I think, that my first computer game I have played was Pacman. It was damned good: text interface on the screen with 23 lines and 80 characters.

My first computer game was called "Ladder". It came bundled with my first computer, a Kaypro II I bought in 1982.

It had a 2.5 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor, 64 KiB of RAM, dual, single-sided, 191 kB 5¼ inch floppy disk drives, and an 80 column green monochrome 9" CRT. Hot stuff, huh. It was portable, at 29 lbs, and used the CP/M operating system.

Ladder was a Donkey Kong clone, using only the ASCII characters as 'graphics'. I wasted a lot of time in this little game. It was (still is) fun to play, and quite challenging at the higher levels. There is a java version available now, here is a link:
WWW Link

Some of you younger players should give it a try. You can see for yourselves what computer games were like in 1982. Even though the 'graphics' are simple, the game is as challenging as anything on the market today.

I think I got the gaming bug back in 1989 or thereabouts after purchasing an Amiga500 computer (I still have it btw ).

First games played on that were the point and click Sierra adventure games:
Space Quest III
Manhunter: New York, Manhunter: San Francisco

Shortly after that I got hooked on the Koei strategy games like:
Nobunaga's Ambition
Genghis Khan
Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Then it was on to my first PC, an NEC 386 something or other (early '90s) with two great classics from MicroProse:
Sid Meier's Civilization
X-COM: UFO Defense (also known as UFO: Enemy Unknown)

Those last two games did it for me big time; there was no turning back and my strategy addiction had begun in earnest.

Apple: Oregon Trail
PC: Falcon (the original)

Yes, I'm an old-timer.

The first PC game I ever played was Castles II.

The first PC game I actually purchased and played on my own computer was Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Ah yes, good times, good times....

Some text adventure on the C-64 where you were a rockstar trying to earn fame and fortune before you got to the age of 35. Don't remember the name of it.

Other notables from that time and system. Larry Bird vs. Doctor J one on one and Aliens(quite a complex game with passable gfx at the time).
And I couldn't forget Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure .

My first computer game was a backgammon game loaded from cassette tape on a TRS80 model I...and to give an idea of the quality of opponent the AI had to offer the board was set up incorrectly...my guess is the programmers had never actually played backgammon.

Someone mentioned Star Control but the best game ever to be on floppy disk has to be Star Control II! It was my first PC game and it's still getting mentions in the gaming media like in some recent PC Gamer issues. By the way, the game is free to download and I have probably gone back to play this game over 8 times throughout my life. Great game with a mix of different genres- definitely unique for its time.

Lol... you and the rest of planet Earth... talk about RIGGED! Got to love those old A.I. that just beelined your character... and if you tried to run, you'd end up dragging around about fifty bad dudes till you found the next town.


Speaking of rigged... My game is Agent USA, c64. First game and could never get enough of it. Thing is, I'm still to this day unsure if there is a way to win this thing. Apparently you had to take one hundred crystals to the fuzzbomb and you would win... but everytime I managed this feat, wading through zounds of fuzzbodies... the stupid bomb would just sit still and not eat my crystals. Yet if I ran into it... my crystals would half like a regular fuzzbody attack.

Any help? I've googled this for years but to no avail. As it is, I'm convinced that the program is some pi55-take allegory for television... and the fact that there may be no end script only strengthens this idea.

Please, somebody, give me closure on this!

Also... I highly recommend firing it up on an emu just to watch the intro. The tune when Agent USA walks onto the screen is still gold.

This is great!
My very first game that I brought was Ghostbusters. For the Commodore 64. I had a few others that I can't remember. I love that game.

I feel old to some of you who's first game was Doom or Warcraft.

First game: Canyon Climber - Radio Shack TRS-80 Color "CoCo"
http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/canyonclimber.html

(link to the computer - note the cassette slot)
http://oldcomputers.net/coco.html

The two games that set me for life as a gamer:
Final Fantasy and Wing Commander.

The first time getting the flying ship in Final Fantasy, totally awesome. Perhaps the first game I ever actually completed. Wing Commander was my first seemingly "3-D" action game. Nothing better than realizing I was ducking at the keyboard while flying through a minefield.

Honorable mention:
Quake - took me forever to start using the mouse. Using a mouse was a fad and I did not want to be any part of that.

PC: First got one in 1993, had Sim City / Myst and Wolfenstein for it.

JaeRod I remember Ghostbusters on C64. I remember play that and one of my favorites, Yoshi Samari Bunny (something like that).

We played the game so load that it burned up floppy drive and it started smoking. Trashed the game and I didnt have another copy.

There were others like PaperBoy and Defender of the Crown. The C64 was the foundation of my computer experience. The first programming I did, the first desktop publishing, the first computer troubleshooting. I could go on for a while.

Myst was another important game in my life. A friend and I borrowed the game and played it straight through on his PowerPC 6100. Let's not forget Duke Nukem. Which would be the first PC multiplayer over modem game I played.

We would setup multiplayer parties where 3 or 4 people would be at two houses. After 20min of getting the games connected we would finally be able to take turns blowing each other up with laser trip bombs and rockets.

LodeRunner on the Apple II (green mono-chrome screen...woot!   )

1981 was such a good year!   



...oh and Joust was the shit!

my first pc game was a dos chess game haha

WWW Link

Atari 520ST in 1987 : Dungeon Master !
Remember Chani Sayyadina Sihaya and Sonja She Devil ?!
And rockpiles and screamers ...

Almost identical experience with mighty duke.

Oh the joy of stealing someone elses freeze with somne pistol spam, or stomping someone elses shrink job, or filling a an entire dark room with pipebombs and watching your opponent pause for that split second to wonder why he's started picking up single pipebombs all of a sudden. BOOM!

osborne computer cp/m operating system i think was "zork" one of the first on commodore was "elite". pc 286 was "a bards tale"

wolfenstein, doom, civilization, earliest pc games i can remember playing

Anyone know of this game where a boy gets his dog stolen by aliens or somesuch thing and he goes on a mission to get his dog back. It was a sidescrolling platformer.

I think it might have been Earth Bound
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EarthBound

Hacker on the C64. Took me ages to figure out what the game was supposed to be about, probably 'cause I didn't bother reading the manual. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever read any manuals before hoiking in to playing most games! Play first, ask questions later.   

And head over heels. Great old school isometric puzzle game played hot-swapping with my brothers. A reasonably faithful remake can be found over at retrospec.

Rodent's Revenge, Crystal Caves, Duke Nukem (the old side-scrolling platformer one), and Wolfenstein 3d were among my first pc games.

My firsts were on my Grandpas IBM, Ski Free, Rodents Revenge, Sim Tower, and MS Flight Simulator (dos version) to name a few. I only got the chance to play them a couple times a year though.

When my dad finally got a computer (which came with a free upgrade to the soon to be released Windows 98) it came with Age of Empires, my first RTS. Afterwards I had Warcraft II, and my favorite, Total Annihilation.

My first game was Age of Empires. Sadly I never tried multiplayer on any games until less than a year ago. But it was pretty fun too

Anyone remember Corridor 7, which came in 2 flavors: floppy and CD ROM? I have the CDROM version, and it is MSDOS.