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For The Very First Time

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I don’t remember my first video game. Not because it wasn’t memorable, but because I was, quite honestly, playing them since before I can remember. They were introduced to me very early on in my life. A story I am fond of telling about this involves a scrapbook my parents kept when I was a baby. There is a segment for “Baby’s Favorite Games” which supposedly is dedicated for stories about Peekaboo and Pat-a-cake. My section details Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Donkey Kong, and Pitstop.

Mister Adequate has a similar story– he doesn’t remember what his first game was, either!

We do have very early memories, though. A few of mine include:

  • Video games popping up suspiciously in dreams (and nightmares.)
  • Getting in trouble for saying a swear word during a particularly scary part of a game (I had no idea that it was a swear word! Also, that game was called Lunar Outpost, and it really did get scary after a while.)
  • My dad holding me up so I could reach the controls of a Super Mario Bros. arcade machine at a store somewhere.
  • Greatly enjoying a “game” about Christmas on a tiny monitor– I was very, very young for this, because we upgraded to a much bigger monitor in short order. I must have still been in diapers.
  • Staying indoors during recess of Kindergarden year so I could play Word Munchers on a green-screen IBM. I also merrily did this to occupy myself during a Parent-Teacher Conference, and I overheard my teacher remarking to my parents that I was the class’s “computer whiz”– the first time I’d ever heard the term.

These are some of my earliest memories. I remember more and more as I get a little older, but picking an earliest is hard to do.

Do you remember your first game? What are some of your memories?

Written by: Pike on July 18, 2011.

10 thoughts on “For The Very First Time”

  2. As for memories, I’ll never forget my Dad bringing home my first computer, a C64 – the beginning of the end. It came with Lemans Racing and International Soccer on cartridge. I think that was the last time I saw sunlight…

  3. Can’t remember exactly, but it was most probably “moto”. 16 colors motobyke “simulator”. The name was probably longer, but then we called games after their filenames (moto.exe in this case). The first and only IBM PC in our school. Must’ve been 386 in the beginning of the 1990’s
    A bit later there was also tetrisn (with “*” running at the bottom of the common tetris glass, which could be killed resulting in an instant game over or slowly chocked to death in a closed space).
    Some games from those times are still with me, migrating to new hard drives along with other data.

  4. That would have to be Doom on ms-dos. Also i played Larry the lounge lizard, i have no idea what my parents were thinking at the time. Oh and King’s Quest 3 and some game where you visited all the old nursery rhymes and solved their problems.

  5. River Raid and Circus Circus on an Atari 2600, when I was 5ish. My grandparents picked one up for some reason long forgotten, but it was a blast and I was hooked. First game on my own system though was SMB1/Duck Hunt on the NES a couple years after that.

  6. I remember my very first game. It was on my father’s (then) new IBM PC, with one of those yellow tinted monochrome displays back in 1984 or 85. I can’t remember it’s name but you were a frigate or something and had to destroy a submarine before it destroyed you. You had three or four “boards” beneath your boat and had to chose a location for the depth charge. God awful simplistic game but it was amazing when I was 5 years old :)

  7. I can’t say with any certainty what my first game was either. My first console was a Sega, so it could possibly have been Sonic, Double Dragon or the like. My neighbours had a SNES though, so it could have been Lufia II or Mario. Actually my sis’s family (don’t ask :p) had a SNES too so it might have been Donkey Kong there.

    Or quite possibly the Jetpack game on DOS on my granddad’s computer. All I can tell you is that I was hooked early!

  9. I remember playing with an Atari 2600 when I was an itty bitty, teenie weenie, twinkie Figgy but my first actual memory comes from playing Kirby’s Dream Land on my friend’s NES so long ago. It wasn’t until my parents bought an SNES and Super Mario World that my love of video games really took off.

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