First game I ever played

[Opa-Opa]

I was thinking now that I, and a believe a lot of you, am from a generation in which games already existed before we were born. Some people I talk to these days don't even know what an Atari is. Well, "gaming culture" or whatever the crap that is isn't that big around here in Brazil yet, but I always thought that Atari was a piece of culture that wasn't that easy to be dismissed. I think, in the end, it's all about when you started playing games, and if someone was playing before you in your family. My brother had an Atari, so I was born with a console at home. I play videogames since I was a baby and have never stopped since. Says a lot about me I guess. When I was four, around 1989, we got a Master System, and then a Mega Drive in early 90s, and then, around 1996 I think, I was the one who got a PS1, since my brother had lost most interest about games that time, and then a Dreamcast in 2000/2001, and then a PS2 in 2005, and then an Xbox 360 in 2008 I believe. Somewhere around that I got an old "Phantom System", which was nothing more than a NES, but made by a company named Gradiente here in Brazil. There's a lot of those and there are still a lot in the making.

Anyway, I was thinking back and trying to remember the first game I ever played. I can't recall that far back in my life, it must've been Pac-Man, Enduro, Pole Position, Mario Bros, or some other game we had for the Atari. But I can remember the first game I finished, and that was Superman for the Atari. It was a great feat back then since most Atari games had no ending, so that's probably why I remember so vividly. Plus, sometimes it was hard just figuring out what the hell you have to do in a game. I remember clearly I had to capture Lex Luthor's gang (and Lex himself), save Lois if she got captured, and rebuild the bridge that Lex had blown up.



This is exactly like the cartridge I had. I found it some other day but was too lazy to scan or take a picture. Lots of Atari games were released here by this eletronics company called CCE.

Well, what was the first game you guys played or finished?

[Dr. BUGMAN]

Like you, I cannot remember the first game I played (it was probably Super Mario Bros.), but I do remember the first one I beat. It was Kirby's Dreamland. I was so proud of myself, and I still remember the adrenaline rush that I got between first meeting Dedede and eventually besting him. I never, ever got to the final boss in a game before. That used to be something we watched dad do; I still remember counting off hits he managed to land on Mecha-Sonic.

Dreamland and the gameboy were also the first game-related things I owned. Sadly it was lost along with my other prized games such as Donkey Kong '94 and Dreamland 2 when I lent them to my jack-ass sibling.

Me and Kirby had a falling-out for years after and I hadn't played one of his games 'til I discovered emulation. This meant missing out on Adventure and Super Star (I hadn't had an SNES 'til the N64 was obsolete, but still). And it seems the moment we reunited, Sakuria ups and leaves the franchise. Cest la vie.

[G.Silver]

I generally claim the first game I ever played was Frog Bog on the Intellivision. It may not have been the first, but it was the one that stood out as being the most enjoyable for me (my #2 would have been Astrosmash). My family didn't have any video games in the house until the NES, so my memories of playing games at other peoples' homes prior to that are a little mixed up--there was a neighbor who had an Atari that I remember playing Pitfall on (and being completely miserable at it). I played Frog Bog (and a ton of other Intellivision titles) at the home of some of my parents' friends--they didn't have any kids, and I have a feeling the husband had bought the Intellivision with all those games for some great bargain price all at once during the market crash or at a yard sale or something. I was probably 5 or 6 at this time, so I missed the point where any of that would have been "new" and culturally relevant, but I distinctly remember the box art and the style of the packaging, and the fake "wood" panels on the console itself--that all made a pretty big impression on me and I still remember all that quite fondly, even if it's completely tacky.

None of those games had endings that I'm aware of, I think the first game I ever "beat" was Donkey Kong Jr. on the NES.

[Shadow Hog]

Probably Super Mario Bros. or some NES game.

[Neo]

Sonic 1. For the longest time I could not get past Marble Zone. It was either the part in Act 3 where you have to jump from weight to weight or the boss.

[Alexrd]

Sonic 1. For the longest time I could not get past Marble Zone.

That at first. Then was the incredibly hard Labyrinth Zone.

Ans yes, Sonic the Hedgehog was my first game too.

[Opa-Opa]

Donkey Kong Jr. on the NES.

Dude, that game was hard.

[Crisis]

The first game I played was Super Mario World. I mainly watched my dad play it though, I could never get past the first stage in Donut Land (?) with all the caped koopas. I erased his save file by accident, twice.

The first game I owned was Sonic 2. For some reason, it clicked with me a lot more than Mario World and it was the first game I ever finished. I finished it several more times after that, but it wasn't until about a year later when I was introduced to the internet that I realised Super Sonic was in the game, and I was instantly motivated to get all the emeralds. The same year, I started frequenting car boot sales (sort of the British equivalent of garage sales) and picked up Sonic 1, and, some time after that, Sonic 3&K for the PC.

It's funny that I found Sonic 2 much easier than Mario World, because now it's the other way around. It'd take me ages to regain the skills I'd need to finish with all the emeralds, but last year I depressingly managed to get all 96 exits on Mario World in a single weekend without even really trying.

[G.Silver]

Donkey Kong Jr. on the NES.

Dude, that game was hard.

Uh, no? Maybe you're thinking of a different version or have some other criteria for considering it "beat," but as a little kid I considered it done after doing one loop, which is pretty easy. It's not a big time commitment, that's for sure.

[Senbei]

Sonic 3! My first exposure to games was at my neighbor's, and he and his brother owned a lot of Genesis games. They also had some PC shooters and would play via LAN a lot, but I was always more interested in the Genesis. Eventually, I got a Game Boy and was supplied a copy of Super Mario Land, which was the first game I ever owned -- though, before that I owned a Sonic 2 Tiger LCD handheld, which also must have been the first game I'd ever beaten.

[Blank]

I may be remembering this all wrong, but the first experience with games that comes to mind is watching my uncle play Turtles in Time. It wasn't until I got my own SNES that I went out and rented my own game. If I remember correctly, I dearly wanted to rent Super Mario Brothers and somehow the box ended up containing Street Fighter 2. Oh well, funnily enough I despise the game nowadays and every rendition of it. That includes SF4.

[Blount]

I have no idea which game was my first, but I do know it was for the ZX Spectrum. Good old Speccy. In retrospect, it's kind of odd thinking that some video-games were stored in tapes. This also made the loading times dreadful and gave me immunity to contemporary ones - nowadays you'd probably wait for half a minute tops, whereas we had to wait for over 5 minutes just to boot up a game, and that's if we weren't met with "R: Tape loading error, 0:1"!

I remember being shocked when we got our Sega Master System - no loading times at all! It blew my mind. When reminiscing about these things, I often wonder how I would have reacted if someone came from the future and showed me a console from this generation. Hell, if having colored sprites made me excited back then...

I think the first game I ever finished was Bubble Bobble for the Speccy, but I used an invulnerability POKE for that. That might have been the first time I saw a congratulatory screen (it scared me almost as much as the boss due to how unexpected I found it), and it wasn't a very good one. In fact, it wasn't even a screen. The words [WELL DONE!] just flashed on-screen. Oh well, that hasn't prevented me from repeating the process countless times thereafter.

[Green Gibbon!]

My dad had an Intellivision II and a few games that, like Stearns' neighbors, I'm pretty sure he picked up really cheap at the dawn of the crash. I don't specifically remember which game I played first, but Frogger definitely stands out in my mind as my favorite of the bunch and the one I played most often. Burger Time is a close second, followed by Beauty and the Beast, Demon Attack, and Atlantis. He also had B-17 Bomber, which to this day I can't figure out how to play.

The first game I ever beat (by myself) was Duck Tales on the NES. In those days I didn't usually have the patience to sit around and play a game long enough to beat it, but I was stuck at my grandmother's house for a weekend. There was no joy in my achievement. All I remember thinking was, "Crap, now what am I supposed to do?"

[Sniffnoy]

We had a Colecovision with three games - Frenzy, Donkey Kong, and Pitfall. I assume the first two didn't have actual ends; I didn't beat Pitfall either, but I didn't even realize you could - the game doesn't do anything to make this clear. We'd lost the manuals but I recall finding them once and reading it and I still don't think even the manual made it clear. Eventually my parents bought me a Genesis with Sonic the Hedgehog; however for a long time I could never get past Green Hill Zone. See, the manual said that you need to hit Dr. Robotnik 8 times; but I didn't realize this meant his ship counted. I would jump just right to hit him, but I always just hit the ship instead. (And when you hit the ship, he laughs at you!) I certainly wasn't aware enough of video game conventions to realize that the flashing meant he was hit.

Now, of course, even if I just did this, I shouldn't have died against him, right? I should have won after 8 failed attempts at hitting Robotnik himself, right? Ah, but I was convinced that that wrecking ball was a platform you had to jump from in order to hit him properly. I'm not sure how it came to be that my many deaths to that thing failed to convince me otherwise, but I guess I just concluded I was somehow doing it wrong. I don't remember how I eventually came to realize that it sufficed to hit the ship; presumably one time I just decided I the wrecking ball thing wasn't working, I'd try it without that, and I only realized it after hitting the ship the 8th time. For all I know I didn't quite believe it even then and may have had to play again to make sure. I do remember one time before I had figured this out, my dad came home and told me he'd seen someone playing the game at the store, and he'd beaten Green Hill Zone, and I asked him how; but whatever he said, I either didn't believe it or didn't find it helpful. I think it was something along the lines of "he just hit him a bunch of times", which I already knew I had to do... the problem lay in the meaning of "hit him".

Sonic is therefore probably the first game I beat, but I don't remember. I got Castle of Illusion shortly thereafter and I remember at first beating that on easy, except of course on Easy you don't even play the full game so that hardly counts; it took me quite a while longer before I could beat the whole game.

[Malchik]

It would have been Super Mario. That's the only game coming to memory.

[Neo]

Sniffnoy's story makes me imagine he was born as an old geezer.

I never really had any trouble with the boss, because I discovered the invincibility monitor almost as instantly as I found the secret stash under the rotating logs in GHZ3. Most of the times it was the large spike pits in acts 2 and 3 that killed me. Oh, the dreadful tales of the bobbing pillar segment in GHZ2.

I guess I was just that good.

[plasticwingsband]

Probably Duck Hunt. I distinctly remember standing right in front of the tv, and some (much) older relative telling me that I was cheating, and had to move back to play the game properly.

[Sniffnoy]

Sniffnoy's story makes me imagine he was born as an old geezer.

Hm; I guess that sort of stubbornness and literalism could be associated with an old geezer, now that you mention it, and quite possibly that level of dumbness. Funny, I always just considered it as "dumb little kid".

I never really had any trouble with the boss, because I discovered the invincibility monitor almost as instantly as I found the secret stash under the rotating logs in GHZ3. Most of the times it was the large spike pits in acts 2 and 3 that killed me. Oh, the dreadful tales of the bobbing pillar segment in GHZ2.

I knew about the invincible - but it's not helpful if you're trying to do fundamentally the wrong thing with it!

[Isuka]

For me it was Pole Position, the arcade one. Then, quite some time later, the NES pack-in Super Mario Bros. + Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. 3.

First one I beat was the Genesis version of Mortal Kombat 3, followed by Sonic 2, IIRC.

[Green Gibbon!]

I distinctly remember standing right in front of the tv

Is there any other way to play Duck Hunt? I certainly never got the hang of it otherwise.

I still don't understand how that sort of technology works. It's obviously primitive - even the original, first-game-console-ever Magnavox Odyssey had a light gun - but even though I never thought much of it at the time, in retrospect, it was pretty amazing, wasn't it?

[plasticwingsband]

I mean, I was right up there. The barrel of the gun was actually touching the glass. I was told I had to stand x number of feet away from the tv, and my score went down drastically. To this day, I hate that fucking dog.

[Delphine]

Honestly? I'm pretty sure it was Pacman, on my uncle's Atari. There were a couple of other games I vaguely remember playing in the system, but that's the one that stands out. I remember I became really interested in gaming playing Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers on my friend's NES, and then I got a Genesis for my birthday, played Sonic 2, and was hooked for life.

[Brazillian Cara]

I pretty much own my interest in videogames to my cousins - of both sides of my family. Half of them had a Master System with Sonic 1 (and Alex Kidd and some others I don't remember), while the other half had a SNES with Super Mario World (and other forgettable titles). Most of the time I just watched them play (and occasionaly beat) the games, but they usually let me give a try - I don't really remember which one I played first, or how well I did (probably not much). It wouldn't be until I got a SNES bundled with Donkey Kong Country (plus Mortal Kombat 2 and Batman Forever) that I had games to call my own.

As for the first game I beat myself... probably Street Fighter 2 on easy - even then, it wasn't very spectacular.

[Gaz]

I'm not too sure. I remember the first console I owned was an Atari 2600 and think the first game I played on it was either Jr Pac-Man or Crystal Castles. I also vaguely remember playing a Popeye game at the arcade but whether that was first or not I really can't remember.

Topics like this make me feel old.

[The Turtle Guy]

My dad would always download the latest shareware DOS games for our home computer when I was a wee lad. The first games I ever played were probably in the Commander Keen series or the Duke Nukem series. My first console was a Genesis I got when I was about four or so and my most earliest, most vivid memories of that involved Sonic 2.