The Geek Forum
Main Forums => Entertainment => Topic started by: Jaepheth on November 09, 2014, 06:50:34 AM
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I'm curious about what first video game(s) you can remember playing.
For me, we had a few games on 5 inch floppies for our old IBM compatible (286 CGA or EGA I think)
1. Space Decathlon - Sort of 10 games in one; including: Rocket Sled (Navigate a maze), Lander (land on targets w/ various points), Asteroid Defense (incoming targets from 4 cardinal directs at increasing speed; shoot the targets), Some sort of navigation game (side scroll through a randomly generated obstacle course)
2. Virus (or Virus Rage?) - I don't remember much about this game. I didn't play it much because I didn't understand it. I seem to remember it being a board of cells and you try to prevent a virus from spreading. There was a cool syringe graphic though.
3. Pacman - Not sure which version this was, but it used the ASCII smiley face as Pacman, and there was a bug where if you got enough extra lives they'd break the wall of the maze allowing you to go off the board.
Can't find any space decathlon screenshots.
Virus Rage:
(http://www.pixelatedarcade.com/screenshots/1331/442/thumb_340ff-level-two-avoid-the-viruses.png)(http://www.pixelatedarcade.com/screenshots/1331/442/thumb_7d2a2-game-over-the-screen-rapidly-flashes-different-colors.png)
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I am not 100% sure what my very first video game was. It was an old one though. Either Space Invaders, Galaga, Asteroids, or Tempest.
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Joust on a Atari 2600.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YDF-s1zlBQ
And heya Cat and Pb!
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We had a pong. The next were electronic football and electronic basketball by mattel I think. Then I had a coleco electronic football which was a big improvement. Then we got an atari, then I got a microvision with several cartridges. Then a Nintendo, then and Apple IIE, then a Sega Genesis, then an Apple Quadra 660AV, then a windows box.
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I also played pong as my first game. It was a great Christmas that year!
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Occasionally my dad would bring home a teletype for working from home. A big suitcase type thing with an acoustic coupling modem (sockets for the handset, etc), dialed into a service called TYMSHARE. I have no idea what the mainframe was. The terminal was a thermal printer, believe it or not, quite advanced. But, no screen, right? A line printer. You typed the commands, the computer replied, they printed out on paper that scrolled up like out of a typewriter. ANYWAY. The Watergate hearings were on, so this was, like, 1974.
There was a football game on the computer. It was pretty straightforward. I think you typed "P" to pass, etc, and you typed the names of the teams in at the beginning. That's about all I remember. That's the first computer game I played.
Also there was a Star Trek game, but I couldn't figure out how to access it. My dad tried to teach me FORTRAN, but I'd rather just play the games. He was pretty disgusted.
Oh and context: my dad did spacecraft structures for Lockheed, so at the time he was either working on their unsuccessful bid to build the Space Shuttle, or early designs of the Large Space Telescope (which got smaller, then was named Hubble)
(he didn't bring the terminal home to work on spy satellite stuff)
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We had Pong and a TI-99/4A. I played a lot of Chisholm Trail, Parsec, TI (Space) Invaders, Centipede, Hunt the Wumpus and the Scott Adams text Adventure! series. Mom was the gamer in the family and thus the one who got a Nintendo. I watched her play a lot of Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. My brother and I took turns on the multiple Super Mario Bros., and I could destroy everyone at Dr. Mario and Tetris (TENGEN!).
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We didn't own a console until the Nintendo 64 - this was before we even owned a family PC. I did get to play Oregon Trail / Number Munchers / etc. on the 'ol Apple II at school - boy those were the days. Other than that, though, I played Mortal Kombat at the Mexican restaurant down the street or some classic TMNT Arcade at the mall if I was lucky.
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Occasionally my dad would bring home a teletype for working from home. A big suitcase type thing with an acoustic coupling modem (sockets for the handset, etc), dialed into a service called TYMSHARE. I have no idea what the mainframe was. The terminal was a thermal printer, believe it or not, quite advanced. But, no screen, right? A line printer. You typed the commands, the computer replied, they printed out on paper that scrolled up like out of a typewriter. ANYWAY. The Watergate hearings were on, so this was, like, 1974.
Also, this is pretty impressive. One of my favourite YouTube series (or, perhaps the only one I watch) is AVGN (https://www.youtube.com/user/JamesNintendoNerd). I love the episodes when he pulls out the really old stuff, though, nothing like this.
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The first game system I can recall playing was a SNES. My parents would drop me off at daycare and I would play Donkey Kong and Super Mario. The first system I got as a kid was a Sega Genesis, my parents had one of their friends sneak in a window and set it up while we spent Christmas afternoon together.
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Oh and context: my dad did spacecraft structures for Lockheed, so at the time he was either working on their unsuccessful bid to build the Space Shuttle, or early designs of the Large Space Telescope (which got smaller, then was named Hubble)
Whoa. </keanu> That's awesome.
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Whoa. </keanu> That's awesome.
I was the first kid on the block to know the word "gigaflop." Lockheed built the first-generation thermal protective system tiles for the Space Shuttle. The shape of each tile was unique (there were ... I had to look this up ... >24000 tiles). They all had curved and non-spherical surfaces. And the tolerances were extreme, I think he said a mille (1/1000 of an inch). Otherwise, you know, fire gets between the tiles and yeah. We know. HERE'S THE FUN PART. The tiles were roughed out from this raw silica foam stuff, then baked, then machined, then the business end was covered with a hard glass-like surface, then they were baked again. Each time you baked the tile it shrank a bit. The amount it shrank was a function of the thickness of the tile at any given point ... absolutely insane. Dad's job was to figure out how big the tiles had to be before they baked the so they ended up perfect after the second bake. He needed a supercomputer. Keep in mind this was, like, 1976. There was this outfit in suburban Bahhston called PR1ME that sold a mini-supercomputer that was capable of a gigaflop (I suspect everyone here knows that this means a billion floating point operations per second). He came home from a sales meeting laughing like hell about this ridiculous word. About 25 years before this capability got to the desktop.
ETA: He was sure it wasn't work. He told me while drunk that "those things will be falling off all over Kansas." He was wrong about that, they worked great. It was a completely different kind of thermal protection that had the ice bash damage that lost Columbia.
He wouldn't have a personal computer in the house. He thought they were worthless expensive toys. So my gaming background is ... not what it could have been :galm:
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I can always remember being a pc gamer before anything else. The first game I ever remember playing was probably Rayman from a floppy disk. But this could just be an early memory that I made up.
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Sandy's Lockheed EE dad also wouldn't allow a personal computer in the house. As we've talked about before, your dads' were eerily similar.
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Might and Magic on the Commodore 64. Back when you actually had to make your own maps on graphing paper. Good times.