Malf on 15/7/2016 at 08:29

---

I think you win the thread even before it gets started with your "Pulling a turnip out of the ground" simulator. Nothing I can mention in my gaming history is anywhere near as interesting :D

Mine was seeing Pong at a mate's house and playing Space Invaders at the local leisure centre, after which I badgered my Dad into getting me a Speccy. My first Speccy game was "Zip Zap" by "Imagine - Play the Game".
Oh, and The Hobbit. Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.

demagogue on 15/7/2016 at 09:40

---

I think a version of that Soviet era naval game made it to the US that I played (a church had gotten it somehow), or perhaps it was the Western version that it was modeled after or vice versa, or it's possible it was just convergent evolution because I mean there's only so many games you can make out of simple vector graphics, but I distinctly remember it.

Re: How I got into gaming. It's hard to say since I was born right at the dawn of home gaming & just grew up with it... It was always there. My family got the Pong Console like the same year I was born and the Atari 2600 when it came out. Then it worked out I had the Atari and C64 and my neighbor had the Nintendo and 386, and we always played at each other's houses. So it was just always there. I was already learning BASIC and making little games on my C64 & TI-85 graphing calculator. Coin/ops at places like grocery stores, orthadonist offices, and the occasional proper arcade we had to drive out to. I wasn't nearby a proper arcade until college in Austin, but for that first year or two I visited quite a bit, and that's also when Windows came out, WWW was born, I got a PC, and the rest of it.

Sulphur on 15/7/2016 at 10:31

---

Cheerily enough, I got into video games due to cartoons. Specifically, Popeye. A friend of my brother's had the Nintendo Game & Watch handheld version, which I borrowed for days at a time:

[video=youtube;-1EWtlkY8jw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1EWtlkY8jw?t=15[/video]

Essentially, you had to punch Bluto off a pier to save Olive. It was ridiculously limited in terms of movement and input, and you could barely see the screen without the right lighting conditions, but it was a great evening pastime for a kid desperate to escape from the horrors of maths homework. (I failed maths that year.)

We eventually got an Atari and marvelled at its horrible built-in games, of which Superman was amazingly terrible. Seriously, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7U2TFIayos) look at this thing: it's like someone hired Philip K. Dick's lesser known brother to make a game while coming down from a peyote+LSD bender. Space Invaders was awesome, though; so awesome that my dad broke the joystick while playing it. I proceeded to fix it with sellotape, which of course made it fall apart completely, so I just manually pronged the metal triggers inside the pad with my fingers, and was introduced to the prickly tingle of electricity coursing through me for the first time. (I passed physics that year with flying colours. Go figure.)

Our dad then rented an NES (because lol forget buying the thing, it wasn't even officially on sale - it was called a Nintendo 'Samurai' on our fair shores). I was introduced to Mario, which I proceeded to hate with a passion, because my brother kept forcing me to play Luigi and stole all the powerups, then forced me to go play outside because I kept making him lose.* To this day, this is something I have not gotten over, and just seeing SMB on my screen is something that bubbles up an inexplicable rage inside me. Fuck you, Mario, you powerup-stealing twerp. :mad: (Despite my forced jaunts outside, this did not really help my geography scores.)

Meanwhile, my true gaming inclinations had blossomed on the PC, where I was introduced to shitty CGA/EGA games during a computer course on Wordstar and dBase 3+ (do any of you guys even remember these?). There was one where you had to save babies being flung out of a building by controlling two paramedics running back and forth with a stretcher. Also, there was (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZDG4dlU5uY) Alley Cat. Ah, Alley Cat, with your gigantic wedges of cheese wormed through by mice, and stupid bookshelf spiders: I do not miss you at all.

One day when I was bored with saving babies, my friend, who'd done terribly in dBase and Wordstar (control-K to block the goddamn text, yo!), had a sudden epileptic attack and proceeded to shake most of the keys out of his keyboard by violently slamming his arms against it, then fell to the ground in a froth. He was rushed to a hospital, and I was left feeling a bit shaken, so one of the other kids came over to distract me with something very, very new. He said it was like Mario, but better. He CD'd to a folder I hadn't seen before, and typed a two-word command that will remain forever engrained within my brain: PRINCE MEGAHIT.**

That was the year when I was introduced to Jordan Mechner's platforming genius, and the year that the gaping abyss of video gaming opened up from under me and swallowed me whole, as after it followed Wolfenstein and Ultima. It was also the year my mom decided I needed supplementary tuitions, and sent me off to her teacher-friends' houses to learn mathematics properly. A wise decision in retrospect, as without it I may not have come across the friends who eventually introduced me to Wing Commander and Syndicate and Mortal Kombat, and without whom to rely on for 'cheat chits' during the exams, I would have tanked the fucking things completely.




*To be fair, I was dicking him over so he wouldn't notice I'd secretly stolen his entire share of jellybeans yet again.

**Only later would I learn that pressing 'k' to kill everyone onscreen was not, in fact, a widely accepted way to play the game.

Gryzemuis on 15/7/2016 at 13:12

---

Half Life 1.
It was the first time I felt that a computer game wasn't just a game. But it allowed you to be in another world. I had seen and played Wolfenstein and Doom. But those were still too gamey for me. In HL1 the characters around you would actually talk to you. And you could walk through Black Mesa in your own pace. Without having to jump or shoot every 5 seconds (like e.g. in all arcade games).

Vivian on 15/7/2016 at 14:17

---

G-Police, Aliens vs Predator Classic 2000 or whatever it's now called, then System Shock 2. The latter is the main reason I'm still interested. Had an embarrassingly large impact on me.