Not the earliest you still play regularly. Just the first.
Mine would have to be Colossal Cave Adventure, followed by Scott Adams' Adventureland. I played the former, but saw the latter in!color! on the brand new Apple II purchased by a couple of friends. As we were all writers, a merry time was had kicking the shit out of the mechanics and parser. I recall they got it as a freebie (one of several) with the computer purchase. This was back in the late seventies. Had we known then what we did now, we would have invested in the hardware. But then, there were plenty of opportunities for that, that turned into dead ends, too.
Over to you. First computer game you ever played.
Front Page Sports Football back in 1993. For 10 years a friend and I played a pen & paper football game we wrote involving dice, each game taking a couple hours to finish. We played about 15 seasons painstakingly going through every game of each of the 30 teams' schedules and always imagined how great it would be to let a computer do all the legwork for us. Once that was realized, and we could blow through games at about a season a week, the magic was gone and we lost interest.
Two experiences that seem to relate to this interesting topic. First let me say that Pong has to be the answer beyond a certain age.
I did a stint in the US Navy in late Vietnam conflict times. Uncle Sam sent me to his new fangled computer rooms instead of the rice paddies. I didn't argue. Nobody knew what computers were, but it was better than shooting people. I ended up on this future systems test ship that would be antique by present standards. But these two things happened in mid 70's...
PC games
Uncle Sam taught me just enough to understand assembler code. That was supposed to be enough to maintain computers. I found a book on Basic and found a "game" called Animals. It was named after a Pink Floyd album so I gave it a try, converting what they had in Basic to the assembler I understood, and had a program that tried to guess what animal you were thinking of. Every time you won, it learned one more animal. I spent quite a few hours playing with it myself, loading it in and out of one of the auxiliary computers in the middle of the night. I conned a few ship mates to try it. It probably counts as their first computer game, too. It became quite formidable. One fellow was an amateur expert angler. After it learned all he knew, when it came to the category of fish, the game was downright scary accurate.
Console games
You know those huge radar scope displays in the movies? When they went digital, the early versions had about a desk and a half worth of electronics wrapped around it. One of the things they had was canned programs to draw things when you didn't want to waste radar wattage on calibration. One of the "calibration" programs was a physics simulator combat thing. Two little icons as rocket ships in orbit around a sun. You could steer with clockwise, counter clockwise and thrust. You could shoot ballistic bullets that lasted forever in various orbits or tracking missiles that only lasted so long. Physics was mercilessly enforced. Most games were decided by who fell into the sun. Being one of those over educated geek types, I applied some solar system gravity lessons and developed comet-like highly elliptical orbits that were easy to fall into if you went just short of falling into the sun itself. Half the time you were way out of range and the other half you were zipping by too fast to hit, but still spraying missiles. They stop inviting me to the radar room late at night. I learned that entering a circular orbit is a lot trickier than you think, even if you already think it is tricky.
The first mainstream title I can remember playing was Myst. Still my favorite.
Now that, erischild, is a fascinating post.
back in the dim dark distant days of yor(approx 1979 in my highschool's NEW computer class), I played a game on a trs-80 model 1 level 2 4k ram called 'snake' that drew the 'snake' on the screen using the 'block' graphics that the player steered around the screen using four keys, and when the 'snake' hit a side or itself the game ended, and after I learnt some programming I started creating my own version of the game with a few little extras, but it was basically the same game
harpo
Sub Battle Simulator.
On console
Pitfall on Atari
On school computers
Dungeon quest on floppy disk!
on my 1st personal computer
DS9:Dominion wars
The first time I messed around on a pc was when I was 22 months old. Around that time I messed around on a Star Trek game my parents were borrowing, which I have absolutely no recollection of. Then I played on those kid games, my favorite was Zeke's Safari/Rainforest or something. But the "real" game I played was Star Wars Episode 1 Racer, at my cousins house, which I would say is my first, but I also played SSB 64 and Mario Kart 64 and AoE2 and King's Quest 5, also at my cousins.
Computer, hmm.... 3th grade at school we had Sim Town. 1995
Age of Empire, Star Wars Rebellion, and Half Life 98 on my family computer.
My first console I played on was my on friend's NES in 1990. My first console 91 or 92 a Super Nintendo. Zelda, Metroid, Mario, and Mario Cart cant remember which was first. Good times.
Ok, totally dating myself, but I still remember as a kid loving to play it:
Road Runner for the Commodore 64. See
Sim Ant
Speak n' Spell Word games?
Well, if we're talking 8 bit sprites and such that would be Choplifter, Beachhead and Pharao's Curse.
As in more game like games it would be Bard's Tale III.
First game that i played in computer is Road Rash...
My first PC game was the original Age Of Empires. Up until that point I had been mostly a console gamer, and I loved Red Alert and C&C tib dawn on the PS1. So naturally as soon as I saw the back of the Age Of Empires box I was blown away by seeing swordsman fighting and armies being commanded.
If you are talking consoles, and arcade games then it would have to be Pong. Then we got Space Invaders, Asteroids, etc. not too long afterwards. Blew at least 50 bucks a week in quarters in the arcades back in the day ('70's, and early '80's).
If you are talking PC (Tandy 1000 to be exact) F-19 Stealth Fighter. Played that while at work while i was in the military. got me hooked into PC gaming.
Man, I loved those Atari games. I remember at one point between my grandparent and my family, we had three Atari consoles. One broke and I took it apart (now an engineer). While graphics have improved, the amount of fun games deliver has been going down.
This is new but may bring back memories (that you only thnik you have): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/13911877/ld24/ld24.html
So many good memories!
zubaz, you have been disabled at dropbox.
I can't remember which was first, either Journey which was a precursor to Rogue or Adventure which I think was a precursor to Zork.
The first PC game I ever played was Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, specifically the demo at a Gateway store and later the full game when my family finally got our Gateway computer, but the oldest PC games I have played are the likes of CnC: Tiberium Dawn, Age of Empires, and Homeworld since then.
*lol* If you google the old game titles you'll find play videos on youtube for many of em.
The first computer game I ever played was... Well old. I don't recall the name, but it came on a big old floppy, and you designed and sold consumer robots. That's the extent of my memory.
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