What was your first pc gaming memory?

[Ratty]

Right up there with you as well as owning an original copy of Zork in my early years and knowing not what the hell a Grue was or why it kept eating me.

Now I don't feel so alone!

I admit that Zork was one of those games I admired from a distance. Those text-only games seemed way too advanced for me, I had to go over to an older friend's house to watch him play.

I feel like an outcast sometimes because of how far back my gaming experience goes. I had a friend who was a few years older than me as well who taught me how to play text based games and later introduced me to the typing teacher that was Sierra games (thank you Sierra for making me type and read so damn fast).

I would really like to play text adventure games but I just don't have the patience for it. I dislike knowing the answer to a problem and then trying to figure out exactly how the author wanted that answer to be phrased for 10 hours.
Have you guys seen the documentary GET LAMP? It was uploaded by Google as part of their techtalk series.
The movie starts at about 7:30 in.

Spoiler: Bonus

 

[otakon17]

My grandfather has a type of gameshow game on something running on what I was pretty sure was MS DOS, monochrome monitor and all. As for a 'proper' PC game, it was Age of Empires II and Fallout 2. One of my teachers had it on his computer in his classroom, and allowed us to play on it as long as we continued to pay attention to class. I was on it the most; this was back in high school in my freshman year if I remember correctly and I was so astounded by it at the time still. It was... 1997 I think.

 

[nevarran]

Going to a friend of mine, to play Karateka ah, good times...
Interestingly enough, the original Karateka is released the year I was born. So, I just met my destiny that day at my friends house

 

[jademunky]

I feel like an outcast sometimes because of how far back my gaming experience goes. I had a friend who was a few years older than me as well who taught me how to play text based games and later introduced me to the typing teacher that was Sierra games (thank you Sierra for making me type and read so damn fast).

Oh those crazy Sierra games, I cant say for sure if I loved or hated them.

Why the hell would my car break down if I forget to inspect it, but turn out to be just fine if I do inspect it?!?!

 

[Double A]

I remember sitting in my dad's lap utterly failing to play X-Wing when I was like 3.

It was great.

 

[Elberik]

My intro to PC games & still one of my favorite games of time.

 

[Rellik San]

My very very first:

Age 4, watching my Uncle play Chucky Egg on ZX Spectrum. I was mesmerised, a cartoon... that you controlled, it was like a revelation, like someone took the blindfold off and I had found what my life was.

I think a lot of Britains in their late twenties and up have very differing experiences to others in regards to this topic, the original console market crashed and the rise of the home computer Spectrum vs BBC Micro, it was the Apple vs Microsoft of the early 80's, if you want to find out how tight the competition was I recommend the highly excellent BBC docu-drama: Micromen.

 

[ZodiacBraves]

Basically the original(?) worms style game. You threw explosive bananas at each other after inputting your angle and velocity values.

 

[OneCatch]

This:

Also, this:

Both came bundled with a Power Mac that we bought in about 1995 and I played a ridiculous amount of them. Spin Doctor in particular was a complete swine in the later missions - just because every mission was technically possible (whereas the harder difficulties on Super Maze Wars were functionally impossible) but required perfect timing - or at least it seemed that way to six-year-old me.

Might have played stuff on PC as well as consoles earlier than that, but since I was really small then it all kind of blurs together. The above is the earliest that was definitely on PC.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

An isometric puzzle/platformer from 1992 called Contraption Zack, on DOS.

 

[DanielBrown]

Watching my mom play Wolfenstein 3D on her work PC, I think.
She was killing that shit. Hardest difficulty, knew all secret areas and every single enemy. Blasted through the game without any issues.

My personal first would be some racing game. I don't really remember anything, but in the beginning you could choose male or female driver, pick a color for them and the car(the graphics were really crappy and blocky). Tried going off course and driving in the wrong direction, out into the wilderness, to see how far I could get. Put a weight on and went for maybe half an hour into the nothingness. Don't remember if I was just driving against a wall or if I actually moved away from the tracks. Don't think I found my way back though.
Was maybe six-seven at the time.

 

[carnex]

First electroic game I eve played was Asteroids on arcades but on PC it depend on weather you talk about Personal Computer in general or IBM PC compatible.

For the first it was Lazy Jones on Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, and first on IBM PC compatible was Tetris

 

[Skeleon]

Ballerburg on the Atari ST. A game wherein you have to decide how much powder your cannons use, what angle they fire at, where the wind is coming from and so on in order to destroy the enemy's castle or rather their king inside. Taking turns, the two castles fire on each other. You earn money to buy replacement wall-bits, powder, cannon balls and cannons.

We also had a handful of other games on that system. Colours are for noobs!
Actually, it was an incredible leap for me from that device to our first 386er.

 

[RyoScar]

First game I remember playing was Heroes of Might and Magic 2 with my dad, twas very fun

 

[Isra]

My earliest PC gaming memory?
32 Megabytes. Ba-dum tish.

I played many games before Commander Keen (1990), but that would have to be the first game I can actually remember the title of. A lot of my memories of my first ten years of life probably aren't too time accurate. There was a lot of crap you booted off a diskette in those days and most of it was pretty random, indistinguishable from other titles or plain unmemorable. I think I mostly played mixed demo disks from magazines right through to the mid 90's.

One memory stands out though. My dad was a computer technician at the time. I remember going into his work after school, and he and his workmates would play games on the computers they had fixed before the clients were due to pick them up. I used to go in pretty often, but I don't remember too many of the games we played until the day when Doom was released in 1993.

As an 8 year old, that game blew my damned mind. It was so unbelievably far ahead of anything else at the time. We played 4 player (I think) co-op for hours on end. It was like someone had invented the fucking flying car or the Star Trek teleporter and they were selling it for like $10 or $20.

These days it's pretty primitive, but I've got a ton of great memories of playing Doom with my dad in that techie shop with computer parts strewn everywhere, and his crazy workmates who would take particularly frustrating PCs out to the shooting range to finish them off.

 

[Kinitawowi]

I love you forever.

That is exactly it. Rainbow Islands... I knew it was Rainbow something, but couldn't find it.

Now to see if there's some way to play this one again.

Ask and ye shall receive. [http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekplay.cgi?title=Rainbow+Islands&pub=Ocean+Software+Ltd&year=1990&id=0000724&joy=kemp&game=/games/r/RainbowIslands.tap.zip&emu=1]

Grew up on the Speccy - I remember many, many hours playing Head Over Heels and the aforementioned Cobra, both from the quite spectacular Magnificent Seven compilation doubletape (Wizball, HOH, Arkanoid, Cobra, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Great Escape, Short Circuit and Yie Ar Kung Fu, most of which I clocked). We had Spectrums in my first school, and I was once called out of a maths lesson to go and fix the school one (it had crashed on some educational program they were running). I was seven at the time, and that started me off on the journey of fixing PCs being a Thing for me.

First game I remember playing on what we'd now call a PC was probably actually The Settlers, after I'd become addicted to it on a mate's Amiga.

 

[Nixou]

What was your first pc gaming memory?

Kung Fu Master... Although I'm not sure if it was on the Commodore 64 or the Amstrad.

 

[Evonisia]

It was being let onto the PC to play some games my Dad liked playing or games that were installed just to keep me occupied. I was three, I can't remember anything before I was three.

So, it's either I got to play Half-Life, or I was playing some Wacky Races game. I'd have to do more thinking.

 

[Riverwolf]

Doom. On that old DOS computer of my dad's whose startup sounds I can still recall with great fondness, the game in hindsight was laggy, slow, and almost impossible. The rocket launcher was a weapon to be avoided since it could easily kill you. (Yeah, dad and I sucked at the game. ^_^) It was the most amazing thing to behold, and I loved just looking at it and everything that looked like it, from the maze screensaver in Windows to Hover, a game I'd forgotten existed till LGR reviewed it. (Funny story, I wouldn't see Wolfenstein 3D until a few years later, and when I first saw it, I thought it was Doom and so told my cousin who was playing it "not to get the rocket launcher".)

I also fondly remember God of Thunder (a Zelda clone with Chibi-Thor), Bio-Menace (an Apogee action-platformer in the same vein as Duke Nukem), and Jetpack (a puzzle-platformer).

 

[Caliostro]

Ballerburg on the Atari ST. A game wherein you have to decide how much powder your cannons use, what angle they fire at, where the wind is coming from and so on in order to destroy the enemy's castle or rather their king inside. Taking turns, the two castles fire on each other. You earn money to buy replacement wall-bits, powder, cannon balls and cannons.

We also had a handful of other games on that system. Colours are for noobs!
Actually, it was an incredible leap for me from that device to our first 386er.

Oh shit! You just reminded me of a game I played a lot as a kid.

Who remembers this bad boy?