Did you know there was a version of Defender for the Apple II? I saw it & played it a little when a fellow student brought it to school ;)

Might be a predictable answer, but it was Super Mario Bros + Duck Hunt. I played it when I was 4.

Really loved it but I was absolutely terrible at it.

hehe, My first video game would have to be Pong at a demo when I was just a wee lad, can't remember how old but it was on either a vic20 or a trs80

Too long ago to remeber age or year

I'm guessing I am going to have you all beat. My first game was "Star Trek," a text only space game on the MITS Altair 8800, a computer so primitive that it had no screen (only a teletypewriter for input/output) and that you had to toggle in the boot loader with switches on the front. Good times, good times. This was in 1976 or 1977, I am not certain which.

I am pretty sure my friends and I killed a moderate forest with all the paper we ran through that thing.

My all time favorite atari 2600 game. I played it so much that I was able to roll the score twice in one sitting :)

First game ever?
Donkey Kong.
Arcade.
1983.
My dad was a manager at Showbiz Pizza and I played the games there for free. I was 3 years old.

It's also why Five Nights at Freddy's terrifies me.

My next door neighbor had a Commodore 64 where I played a lot of California Games, but Donkey Kong was my first one, along with Gallaga

another age revealing thread :))

my first game is monty python's flying circus, in dos platform. installed in our 386dx pc with 5.25 floppy disk, with VGA screen.

if i look again at that game right now, i can't believe how absurd and surreal my first game was - which as a child i never had a single idea about it. well, children is way more open minded than adult, i think :) here's the video of it www.youtube.com/watch?v=MThuu54yg6g

i was around 4 that year, early 90's, really a good time :P

I was never an arcade player, because I grew up on pinball, and was very good at it. When video games came in - Asteroids, Pac-Man, Missile Command, that lot - I played them from time to time, but I never got into them. Pinball was tactile and sexy in a way that video games just weren't (my specialty was riding the tilt - on machines I knew well, I could get a lot of motion out of them without losing the game). The only video game I ever liked was Tempest.

Pong was probably technically my first, on some TV somewhere, but since it played itself just about as well as I played it, I don't really think of it as a game.

The first real games were King's Quest III, and Rogue - which would soon become Hack, which would in turn become Nethack. (Also not counting Adventure, a.k.a. Colossal Cave, I think, which ran on the college's UNIX VAX and in which I rarely made it more than one or two locations in before getting hopelessly lost or confused.)

Rogue I ran across at MIT, visiting my girlfriend's brother - this would be 1981 or 1982. I've told this story here before, so skip ahead if you've heard it. I don't remember much about the visit, but I remember that he had a color monitor, which was AMAZING SCIENCE - at the time, monitors were routinely green or, if you were especially cool, amber. The truly mind-blowing bit was that when you found, say, a cyan potion in your travels, the potion would be cyan on the monitor as well as in the text name. Like, how did it know? This was very exciting stuff. The game was amazing, of course, and it launched me on my lifelong love of roguelikes - though it wasn't a roguelike, it was just Rogue. It was years before I saw another color monitor outside of a demo lab.

King's Quest III we ran on my roommate's IBM - PCJr? PCXT? I don't remember. Dual floppies, no hard drive, amber monitor (we were cool). We went to the game store and looked for weeks at all the games, discussing the merits, comparing the pictures on the boxes. We didn't know anyone who had a computer game, so there wasn't anyone to ask - we barely knew anyone who had a computer. Finally we chose this one, and split the cost ($50, if I remember right). And we played that game for months. Months! Giggling over the funny messages, trying out every possible combo in the parser, maneuvering Gwydion down that damn mountain path (INSERT DISK TWO) whenever we got the wizard to sleep. Chipping away at it, making maps and keeping notes. It probably took us most of a semester to get through that. Again, this is around 1981 or 1982.

Ah, the days.

Probably some kind of educational game I can barely remember any details about, followed by Hugo's House of Horrors and Sonic 2.

Call of Duty 4 on the Xbox 360, i was 10.

I kid, i kid...Road Fighter around... 1992 i think, it was on my cousin's house, later on my father bought a NES (or one of those fake ones) for me and my brothers and the first game that i played on it was that old bomberman.

Pinball on Windows 95!

Not sure if we got an Atari first, but I have always considered my family's first game to be Adventure. Even if we already had an Atari, it didn't leave the same impression. Early 80s, I would have been 7 or 8 maybe. No clue what version we played.



<xyzzy>

EDIT: I'm actually on vacation with my parents right now. I'll see if I can flesh out any details over breakfast in the morning. Adventure was a truly inclusive experience for my family - my mom even enjoyed it, and she probably hasn't ventured past solitaire since. I remember our hand-drawn map vividly. It was started on a piece of copy paper and grew to so many taped-together sheets. I wonder if that's still somewhere around my parents' house...

I don't remember my *first* game, I was just too young, but the first game to influence my life was Pool of Radiance. I was obsessed with that game. I mapped, strategized, gound levels so the big fights weren't so hard, made up backgrounds for my characters... I about had a heart attack when I found there were FR books, spent all of my youth reading them and playing every game I could get in that setting (even some paper and dice occasionally)... and then WOC came along and destroyed everything I loved about that world. I haven't played any games in it since, and have all my 100+ forgotten realms books packed away until I can decide if I want to sell them or not. I don't think I'll ever read them again. I didn't even bother finishing the various series they ripped apart with their unwarranted BS.

This has turned kinda depressing, sorry :P

Super Mario Bros. + Duck Hunt combo pack. It gave me many hours of fun as a kid.