What was your first computer game that got you interested in computers?

Answer 1

Warcraft II

Answer 2

Sim City (First Version) You can play this now online: http://simcity.ea.com/play/simcity_classic.php

Answer 3

Jet Set Willy

Answer 4

I would probably have to say the game ADVENT, the original text based adventure game.

Answer 5

Diku MUD

Answer 6

Elite

Answer 7

Doom. Played it on NeXT ages ago

Answer 8

Prince of Persia (1996)

Answer 9

Although their were a few before, what finally did it for me was Wolfenstein 3D. I remember I got my first soundblaster card and I was the only one of my friends that could actually hear what the Germans were yelling.

Answer 10

Paratrooper - http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/203
Digger - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digger_(computer_game)
Lode Runner - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner
Alley Cat - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game)

Answer 11

Rastan. I was like 10 or 11 when my dad brought me my first computer. I'm amazed I still remember the name.

Answer 12

Sopwith

First and only game I have ever seen my father play. He introduced me.

Answer 13

I got hooked when I attended an IBM Open House event in the late 70's, when I was about ten years old. They had a green-screen TTY set up with a Lunar Lander game. The display looked something like this:

You are 143.347 feet above the surface.
Your downward speed is 10.832 feet per second.
You have 323 pounds of fuel remaining.
How much fuel do you want to burn for the next five seconds?
> _

You entered a number, then it would update everything and prompt again, until you landed safely or crashed.

It was primitive, but I was hooked. I saw that there was this imaginary abstract universe that somebody had created, and I wanted to create some universes of my own.

After that, it was Star Raiders and M.U.L.E. for the Atari 8-bits

Answer 14

Text-based Star Trek

The game ran on a teletype (essentially a keyboard/printer that would send commands to a Vax computer and then type back the results). The "space" in which you played was a 10x10 (or 20x20) grid where each space had a period for empty space, an "E" the enterprise, a "K" for a Klingon ship, etc. You would make a move by typing a command such as jumping to another sector or firing a weapon with a numerical direction (e.g. "Photon +3 -2" or something like that). It would take about a minute for a command to be processed and a new game state to be printed back showing you how your move did.

This was in the mid 1970s so we are talking really old school.

Answer 15

rampart, oregon trail, word/number muncher

Played those in 2nd grade on our apple 2s

Answer 16

Monopoly. That is, in the primitive age before the IBM PC I wrote it myself in BASIC on a Tandberg computer at school, replacing the street names with the streets in my home town...

I have continued to program since then, especially after the IBM PC came out. My interest in computer games have however faded away after the initial joy of playing "Kings Quest" and "Leasure Suit Larry". Maybe that is because I'm more of a "word" than "point-and-shoot" person...

Answer 17

Emulators for PC:

• SNES
• SEGA Genesis

Best bit, learning how they work!

Anyone else?

Answer 18

At school we had 3 cp/m pc's with 5.25 floppies and amber screens. Two of them where put in the physics lab. But during lunch break, the geeks used them to play games.

One of these games was an adventure game written in a Basic variant. You where in a 10x10x10 grid of rooms and in each room was a monster, a trap, a treasure, stairs to an other level, a vendor or also teleporters if I remember correctly. And of course one of them was the exit.

I likede the game, but I got sick and tired of dying each time, so I started cheating (changing the source code) and I never stopped hacking since then.

Answer 19

MICRO SOFT PAINTBRUSH

Answer 20

For me it was Breakout. Not so much for playing it, but because it was used an a programming example in my Vic 20 manual (it came with a manual informing about how to program it, those were the days). The example didn't cover the full game, just a ball bouncing in a rectangle. It was about iterating the ball in a diagnoal direction, checking when it hit a wall and changing the direction. BASIC was the language. Later I bought an upgrade containing whooping 32 kb of memory (the computer had 3 kb when shipped). The upgrade card also sported an assembler editor so that I could start programming in assembler. I had all sorts of trick to slow my games down! Vic20 was an amazing computer. Almost as amazing as its successor, Commodore 64.

Answer 21

Defender of the crown (Commodore 64)

Answer 22

Pong

Answer 23

Junior Jeopardy. Me and my classmates (three of us simultaneously on one computer) played that game during our class break

Answer 24

Tomb Raider.

Answer 25

Dune II :)

Answer 26

Ultima IV on the Apple II. The story of Lord British making it big developing the first Ultima game sparked my imagination.

Answer 27

Lode Runner. And BASIC. Actually, my motivation to learn how to read, was to improve my coding skills so I could program games like that one.

Answer 28

Ghostbusters (C64)

Answer 29

nibbles.bas and gorillas.bas. Of course with the code being right there I felt compelled to jump in and see how they did that.

Answer 30

Tunnels of Doom on the TI 99/4A.

Many years later, Wizardry encouraged many attempts at an RPG.

Answer 31

Stunts. The built-in track editor was great for building special tracks that made the car go so fast it just exploded and flew out of the map (see Steve Yegge's latest article). Great fun!

Answer 32

The game that got me hooked on computers was 'Roller Coaster tycoon 2' (not so old skool, but I'm young so I guess that's okay). The game that made me have like programming was Garrys mod (which is a mod for half life 2) you can write add-ons for it in lua, which I did.

Answer 33

Lucasfilm adventure games: mainly Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders and the Indiana Jones games.

Answer 34

Hugo's House of Horrors and Jungle of doom were adventure games that really got me thinking about human-computer interactions and machine learning. Commander Keen was just badass. Simcity was also a major time sink.

Recently, Dwarf Fortress has become a serious creative outlet.

Answer 35

Warcraft 1, Xargon and Ski or Die.

Answer 36

Prince of Persia (the very first one)
Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion

Answer 37

Descent 1/2

First time I ever chose a PC game for my birthday present intsead of Lego

Answer 38

Starsiege Tribes

Not only did it get me hooked on computers, but it's scripting language got me started programming.

Answer 39

Pirate Adventure, a text-based game that I had on a cartridge for my Vic-20. The first thing I can remember pogramming was a text-based adventure game in Commodore BASIC that involved something about running about my neighborhhod :)

Answer 40

I think the first game I was ever really hooked on was 'Bards Tale'. Great RPG game and at the time, the 'graphics' were just awesome.

ALL of the Infocom (?) series like Zork, Leather Goddess's of Phobos, etc. I was reading the Zork 'pick your own adventure' at the time so the game was awesome, but honestly I found the book easier to get sucked into.

Once I moved on to a C128D from the Apple ][e, it was over from there, starting learning BASIC and never stopped coding.

Answer 41

I had a whole bunch of things on my Apple II. What really got me hooked was that when a lot of them crashed, you'd end up in the BASIC prompt. That's how I first learned about programming.

Answer 42

Building on Uri's response.

There were quite a few factors that interested me in programing.... but as for a game I would have to say in 6th grade when I broke into BASIC when I was playing Lemonade Stand and started tweaking things. This helped further my interest :)

Answer 43

Astrosmash for Intellivision was another great game for me...all the intellivision titles were a lot of fun to play

Answer 44

Last one for me...Legend of Zelda the original ones for the old nintendo.

Answer 45

Operation Neptune

Answer 46

Text-based MUDs!

In most of them after you reached a certain level you could go on adventuring or you could become a wizard-administrator and code your own areas. Definately the first code I ever wrote was my own game area in a MUD, complete with triggers, events, items, etc.

In fact, I still occasionally log onto VikingMud and chat it up or play for a couple hours.

Answer 47

King's Quest V, my dad and I played that for ages back in the day.

Answer 48

Adventureland on the VIC-20 plus a similar "Pirates" adventure game written by one of my teachers (with basic graphics, ASCII-art)

Answer 49

Wolfenstein3D, Doom, and Doom 2

a couple flight simulators also helped: gunship2000 and b17 flying fortress

Answer 50

Game? I was hooked before I ever saw a computer game.

Answer 51

First proper computer games was Monkey Island 2: Le Chuck's Revenge

That got me hooked on puzzle based adventure games. Too bad that genre is all but dead now.

Answer 52

There are so many!

• Space Invaders
• Monkey Island
• Doom
• Wing Commander series
• Commander Keen
• Duke Nukem, old school 2D ones.

Answer 53

I got hooked on computers before I got hooked on games. My first computer was an Ohio Scientific C1P, a 6502-based microcomputer. The first game I really got hooked on was Adventure running under the MUSIC timeshare system.

Answer 54

commander keen, lesuire suit larry, civilization, price of persia, another world etc. who knows, what was the first. probably some from the 8-bits such as formula 1 or snoopy.

Answer 55

Dangerous Dave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Dave

Answer 56

Wow. Thanks guys, you make me feel old, as mine would have to be Parsec on a TI99/4A

Answer 57

Police Quest

edit: Found a place this game (and others) can be played online http://www.sarien.net/

Answer 58

Trinity, a text based game. I could never get far and was confused but it always intrigued me.

Answer 59

Quest for Glory by Sierra (Or Hero's Quest, depending on the version.)

There are so many others, but that one title in particular really cemented my interest in computers and videogames.

Answer 60

Not my first but Nethack deserves a mention

Answer 61

Might and Magic Book One: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum on an Apple IIe.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=959060)

It was a great RPG. It not only got me hooked on computers, but also got me hooked up on Role Playing Games, two of the passions I still carry today!

Answer 62

Monkey Island, Space Quest and Day of the Tentacle got me hooked to a computer - but the first game that ever made me want to write a game mayself was actually from a SciAm article about a (bit more complex) "Game of Life"-like simulation.

Answer 63

Wizardry for the Apple II+

Answer 64

Surround - later to become Tron Light Cycles. My friend had his Atari 400 for a couple months and I just bought my Atari 800. Ostensibly to 'help with homework', but really to play games.

My friend came over and wrote Surround while we were sitting there in Atari Basic. I was confused since variables are things you solve for in math. I was more confused when his 'guy' could wrap around the screen and mine would just crash into the wall on the edge. Something about that was magical and motivated me to start learning - to have that much control over what a device did.

Answer 65

BASIC. You have to do a lot of customization work, but it's a very versatile gaming system. (More seriously, I wasn't drawn in by a game.)

My wife was drawn in by Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio (sp?), and started making changes.

Answer 66

Deus Ex. It's also the thing that got me into video game development.

Looking at the other answers, I feel young, hehe.

Answer 67

The first game that had me hooked was Space Invaders on the Commodore PET computer.

After that it was customizing games like Doom and Quake. In those days you could learn a lot about computers by just trying to get those games to run (manually going through autoexec.bat and config.sys anyone?)

Answer 68

Text-based games or MUDs such as Darkened Justice, 7th Circle, Magic Souls, and Aethar.

Answer 69

The Horse Race game I wrote myself in FOCAL on a DEC PDP-8/L:
1.1 T "THIS IS A HORSE RACE. THERE ARE 8 HORSES."
You'd pick a horse by number, amount to bet, and a random number would determine if you won.

Answer 70

Rocky's Boots.

It wasn't until I was a freshman in college that I discovered that I had acquired a intro to electrical engineering when I was 3.

Answer 71

The incredible machine

Answer 72

There was one game that got me hooked. I think it was authored by the SA Education Department. It was a graphical adventure on 2x5.25" floppy disks for the C64. I was hooked after that. It's too bad the name escapes me.

That said, I was hooked on the C64 at about 5 years old. As my reading got better so did my BASIC, until I graduated to assembly when BASIC wouldn't cut it anymore. Ahh fun times; being able to make the computer do my bidding was what hooked me, not necessarily games.

Answer 73

Conan: Hall of Volta for the Apple II waay back in 1984. The BBS door games that came shortly after were awesome too :)

Answer 74

Olympic Decathlon on the Apple IIe
Radar RatRace on the C64

I can still remember having 6 of us around a single keyboard each trying to hit our two keys as fast as possible. Everybody shoulder to shoulder all squished together. None of this sitting across the world talking over a headset with no clue who your opponent was.

Answer 75

Duke Nukem

Test Drive

Pac-Man

Answer 76

The many games that were printed in the back of Compute! magazine that I typed into my Vic-20. Talk about a lesson in syntax.

Answer 77

The Incredible Machine!!!!

First game for me that it felt like the computer was thinking, not just spitting out pre-determined things.

Answer 78

Some of the first games i played were a game on amstrad 1640 called cameleon - you needed to type it in first into GEM before running, and outside of that there was jacaranda jim.

also i loved the "write your own adventure" books i got from the library to do you own adventures like that.

Answer 79

NetHack, when I was six (playing on SuSE Linux 8-point-something). I still haven't won (without using debug mode or editing the source) after more than six years.
For new players:

• Use ASCII full screen
• Read the guidebook
• Stick to it - you might find it too hard, or boring at first, but after a few tries, you'll like it.
• Don't copy the save file. Please...
• Go to Wikihack

Answer 80

A home Pong first game got my attention.

A crappy backgammon on a TRS-80 in middle school made me realize that computers could be used to play games on.

Then I got hooked after playing a pinball game called David's Midnight Magic on an Apple IIe. I immediately signed up for a BASIC programming class in my high school after that.

Answer 81

TI-99/4A (Circa., 1982)

Munchman, Parsec, Hunt The Wumpus

http://www.videogamehouse.net/munchman.html

http://www.videogamehouse.net/parsec.html

http://www.videogamehouse.net/huntwumpus.html

Break

Apple IIGS (Later in the 80's.... around '85 and '88)

NumberMunchers, Oregon Trail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Munchers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(computer_game)

Answer 82

Asteroids on Atari 2600

Answer 83

Artillery on the Apple II

Answer 84

Dungeons of Daggorath on the TRS80. It's a 4k game. Got me into BASIC. From there, I was hooked.

I also liked Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple 2.

Answer 85

"Adventure" on the PDP 11/44
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

basically the forerunner for all of the Zork and Infocom text games, which ultimately led to everything else :P

Answer 86

Martian Memorandum

Answer 87

The first time I really used a computer wasn't playing a game, but typing one in from a book. Long, ago, my friend and I laboriously slaved over a computer we barely knew how to use, typing in an enormous (to us) BASIC program that doubtlessly ultimately would create a shockingly mediocre game. It took us about 3 hours to type in, then another half hour to fix the typos (I, as the typer, had a tendency to type THAN instead of THEN), and then we didn't even get to play it because his mother had finished her meeting, and we had to go home. 3-4 hours "wasted".

And every minute was awesome. As I was typing it all in, I could guess (it was BASIC, after all), what the commands would do, and I was trying to convince my friend that we should replace the strings reading "B-17 bomber" with "X Wing" and things like that. He was too scared, afraid it wouldn't work, but I knew it would. I was so giddy...I knew I could do anything I wanted!

Now, I know a lot better about the "anything" part, but that, more than ever just playing a game, got me really knowing that this was something that I could do and enjoy.

Answer 88

The one "game" of sorts wasn't really a game at all, just packaged as a game of sorts. "Learn to Program Visual Basic" was the program name, though after moving to real visual basic (at the time, VB6), I learned just how proprietary it was. Got me hooked though, and I've never looked back :)

Answer 89

a bunch of MSX games, don't remember which was the first one, but here's a couple

• The Castle
• Chess
• Nemesis
• Tank Battelion

Answer 90

UFO: Enemy Unknown, also known as X-COM: UFO Defense (and almost all sequels)

Answer 91

Early NES games, most notably Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.

If it wasn't for Nintendo, I may have never gotten into computers and my life may very well have been drastically different.

Answer 92

Star Control 2 of course!

Answer 93

Warcraft I, so much hours spent on it

Answer 94

I have to go with the following:

1. Doom 1 / 2
2. Commander Keen
3. where in the world is carmen sandiego
4. Kings Quest series
5. Diablo

Answer 95

Classic Empire, the old turn based military strategy game. My bother and old man used to sit for hours on two computers hot seating that game for weeks on end!

Answer 96

Dungeon Master!

I spent ages drawing the level maps on huge sheets of paper, drawing location of traps, keys, food and enemies...

Answer 97

Warbreeds

or Starcraft

Answer 98

Digger on Amstrad PPC512.

Answer 99

I was sitting on my uncle's 486 DX 66 Mhz playing the one and only:

It must have been in 1993 when I was 6 years old :-)

Answer 100

Star Raiders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders

And I got the highest score on it. You needed to have shields off the whole game to do it!

Remember the Byte magazine article on it?

Answer 101

Commodore 64 - Legacy of the Ancients and Legend of Blacksilver .... and the D&D games ... but if I had to pick I'd say "Legacy of the Ancients" .. LOVED that game and still do today.

Answer 102

I actually remember the exact moment. It was playing Red Alert on the 3rd mission of the allies (might've been the second. First one you got tanks). I ran someone over and thought that was so cool that people took the time to make the game do that. I knew form then on I wanted to be a programmer.

Answer 103

stunts, civilization, gorillas in qbasic (first code seen)

Answer 104

EAMON, yo. Nobody else taught themselves Apple II BASIC so they could hack their stats in that? Man.

Answer 105

I guess it was Chuckie Egg for me. I had to wait for for five minutes for it to load from a magnetic tape. I had a Didaktik M wired to a b/w TV and a tape recorder and it made these funny old-modem sounds while it loaded (played) the tape. The game was GREAT! Although I never could get past the first five levels or so...

It was amazing to see/hear how the screeching sounds turned into a game!

A few years later, on a PC, I got seriously hooked on The Lost Vikings. Spent years trying to get through all of the levels...

Answer 106

Microsoft Decathlon!!!

Answer 107

Lemmings

Answer 108

The game that got me interested in programming was Starcraft. It comes with a map editor that lets you set up "triggers" that control the game. After a few weeks of playing with it, I realized I was actually doing computer programming, I got interested in learning more, and here I am.

Answer 109

Starcraft

I was around 7 or 8 when it came out

Answer 110

Hunt the Wumpus - Typed in from the BASIC listing in a magazine (might have been a library book, now that I think about it).

Answer 111

It's been said by others: QBasic Gorillas

Answer 112

A really really old dos based game called 'karateka'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karateka_(video_game)

Answer 113

I don't recall having a computer game getting me hooked on computers. I think the main factor was when I saw Jurassic Park... "It's a UNIX system, I know this!"

Answer 114

Jet Pac/ZX Spectrum 48K

Answer 115

I would say Test Drive 2 in monochrome ;).

Answer 116

Robot Nim on the TRS-80. I was 4, and the robots blinking, looking to the side, and shooting each other was sheer joy. I've been hooked ever since.

Answer 117

Mr. Robot for the Apple IIe.

Answer 118

Someone else already mentioned it but my first gaming love was the original computer game itself: Zork, originally called Dungeon. You can even play it online still: http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php

I first played this connected to my father's university network via modem - this was when it was just called Dungeon. The only interface we had was a terminal that printed out display data on paper - no monitor. After playing the game for a while you ended up with a ton of wasted line-feed paper, but at least you could reference your entire game again.

Soon after I bugged my parents to get an Atari 800 computer and began writing my own text based adventures in BASIC.

Answer 119

I can't believe no mentioned EMPIRE. It was text-based, played by people from all over the world, and was the ultimate time-sucking device.

Answer 120

max payne

Answer 121

Baldur's Gate of course!

Where are all the AD&D games??

Answer 122

Atari 800...
Archon
Bruce Lee
Mr. Robot
River Raid
Blue Max
BC's Quest for Tires
Zaxxon

Answer 123

Quake 3 Arena

Answer 124

Super Mario World (SNES). First game I really got, and it definitely set me on the path to programming.

Answer 125

I don't know that I could attribute my interest in programming to a game, per se, but for me it all started with the Commodore 64 I bought when I was about 14. A couple of games that did further my interest in computers in general would definitely be the old Zork series and a Settlers-style game (don't remember the name) on the business machines in my high school that ran the old CP/M OS. The were Commodore Business Machines, IIRC.

Answer 126

• RailRoad Tycoon
• Transport Tycoon

Answer 127

Monster Truck Madness

Answer 128

Word Munchers

Answer 129

maniac mansion & day of the tentacle. go lucasarts!

Answer 130

Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and other classic LucasArts point-and-click games simply urge you to revive the concept of point-and-click adventure and apply it to nowadays' techniques. It would be great to have a P & C adventure game engine like ScummVM!

Answer 131

I know this question asked for the first game, but honestly I don't remember which was first and they were all influencial

Mac LCIII

StickeyBear's Reading Room

Thinking Things

KidCutz and KidPix

Prince of Persia

Spell Dodger

Load Runner

PowerBook 9600c

SpinDoctor

Discovered AppleScript (not a game but it was fun)

PC

Stunts

4D Boxing

SkiFree

Wolfinstein

Doom

MindMaze (part of Encarta)

BioMenace

Commander Keen

Brix

Total Annihilation

Need For Speed II SE

SimCity

Answer 132

Quake

Answer 133

Rick Dangerous

Answer 134

MOZ PONG - i think it was called that on the Mac.

So addictive!

Answer 135

DUKE NUKE'EM 3D

"what are u waiting for...christmas?"

priceless!!

Answer 136

Aztec Challanger on Commodore64

Answer 137

Grannys Garden - BBC Micro - 1983:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny%27s_Garden

Answer 138

A Sub Hunt game that my instructor had written for our IMSAI 8080. Also, my brother did an amusing animation of a lunar lander landing on the moon in a crater, an the crater closed like a mouth and licked its lips with a tongue...all in ASCII, naturally.

Only got to play with that machine for about a month, but the next year we got a bunch of PET computers, upon which I proceeded to do nothing but write computer games. My first 3D graphics were done on a pet, from a BYTE magazine about 3D graphics. Couldn't draw a line, though, but I got points to rotate!

Nothing warms the heart like typing in a Conways LIFE game, in machine language, in hex, using POKE, over and over and over, with it never working. Never did damn thing. Them were the days.

Answer 139

Tic Tac Toe. The user's moves were input by flipping switches on the front panel. There weren't enough switches so cell numbers from 0 to 8 had to be encoded in binary (4 switches for 4 bits). Then a printout on the typewriter showed both the user's move and the computer's next move.

Adventure came a loooong time later. Dungeon came after that.

Answer 140

Kye.

It got me hooked on fiendishly hard and overly complex puzzle games; also had a level editor so I learned a lot about level design.

Answer 141

God, where to begin, Leisure Suit LArry, All Lucas Arts Games (adventures) I LOVE LUCAS ARTS!, Simon the Sorcerer, Loom, Monkey Island, (And a new MI game is soon to be released!!!!), Commander Keen etc. etc. I still have all those old games and still play them from time to time.

**Sigh** the good old days....

Answer 142

I Wanna Be the Guy.

I played computer games before that, but IWBTG really got me hooked on them.

Answer 143

For me Mario Bro, Tanker and Brick games.. Wonderful... :)

Answer 144

X-Wing CD-ROM.

Loved that game.

Answer 145

Origin's Omega was truly awesome. It was a futuristic tank combat simulator, with a twist only rarely seen to this day: rather than controlling the tank, you had to program it. It had a neat BASIC-like language, and a structure editor that spared users (like 7-year-old me) syntax errors. I didn't just get into computers via games, I got into programming.

Answer 146

I didn't get hooked on computers because of games. Oh, sure, there was a crappy PacMan clone for the ABC80, but with 80*72 pixel resolution in graphics, it was pretty limited.

No, programming hooked me directly. Trying to make the computer do weird things, figuring out how every bit of it worked. That's what got me.

Answer 147

Fool's Errand on a Mac Classic. Still one of my favorite puzzle games of all time. I find myself downloading some new emulator every few years just to replay this game.

Answer 148

Hanse

Answer 149

Any game I laboriously typed by hand into my Commodore-64 from BYTE magazine. To type some stuff into a computer, and have a game appear, was completely magical.

You damn kids are makin' me feel old with all the "Quake 3 changed my life... when I was 10". Sheesh. Old guys unite! :)

Answer 150

Jazz Jackrabbit for the MS-DOS

There was a computer school in my town, and as a summer course they offered a "videogames course" and I just got so excited about it, I was like 10 years old back then. The course consisted in just playing all the videogames they had installed on their computers for 2 hours, yep... just that, zero programming, just playing the games!

It was really funny because, we didn't even know how to run the games, or how to use DOS commands to navigate trough the system to the GAMES\ directory and list all of them... So basically you had to ask for help to do that. And, there was, Jazz Jackrabbit, the one that every child played almost all day long, the graphics were so cool, that green & purple color excess plus a shotgun and very cool music featuring a badass-looking rabbit! man! that was intense!

Answer 151

New users can't post screenshots apparently, but mine were:

"OUT OF THIS WORLD" and "THE 7TH GUEST"

Answer 152

Ultima. Later, Diablo.

Answer 153

Captain Comic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain%5FComic

Another screenshot

Answer 154

Zelda: A Link to the Past. Classic Game. This is truly the game that made me love games

Answer 155

TRS-80:
Star Clash (precursor to Master Of Orion but in Basic with 16k and all text)
Anything from The Big 5
Temple of Apsai
Jovian! (not sure of the name, it was a Star Trek knockoff)

Answer 156

Wow. Star Controls, on an old 8086XT. 10MHz, man. A massive 13MHz with turbo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star%5FControl

Answer 157

Carmageddon made me miss so many crucial nights my freshman year of college.

Answer 158

Zork.

Or, rather the "original" version of Zork that had I, II and III as one big environment that ran off 8" floppies on a DEC Mink workstation in 1980.

Answer 159

I liked a few of the others more, but twin kingdom valley was the first game i played for days straight.

Answer 160

Actually I got my first computer (TRS-80) before "Games" existed on it when I graduated jr. high. I think Pong was around at the time, but I didn't play many arcade games.

What got me "Hooked" was learning to program--that was just the coolest thing ever.

I'm really glad games didn't exist, I don't think I could have made it past them, I'd probably be a playtester for Blizzard now if I'd been born a decade later.

Answer 161

Star Wars Quest - it took me months to get to the end without actually seeing the movie on XT computer back to 1987...

Answer 162

My first computer was a Vic 20 at age 8 (thanks Mum & Dad:)

So either Raid on Fort Knox or Blitz.

But even before that, our local pub had space invaders, with different coloured glass!

My son just turned 4, and can already beat people at a Peggle party, but he'd probably answer this with World of Goo.

Answer 163

Mine was a CASIO fx 1500 P. (Calculator). Not a computer to be precise, but I could do small programs in it.

Answer 164

Championship manager (or Football Manager as it is now called). Probably the most addictive game ever to grace the PC next to the likes of Civilisation. Lost whole years to the game. Later versions helpfully kept "game time" counters to show how many straight hours/days you've lost to the game with wise quips such as "don't forget to feed the cat". It looks like a giant excel spreadsheet but I was hooked to this day as to the algorithms they used to calculate football results. Amazing.

Answer 165

Aside from an ATARI 2600 cartridge-based games, my first games were programming. I had an Atari 800 that I programmed games in BASIC. My first was a random "guess the number" program and then I moved up to card games. My interest in game development probably predated that with the Atari 2600 games, so I'd say it was Pitfall, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, ET, and Jungle Hunt

Answer 166

Chess Master (I dont exactly remember the exact version) It wasnt probably the first game that hooked me with computers but definitely it was the one that inspired me to pursue programming.

Answer 167

1. Tetris, the original game. Watch out the clicks, they are genuine

2. Empire on PDP-11M

Answer 168

I liked to play Dave. It was Dos based game and that is when my interactions with computer started.

Answer 169

The question appears to presuppose that everyone who became interested in computers did so through games. Which is of course nonsense. Who ever rep'ed this question up!? I got interested in computers through programming alone (circa 1981).

Answer 170

Paratrooper! :D I clearly remember playing it at a cousin's house for hours and hours when I was 5. Ah, those were the days.

Answer 171

"Snake game" on amstrad computer in 1986 which i found later incorporated in nokia phones.

The good old amstrad had green color text on black background with CPU/Floppy drive in the monitor chasis.

Answer 172

The game that got me interested in computers was a very simple BASIC game for the ZX-81, called "Meteorids". It looked like that:

    V  O
  O
      O
 O
        O
    O
O

V is my spaceship, moving left and right, trying to avoid the meteroids. O are those meteroids, scrolling up.

Answer 173

The first PC game I really remember and liked was the The Settlers 2...that little strategy game just got me hooked up even until today.

Also, while I was playing Albion, I suddenly snapped and said "I wanna become a programmer". :)

Answer 174

Mortal Kombat !!!!

Answer 175

Prince of Persia (1989 video game)

Answer 176

Donkey Kong Jr is the reason I got into computers -

Answer 177

Space Quest IV!

Thank you for playing Space Quest Four! As usual you've been a real pant-load!

Answer 178

Ghosts 'n Goblins for the Commodore 64:

God, this game used to scare me a lot

Answer 179

The Dungeons of Daggorath on my TRS-80 Color Computer (Coco):

Answer 180

Prince of persia 3D

Answer 181

I'm still a youngin, so the first game I played that got me interested in computers was a game I played before I could speak… I loved computers from a very early age!

Math Blaster (Mac):

Answer 182

commander keen of course

Answer 183

Duke Nukem 3D

Answer 184

IMLAC PDS-1 running MazeWar .. circa 1972 .

now THAT's Old School

Answer 185

Power Pete / Mighty Mike

I could not understand how they programmed the game. I seriously entertained the idea that the programers had simply written every possible permutation of player moves (e.g. move right, then left, then up, then fire. Permute ad infinitum). I realized fairly quickly that this was unlikely, but I didn't learn how it was actually made until probably a few years later. This is circa 1995 or 1996.

Answer 186

Snake on TI-99/4A, saw it at a friend's house at age 10, convinced my parents to buy me this "machine", taught myself its Basic and all the rest is history...

Answer 187

C&C

Answer 188

Jetpac

http://twinbee.org/hob/play.php?snap=jetpac

Answer 189

Anything by InfoCom.

Answer 190

Frogger on the Apple II

Answer 191

Worms 2

Answer 192

Lemmings