Very first electronic game played?
This - though I'm pretty sure the writing on it was all in Kyrillic/Russian - either a clone/remake or there were versions for the Russian market. Must have been between 1983 and 1984 so I was something between 8 and 10. A classmate of mine had that thing. And it burned through the 9V batteries like hell.
My second encounter with electronic games was the
Poly Play arcade machine. In one of my vacations I spent hours playing the downhill game. I think this must have been in summer 1985 or 1986. So was 10 or 11.
My third encounter was an Atari 2600 at my uncle's place. Don't know where he got that thing from. First game played was Pitfall 2, but I spent an entire afternoon beating Asteroids. That was 1987.
My first own computer was a Commodore C116 with a cassette drive. My parents bought it second hand for 2,000 East German Mark. I don't know what the first game I played on that machine was, but the most time I spent with was
Hustler. No, not what you think -
a pool game. And I only had B&W images since East German tv used SÉCAM for color instead of the Commodore's PAL output.
At the same time we had computer courses with Robotron KC hardware. Of course there were games too, but they were primitive in comparison.
After the fall of the Wall, I hurried to get a C64. Of course it was already outdated by western standard - but for me it was affordable high tech :-). One of the first games was
First Strike.
Later I switched to Amiga. Unfortunately I had to sell the C64 with all the periphery to be able to afford one. I really can't remember what my first game on that machine was, there just were so many. I'm thinking it could have been something like Turrican or Silkworm.
While we're now about ten years from "first game ever" it still marked an important point: For the Amiga I had amassed hundreds of games. That was pretty easy because the Amiga was by far the most popular machine in my region back then and "school yard sharing" was as common as breathing. And then I came across the crack intros by Fairlight: "Remember: A game worth playing is a game worth buying". That got me thinking - my allowance (I was still in school) was not bad and I didn't have any other expensive hobbies and I also didn't spend much in clubs and the like. And at the same time I was looking for a game I had read about but that none of my pals had, not even those with connections to the warez scene: PowerMonger. And so I bought it. And it felt that good to actually
own the game that I went and bought Battle Isle and Populous 2 also. And then I started to sell my ~700 floppy disks (formatted!) for about half the price they were in stores and invested all that money in legit games. So PowerMonger was my "first" game too: The first I legimately bought from my own money.