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What was the first game you ever loved?
I'm interested in hearing about the first game you ever loved and, more importantly, what it was that made you feel that way. Don't just give me the game title, but tell me the whole love story!
If more than one game fits the bill, that's fine too. I'd love to hear about all of them.
The first videogame I ever played was the original Pong, which only contained the game Pong and was controlled by something resembling volume knobs. There was no AI, it took two to play. Pong is a silly game but the mere fact that I could move things on the screen made the whole experience magical to me. I was entranced.
Tempest. I use to have dreams about the game. I'd draw the existing levels, and try to design my own levels (even though I'd have no way to implement them). I think what drew me to it was a) the vector graphics were unlike anything I'd seen before (I mean I'd seen other vector games like Asteroids, but none in this format) and b) the radial game play was very different from other games. I don't recall many other games that work radially other than Gyruss, which came out about 2 years later. I've actually ended up using polar coordinates a lot in my career where it's not very common. I don't know whether it's related to my early love of Tempest or not, but now it's making me think!
No way! That's too cool! I hadn't seen that before. I have played it again via MAME, though. It's still a fun game.
I got my start as a very young kid playing Flash games on the internet, but I think the first game I truly loved was Pokemon Silver, incidentally also my first Pokemon game at age 6. It felt so much bigger and grander than any of the games I'd ever played before, it had an addictive premise in trying to explore the entire map and catch as many Pokemon as I could, and it was also one of the first games I got for my GameBoy Color, which meant I could take it with me anywhere and play it on my own (this is back when most people only had 1 computer, if that, and you had to share). It really opened gaming up for me from something I could do only for short periods of time, or with other people, into something I could dive in on my own and enjoy just for myself. I actually like the generation afterwards more - Pokemon Emerald is probably my favorite of the mainline games - but Silver always holds a special place for me as the very beginning.
I started with Pokemon Red, then Yellow. But I remember when I got Silver and was playing it, I went to a friend's house (with my GameBoy of course) and he told me that after the first 8 gyms there were 8 more, and I didn't believe him! Then he booted up his copy and, sure enough, he had the badges to prove it.
I do recall that even through the eyes of a 7 or 8 year old, I could tell that the second region was much more sparsely populated than the first, but it was still so cool that they packed it in there.
Thanks for the recommendations! Outside of a communal playthrough of Soulsilver my friends and I did back in 2014, I'm not very familiar with rom hacks. I've been thinking recently about giving them a shot, and I'll check these ones out! :)
Serious Sam. It helps that it was the first game I've ever played. It introduced me to a variety of fantasy elements, as well as gave me a nice shooter to run around in. It was simple, and it was fun.
I replayed it a year ago and left it shivering. If you venture out exploring the levels to find secrets and whatnot, the game usually "rewards" you with a sudden wave of enemies. Much as I love the franchise, this is not how you encourage exploration. Modern games don't do that, but you can still play the classics if that's your thing.
It also showed me how scale can be applied in games. It's barely a spoiler, but the game's final boss is absolutely freakin' enormous compared to the player. This is the first time I've seen anything like that, and it fascinated me to no end. Up to date I've only ever seen one example of this disproportionality applies in games: Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which has one gigantic snake you can fight if you go around exploring. It's not as big as that boss, but it still piqued my interest.
WAAAAAAAAAAAR!!
Doom 2. I played Wolf 3D. I played the shareware episode of Doom. But after I got a pirated copy of Doom 2, I learned about user-made levels. I browsed a ton of them on AOL's file share. I learned about Aliens from Alien Doom TC. I learned about the Evil Dead movies from an Army of Darkness TC. Shit I learned that games could be expanded and modified period because of Doom 2. I made my own bad levels. I ran SLIGE and played too many of those boring things. The endless amount of new stuff to play with Doom 2 gave it a life that no other game I played before ever did. I still play Doom 2 at least once a year.
I've loved playing it online with the Zandronum (formerly known as Skulltag) port. I like dropping into either classic co-op servers, or joining servers with over-the-top co-op "invasion" maps where you fight waves of enemies and the level expands. It's been years since I've tried it, so hopefully it's still active. Maybe I'll try it again sometime.
Although I'd played and enjoyed other games before, the one that stands out as the first game and experience that I really loved, was the somewhat awkwardly named Descent: Freespace - The Great War.
My first encounter with the game was actually my Dad picking it up for himself, along with a joystick (which wasn't something I'd seen before). At the time I was still a little young for the game, but he'd let me "co-pilot" by operating the extra keyboard controls that didn't fit on the joystick. We played through the whole story that way, and the sequel when it came out a few years later.
There's plenty of other action games that develop their mechanics over the course of the story, but at the time I hadn't seen anything to compare it to, so the way the whole story played out was utterly captivating.
Spoilers for a 20 year old game: The game starts you out fighting a war against a fairly well understood alien race on a roughly even playing field. Neither side has any kind of energy shield, so every hit matters. At the time, I didn't have any idea that shields were a staple of the genre, so I had no idea they were a "missing" system, and just flying around in a space fighter was cool enough on its own.
After a few missions, you are abruptly attacked in the middle of an escort job by a new enemy that none of your sensors can lock onto, and even if you do hit them all your weapons are just absorbed by a shield. The mission is a disaster, and it's all you can do to escape with your life. What follows is a long grinding campaign where you and your former enemies must band together to fight a losing war against an infinitely larger threat, steal their technology for yourself (there's a whole series of stealth/raid missions where you're given experimental equipment to attempt to sneak into enemy areas), and finally save the world in a last ditch crazy mid-warp battle that ends up destroying the FTL jump node between Earth and the rest of the galaxy.
There's a cool detail where the main menu is designed to look like the interior of a large carrier ship, with animated doors for different sections and soldiers walking around. It's nice flavor, but you stop thinking about it after a while. Until at some point in a mission, the enemy manages to destroy your assigned carrier that you've been launching from for the whole game, and in the post-mission debriefing, you're told you're being assigned to a new carrier. When you exit the debriefing screen, the entire main menu has been replaced with a new layout, forcing you to learn your way around again and driving home the sense of loss.
That menu switch was the moment that sold me on the idea that games could tell stories in a unique and special way, using even the mundane elements of the basic user interface (does the main menu even count as "playing the game"? (of course it does!)) to deliver compelling emotional moments.
I think one of the X-Wing or possibly Wing Commander (which I swear I'm going to play one of these days) might've done a similar trick with the menu first, and there are plenty of other games doing incredible UI-based gameplay now, but FreeSpace having been my first experience, and being able to share that moment with my Dad the way I did, has earned it a special place in my heart.
Oh, and the game shipped with the same level editor and s-expression based scripting tools that the game was built with, so it's rich modding community and later open source release both helped lead to my own interests in programming and the ideals of Free Software.
There's a modern port called DXX Rebirth if you want to play it again.
Hey, thanks for that!
Despite the name, "Descent: FreeSpace" (more commonly known as just "FreeSpace") has almost nothing in common with the "Descent" games except that they're both space games from the same company, and the devs and/or publishers wanted to capitalize on the name recognition.
As it happens, FreeSpace also has a modern port based on the open source release, called FS2Open or sometimes just the "Source Code Project".
I've actually never played the original Descent games, but Rebirth looks like a great way to get into it!
D'oh! Sorry I missed that distinction!
God damn, Freespace is good. I was a TIE Fighter player first, but Freespace improved on that game in almost every way. It's still my favorite space dogfighter.
Right? Both FS1 and FS2 are so good, and maybe I missed a few, but there really haven't been many (any?) similar campaign-oriented space dogfighting games since.
The tension of doing bombing runs on the big capital ships, dodging around gigantic ship-to-ship beam weapons (in FS2 anyway), all the little sound cues for hostile missile locks, the way the story kept you feeling like you were on the back foot fighting tooth and nail for every possible advantage.
I still remember the first time I saw that cutscene where Terran and Vasudan scientists are working together to test the energy shield prototype, being so excited to try it out, and then finding out that you still have to succeed in escorting the prototypes to a new location and then you still have to wait a few missions before you can actually use them in combat.
I didn't mention another little detail that added a lot to the game, which is that, although the game was basically a linear series of missions, there were often several grades of "success". If you straight up died, or failed badly enough, you'd just have to replay the mission, but often there'd be a situation where you could've done something better, gotten a closer look at some target before they escaped, saved one more transport full of materials and crew, hit the enemy that much harder.
I don't recall how much impact those varying win-states could have on the story (outside of some of the optional SOC missions), but knowing that the game at least kept track of those things definitely added to the tension and the sense of the player having a real impact on the campaign.
Simcity 4, and l still love it.
I got it when l was a kid in 2003 (aged 10 or so) and l've been playing it ever since.
I've been playing it for 17 years and it's still not gone stale. And l hope it gets a proper remaster sometime, as l think it's still the best city simulator, easily better than Cities:Skylines.
My sister and I used to play the original Sim City. We just couldn't decide zone placements and ended up fighting instead so we worked on separate cities. There was only one computer at home so we had our hours decided, I played one hour than she. Her city was more prosperous than mine, I admit that but I was like 10 years behind her city so I could've gone past her easily. One day I accidentally overwrote her save game with my city, it was a honest mistake I mean why would I do that knowingly, seriously. After some .. heated arguments the game was deleted by our parents. Years later we bought SimCity 4, but we had separate computer so we kept to ourselves. We didn't play together like we used to do anymore. I still play SC4 sometimes but I miss the old days.
That's gotta be The Settlers II for me. It does not hold up gloriously anymore; it could really use some QoL improvements by now. But the chill vibe and the deliberate strategizing made it really memorable. I keep coming back to it every so often, but it just isn't the same. A reboot is in the works, but I'm skeptical. Ever since The Settlers 5, the series didn't really feel home to me, and I'm not sure this is a proper return to old glory or an attempt to slightly correct what was lost.
I don't feel I'm doing the game justice. Put it like this, it's a very early RTS with quite a lot of economy modeled. The control scheme is very indirect, where you just tell your settlers what you want done (attack this watchtower, build a sawmill here) and the game will select the soldiers to do the job and dispatch workers. It has one unique mechanic that I haven't seen since, which is that you manually have to create roads for your people. But rather than haulers transporting goods to the construction site and returning to your warehouse, Between every 2 crossroads, on every edge of your road graph, there's a single hauler. He'll pick up stuff from one node and carry it to the other node. This throughput-limits your network, so you have to think carefully about how you want to set your stuff up.
40-ish years ago, I was 12 or 13 years old, my Middle school received one free Apple ][ (or perhaps a ][+, I forget) ... and I was one of four students given access to it, in a kind of informal computer club run by the school counselor, who was himself still trying to figure out what to do with the thing.
We spent some time learning to program (Applesoft, and Integer Basic), and learning basic computer usage, sys admin, etc. But mostly, we played games.
I fell in love with lots of games back then, stuff like Oregon Trail, Star Trek, Hammurabi, assorted Zork-like text adventures, etc.
There was one game that especially made an impression. I don't remember the name. It was dog-simple, written in Basic. I could write it from scratch today, in an hour or so. You thought of an animal, and with 20-Questions format, yes-or-no questions, the computer would try to guess your animal.
But the really ground-breaking thing was, if you won, if it couldn't guess your animal, the game would ask you what was the animal, and what was a question it could have asked to ID it ... and then, the next time you played, it knew that animal.
This was my introduction to AI, Machine Learning, the whole nine yards. The realization that the computer could learn, could memorize new info and then reprogram itself to incorporate what it had learned ... and what's more, that it was so simple, 50-100 lines of code, nothing complicated ... that was a degree of "mind blowing" I've only experienced a few times in my life.
Adventure for the Atari 2600. I didn't know what the hell to do until I was 15 (it was my first console my dad somehow got, and was old when we had it), but I enjoyed it.
I guess for a game I could actually progress in: Kirby's Dream Land. I haven't played the sequels, or many other Kirby games but Adventure and Dream Course, but Dream Land was the first game I felt like I really loved.
Final Fantasy IX - Not the game, the cut scenes. I got a copy when I was like 9, my first FF, and I didn't know what I was doing because the copy was in English (I'm non English native), but the cut scenes really fed my imagination at the time.
Ico - I don't know if people still ask themselves "What game is the Citizen Kane of video games?", this game is not it but it is like precursor, a silent movie made into a video game (there's some dialogue in a made up language so it doesn't count :b). I love how peaceful the castle feels, how gigantic and labyrinthine it seems, the birds singing and the waves crashing at the distance, how cinematic it looks specially in long shots, and I specially love how you save the game, sitting in those stone sofas, enjoying the moment, it honestly makes me wish I could be there and that that moment could last forever.
Kirby & The Amazing Mirror - I love the concept of the mazes, and this game does it exceptionally well.
Fez - This is like the perfect game for me, it has a lot of things that I love: puzzles; excellent art and music, a peaceful atmosphere; the world is a giant maze that is fun to explore; some weird cut scenes. But is kind of short, and there's some cultural barriers, I didn't know that "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" was a thing until this game and I wish there was another way to decode the alphabet.
Celeste - Excellent art and music, but I specially love how the act of climbing the mountain plays a role in the development of Madeline,
like the mountains is a metaphor of the mental health mountain. But this is the only game (from the list) that I haven't replayed, probably because the other games are like a nice walk through the park while this game is rock climbing, literally.Mine would have to be Mario Kart 64. So many great memories of my brothers and I sitting around a tiny TV in our room playing split screen races or the battle royales.
Super Mario Bros 3. I'd played video games before it, but man nothing grabbed me like SMB3 did. I remember we went yardsaling and my parents bought my brother and I a NES complete with a bunch of in-box games, the light gun, and two controllers. I very distinctly remember sitting on the couch reading the manual for SMB3 while my dad tried to figure out how to hook the NES up to our little TV. The artwork was (and still is) absolutely delightful and it helped me fall in love with the game before I even played it.
And then when I did play it, it very quickly became one of my favorite games.
FFIX was a huge one for me. I adored FFVII but something about IX just screamed greatness to me, even when I play it now I am mesmerized by it.
After that, Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2. I played them when they first came out, and fell even deeper in love that kept me going for years.
Probably Combat on my Atari 2600. Loved the tank games, figuring out the physics to bounce my shots behind my brother's defences. Oh, I did have a stand-alone -- like a super-mini, arcade-cabinet style -- Pac-man that I played till my hand was a claw. I was an obsessive kid.
Oh, wow; damn cool. Are either of them your original?
I think it’s a tie between Zeliard (the first I played and loved) and Day of the Tentacle (the first I loved and owned).
Hmm...
It would have to be Mega Man 3 for the NES. While it was not the first game I had played, that honor goes to Super Mario Bros., it was the one I became enraptured with. The number two to that would have been Dragon Warrior (NES), and number three would be a tie between Adventure Island 2 (NES) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES).
Probably Roller Coaster Tycoon, which I first started playing when I was in primary school. I can't really talk about the 90s much or I'll make myself sad, though, so I'll go with Freelancer instead. Oodles of atmosphere in that one. Spooky, and the story had big stakes with characters I rooted for. I remember spending ages trying to get the money together on risky diamond freight runs so that I could afford the best fighter in the game, which was only sold in a couple of locations way out in the deadliest star systems, where pirates were probably the least of your worries. Every asteroid field or gas cloud was something I would comb systematically for secret wrecks and treasures.
I guess it could also have been Pokemon Blue on the GameBoy Colour, but that was so far back into the mists that I can barely remember much of it.
Probably Berzerk for the Atari 2600. I enjoyed a lot of games for that system as a child, but that game was the first to really occupy my brain and make me think about it a lot back when I was in elementary school. Though, the memories are so hazy, it's really tough for me to say. Evil Otto definitely freaked me out.
Not a video game, but back in elementary school, my class had a Risk board that we would love to play when we got the opportunity. We figured out pretty quickly, however, that the game tended to boil down to getting lucky dice rolls in battles near key locations (Brazil, Kamchatka, Ukraine, SE Asia, etc.), so we decided to try and 'improve' the game ourselves. Our set included normal soldiers, along with little cavalry and artillery figurines to represent 5 units and 10 units respectively. We drew up a small technology tree that had things like adding a +.1 modifier to rolls, rerolling, etc. We also added some terrain bonuses to defense, since in the base Risk game the attacker tends to have advantage. You would start with one territory, and expand outwards from there. It was terrible balanced, but I had a lot of fun with it.
Imagine my surprise (and delight) when I found the Civilization series of games and it was basically what we were trying to do, just more complex and better balanced
The first console my family had was the PlayStation 1. My cousin gifted me a bunch of games (he had moved on to PS2, this was around 05-06ish). One of them was Crash Bandicoot 2, Cortex Strikes Back.
I loved that game. We would play for hours, taking turns when we died.
The next game I fell in love with was Tomb Raider Legend for the PS2 which we got about 3 years later. Seeing a game combine puzzle solving, platforming, and action/gun play just blew my mind.
My mother bought the family an NES in 1993 on my fifth birthday (she played a lot of Dr. Mario on that thing too, don't get me wrong). I was immediately hooked on Duck Hunt. I didn't really have the coordination to be good at Super Mario Bros., but Duck Hunt was my favourite and it was very easy to cheat at, haha. It was so novel and cool to be able to "shoot" at the TV and I even discovered my little brother could control the ducks if he wanted to play too!
I have a lot of nice video game memories from my childhood. I'd say the first games I really appreciated outside of the novelty factor in those early days, when I was more able to understand them, were Mario Bros. 3 and Megaman 2. Later on in the "SNES" and "Gameboy" era most of the happy memories are me and my brother or my friends playing together: Megaman Soccer, Kirby Super Star, trading Pokemon with Pokemon Gold/Silver and comparing teams in Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 (which I still think is more fun than Pokemon, but alas). We would share the controller around for single-player games like Super Mario RPG, too.
My uncle taught me how RPGs actually worked, which is another fond memory. With Pokemon it was just... Pokemon, you know? I picked the Pokemon and the attacks that I thought were cool. But he let me play Breath of Fire and helped me when I kept dying to the first boss over and over again and it finally "clicked" that the stats meant something. I loved Breath of Fire and spent a lot of time trying to draw Nina, and then the first game that I think ever made me really emotionally invested was Breath of Fire II. It was the first game to make me cry, which is silly in retrospect given its horrible translation.
As for first, Super Mario Bros & Mario Kart on the DS Lite.
As for most hours its got to be Minecraft. There's not any other game I've put nearly as many hours into as Minecraft. Its a shame there's no central count but between platforms - between Pocket Edition since 0.5, Xbox 360 since TU12 or something, Java since 1.6 - and all the worlds too... its got to be thousands. Maybe more. People sometimes dislike it and the player base, and to be fair I'm not playing it too much at the moment, but its a good game!
Lode Runner, played on the mac that my father brought home from work. According to Wikipedia it was a smash hit when released in 1983, although I've never met anyone that knows the game except for me and my stepbrother. I probably played it a couple of years after its release - in 1986 or 1987 would be my guess. Turns out (also by looking at Wikipedia) that there are a huge amount of ports that I had no idea about.
I loved this game! I would play it for hours. It definitely was a smash hit. All of my friends had it. I played it on both the Apple II and the Mac.
That's so cool. Tbh I don't even know what hardware it was that I played it on except that it was something built by apple, my computer interest came much later.
You and your stepbrother are not alone! The first computer my family ever got came with a version of it installed: 1994's Lode Runner: The Legend Returns and I played it endlessly. I loved the game's mix of puzzling and action. I'm glad you mentioned this, as I had completely forgotten about the game until now. I didn't remember it at all despite it being a formative gaming experience in my life. Thank you for resurfacing it for me!
Glad to hear it! I was pretty young at the time, and it was my first game, so I never saw anything like the "end-game" but I had great fun with it. I didn't know it then, but seems it had a level editor as well, that's insane to me for a game coming out in 1983.
Probably MDK 2. It was the first game that I played where you had to have one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse to rotate the camera (before that I played mostly racing games and 2D platformers / point-n-click adventures), so I vividly remember telling my older brother how uncomfortable and cumbersome this is. I quickly adapted though, and the characters and the weird setting pulled me in until I beat it.
Either F-Zero or Super Mario World. My neighbor had both when I was a kid and they were my first exposure to video games. I loved them so much that I begged for a Nintendo and those games for Christmas. Instead I got a Nintendo 64 along with Super Mario 64 and Star Fox 64, none of which I had heard of at the time, being only 8 or 9 years old.
A toss-up between Final Fantasy VI or Zelda on the SNES.
I was already enamoured with the FF series before FFVI came out, starting with the original on NES, and similarly Zelda was one of my faves on the NES as well.
However, Zelda was pretty much the reason I bought my SNES. I actually got the game before I got the console as it was pretty much always sold out locally and I just happened to run across it while out-of-town even though I didn't actually own a SNES yet.
FFVI on the other hand. It's still one of my favourite FF's, and as far as early gaming goes the breadth of the world and character development was incredible. To this day the music still haunts me, starting right away with the opening score with the magitech armor marching through the ice, and with many tunes throughout the game (there are some great remixes of them as well, i.e. on OCRemix, and yes I bought into that album when it first came out as a kickstarter).