my new 386 was Tie Fighter.

256px-Swtiefightercd.jpg
 
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