My Dad had an Amstrad that you had to lift the cover up and put your hand on the 3.5 floppy dribe to make it work. We had a game called 'Magic Carpet' or something.
Later we got a Windows 3.5 computer back when it booted to DODS amd you ran Windows from a command. I remember playing Prince of Persia and a game called 'Cosmos Comic Adventures'
I think it was Track and Field, then I think my brother didn't like the Commodore and they exchanged that for an NES (I don't know about the transaction, I was very young). Most of my earliest gaming memories are of SMB1.
We had an Apple computer in the late 80s/early 90s though I couldn't tell you which one. I vaguely remember playing a game involving bear astronauts catching falling apples in baskets but have never been able to figure out what it was.
Heroes of Might and Magic V.
I was like 5 or 6 y.o. and I played it on the uncle's old laptop. After 1 hour working in the garden, he gave us a 1 hour to play with my big brother. I loved just making a huge army by skipping a move lol. It was such a good time)
I don't remember what it was called, it was a police and robber kind of game. It was a 2d platformer where you (a stick figure robber) had to run from stick figure police men. All you can do is dig a hole where the chasers fall in and then run back over them. It was pretty simple but fun.
Maga Man X on the SNES. I still vividly remember the first time I ever beat a boss in it, too. I remember running out of my room to look down the loft to the living room area and screamed to my mom that I finally beat Chill Penguin. She wasn't impressed. I immediately went back to my room and beat another boss. Then another. After probably a couple of years of just dying over and over, something clicked that day, and I was able to beat all the bosses. And I have been hooked on gaming ever since.
Probably one of the simple home Atari machines - a Breakout game with a couple other "games", like "basketball". Although my only memories of playing it were later.
Combat for the 2600 is probably the first one I actually remember playing. Actually, might be Adventure.
The earliest ones I remember well - like, my earliest strong memories of playing - are C64 games like Miner 2049er, Jumpman, Repton, Space Taxi.
Then remember a wholllle lot of shit for the rest of the early-mid 80s while I was still pretty young :)
My kid is now a big fan of pretty much all those games. I'm surprised how many. (And surprised about a few he isn't)
If we are talking about my own games it was either sim city 2000 or Hey You Pikachu! On the N64 but prior to that ive played bouts of mario kart on the SNES or the very early Microsoft Flight Simulator at other peoples houses.
Combat (1977) for the Atari 2600. Tbf it was some time in the early eighties, not straight after release when “that kid on the road that had everything” finally also got a console.
My parents had a console that had knobs for the controls. I remember pong and hockey, but it had other games, too. I'm 99% sure it was a Sears Tele-Game system.
Some of my friends had Atari consoles (with stick controllers), but my first console was an NES, followed by a Game Boy (which I still have).
I just want to say, I love social media. I think that the afterlife is a giant social media mindmeld. Half the joy here is nostalgia for the land of the dead.
And one more thing. leminal.space has a really nice UI.
It might not be the first but my oldest memory of playing a game was a very old pc game that I can't remember much about and I've never been able to actually find anything about it anywhere. All I remember is that it was a game that had colored rats on conveyor belts and you had to sort them. I'm pretty sure it had a top down perspective as the conveyor belts would loop back to where the rats came from.
Then he bought an Atari 2600 before getting into computers such as the Commodore VIC=20, Commodore 64, Atati ST, before moving onto "PC Compatible" computers such as a Zenith, Vendex HeadStart (endorsed by WWF wrestler King Kong Bundy), then Tandy S/L or T/L and then we started building our own.
Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars. My Dad had an IBM machine that booted up in DOS, and he installed a bunch of games on it for us. I played every Commander Keen game (including Keen Dreams), Wacky Wheels, Oregon Trail. Sim City, and Sim Ant on that machine (although I think I needed to boot up Windows to run those last two).
Oregon Trail on an old Apple IIGS. It was in the elementary school computer lab, and they would let us play that or Carmen Sandiego whenever we were done with our work. We would have little contests to see who could go the farthest without their party dying.
Octopus on a Nintendo game and watch (though it's hard to put things in order, I had a knockoff portable game in 1987 "submarine battle", and I feel the Nintendo has to be earlier, or what else could the knockoff be knocking off? Yeah game and watch was 1980 onwards)
Technically a TV console knock off pong. But it was awesome all the same.
First coin op was .. space invaders - table top edition.
It’s hilarious / amazing how back then it was all a brand new frontier , but you just put your money in anyway, and figured it out with a sense of awe and adventure and zero doubt.
fast forward nearly 50 years, and I’m yelling “this world has gone to shit” in the supermarket if they move my beer brand to a different shelf.
I'll start: my earliest memory is playing Cool Croc Twins with my big brother on his Commodore 64. I also remember watching him play Shinobi or The Last Ninja (although both games look entirely different, I can't say with any certainty which one it was).
For most people under 50 i would guess they cant remember which it was. Even 40 years ago there were lots of arcade games, home game systems, and little portable game devices. So most people under 50 probably can't remember the actual first one they played.
But you can answer the question "what's the first video game that you remember playing?"
For me it was some atari 2600 game that a much older cousin had, i don't remember which specific game it was.
I don't remember, it was some god awful (by todays standards) game written for the Vic 20, I remember Omega Race and Clowns but I am sure there was a few before them
Commodore 64 for me as well. Can't remember which one was the first for me either. Maybe Giana Sisters or Usagi Yojimbo. We had tons of floppies with games and large printouts showing which game was where.
I know my dad and I played Ace Combat, Crash Bandicoot, and Independence Day when I was suuuuuper young, so it's probably one of those 3
Horrifically enough I remember equating one of the power-ups in ID to the shirt Steve from Blues Clues wore (this might legit be my earliest memory period) so it's probably that steaming pile of garbage
Computer - Radar Rat Race on the C-64, bought it in cartridge when I got the computer just to have something to start with. Last cartridge game I bought too, the rest were either on tape, later floppy disk, or typed in from a computer magazine. On the latter, I think they were trying to develop a generation of programmers with those and intentionally put bugs in them to make them not work until you fixed them. Every one.
Arcade - that's a harder one to remember, but I do know it/they would have been at a roller skating rink. Probably Asteroids as that would have gotten my attention first, or Turbo or Wizard of Wor.
Mine was a baseball game on an Atari 2600. Couldn't tell you more than that, my granpa was super into baseball and tech so he bought an Atari brand new. We dug it out years later and played.
It's hard to say because I started when I was 4. I know the first one I have memory of, though: The Settlers. I was probably 5 by that point. I also have a very clear memory of my father, who would die two years later, coming back home from work, to whom I said: "I finished the first level of The Settlers before you", to which he replied: "No shit (or something like that), you don't have to go to work". There, I understood work wasn't a great thing.
I also have other memories of The Settlers and other games when my father was still alive, so it was necessarily before I was 7. These include: The Chaos Engine, Arkanoid, Cannon Fodder, Lemmings, Monkey Island 1 (it was 13 floppy disks). All of this was before I could really read and they were in English anyway (except Monkey Island), which I didn't speak. I played on an Amiga 500.
but I remember being really excited about pac man in 1980. I mean who wasn't. Donkey Kong and Zaxxon are also potentials, oh, and Moon Patrol. Hard to say.
The first game I remember playing was, I think Paper Mario on the n64. But, I knew I had an n64 way before my first memory so I don't know what exactly my first game was.
Some kind of (Atari?) console that I think only had pong, or if it had other games I can't remember them.
The first good games I played? Prince of Persia and Karateka on DOS, also mines of Titan but I had zero idea how to play that. Also word muncher; loved that game but I was a dumb kid and didn't know the solutions many times. I also got an MSX keyboard and the little tape machine addon that somehow played video games off audio cassettes. I still have zero idea how you put video games on audio cassettes.
Super Mario Bros 3 on a secondhand SNES, there was this jump on the first level that I struggled with, the one with the wooden textured blocks and I had to get either my mom or my dad to help me with it hahaha
There was lots of Atari/intellivision games my dad and uncles had when I was little. But first first? Probably like Combat though, I have several memories of playing at my great uncles house using the weirdest controller ever built, it had like little picture slides you put in that showed what buttons did what for the game.
It was either Super Mario Bros. on NES or Excitebike. Unfortunately followed shortly thereafter by Ghostbusters and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Mind you, the NES was a good bit before my time, and I was playing a hand-me-down. I count myself lucky to have had the same experience many kids in the 80s had on Christmas Day when the NES hit North America. Even with all the gizmos now, the NES and N64 really capture me in a way that I'm not sure they would had I grown up with a PS2 like everyone else.
I'm not sure which one was first in order so I'll just list them
My first console was Sega Mega Drive 2 (Genesis 2 in the US) with Lion King. I just recently read a thread where people said the giraffe and monkey level was so game breaking for them while I remember that I ran this level blind as a kid.
My school buddy's sister had a NES with Super Mario Bros. and World Cup.
My first own PC was my uncle's old 286 DOS PC which could run Prince of Persia in black and white.
On my uncle's new PC i played Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn for the first time which started my love for RTS games.
I don't actually remember if this is the first video game I ever played, but two of the first was Myst and The Gene Machine, and I mostly treated them as activity centers
Don't know the name... It was on DOS, exploring a castle or something, your character was the spade character from cards, and in one of the first rooms you find a... helmet, or was it sheild?
earliest memory is of the Nintendo 64, but it's a blur to me whether i played Crash Bandicoot, Goldeneye, Banjo Kazooie, or Mario Kart 64 first. Probably Mario Kart because we had the steering wheel attachment and that's irresistible to kids.
Need For Speed Underground 2. That was a great racing game. Shortly followed by Burnout 3 Takedown. Got a PlayStation 2 bundle with both of those games for Christmas as a kid.
I remember playing a few games at my cousins 286 when I was like 6 or 7. There were Accolade F1 and Moto GP, Zany Golf and one more game I just can't remember the name. Its gameplay was a bit similar to pacman - narrow paths with obstacles and I think enemies chasing you, you played as a boy and there was even raft across a creek and I believe there was grizzly bear involved somehow. But the name? No idea...