Your early video game memories

Wyrmrest Accord
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Video games. We’ve all played them at least once, I guess?? Tell me about your first video game experiences.

What was the first game you played?

What was the first game you beat?

What amazed you?

What scared you?

How did you start with Warcraft specifically?

The first time I got access to video games was when I got a super nintendo for some birthday as a small kid. It came with Super Mario World and Super Mario All-Stars, so those were the first games I owned. I was pretty young so at first I just watched my aunt play them a lot and yelled at her when she got mario killed. But I did beat World myself eventually so that was the first game I beat too. A lot of my earliest memories are of watching other people play games–when we got an N64 later on I mostly just watched my older sister play Mario 64. I didn’t heckle her as much as I did my aunt though 'cause she was a little edgier and would swear at mario when he died, which was intimidating to me

The things that really amazed me were the tech advances in the early 2000s, even when they seem kinda quaint now. Like I remember being absolutely blown away by how clear Pikmin looked since the gamecube had much higher resolution than old consoles. For all the graphical advances we get now nothing even hits me quite as hard as seeing Captain Olimar in that amazing 480p did.

And for some reason this particular moment of todd howard moving a chain amazed me, even though 2005 was kinda late and physics engines weren’t even totally new at this point

As for scary things I was really scared of blood in games as a kid? Like I remember playing Tekken 2 at a friends house and feeling weirdly sick beause of the reddish hit effects on characters. Looking at videos of the game now it doesn’t even look like blood, just generic 90s punch boom but I was afraid of that as a kid. I was also afraid of nudity because I was raised in a religious household and felt that I might get punished in the afterlife for seeing Princess Ruto naked in ocarina of time (anyone with a religious education please confirm or deny that for me). Seeing headless Jenova in FF7 was also extremely upsetting to me as a child because it involved both an ambiguously gory and naked person. The death animations in Lost Vikings were also fairly traumatic for me

I didn’t play a warcraft game until Warcraft III, like a lot of people. My sister (the one who I watched play mario 64) got it for me as a Christmas present one year. She didn’t know anything about it but she said it was her boyfriend’s favorite game so some guy my sister dated in high school was my entry point to the series. I remember being surprised that you played an orc in the tutorial since orcs were usually monsters. Subverted expectations about orcs were cool back then, I guess, before we became jaded and realized that you can’t coast on thrall being cool in 2002 forever!

I really sucked at RTS games as a kid though and I never actually beat WC3 legitimately. I played through all the campaigns using cheats whenever it got hard just because I enjoyed the story. I also liked those custom maps that were like RPG maps where you’d just control one character and grind monsters to level it up. And I don’t remember what they were called but there were maps where you controlled a big arrow that let you spawn and customize any unit you wanted so that you could set up RP scenarios and stuff. I played with those a lot but I didn’t actually RP with others, I just spawned units to make cool cities and imagined things

Those are my tender childhood video game memories. Please share your own

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Age of Empires 2. Specifically a demo version of the Conquerors Expansion that came out of a cereal box. I could only play the first chapter of the Aztec campaign, and I did so like a hundred times in a hundred different ways lol. I was 7!

I suppose AoE 2 as well, depending on your definition of beat. I didn’t play every single mission but I won a lot of games and had fun doing so. Winning the Joan of Arc campaign once i bought the full game was pretty special.

Man, everything honestly. Computer games seemed so magical to me. Frankly, I think the reason that I’ve got such a passion for history IRL (and actually teach it as my job) is that Age of Empires 2 inspired me. I wanted to learn more about what all of these different civilisations actually were. I loved building and commanding armies, making my cities look cool as, and generally telling stories with the game.

My parents telling me to get off the computer lol. I was only allowed 30 minutes a week, and then nothing at all by the time I became a teenager. Used to frustrate me no end :stuck_out_tongue:

So for a long time, because of my intro with RTS, I thought that was the only genre I really enjoyed. I played games like Age of Empires 1, 2, 3, the Settlers 3, Stronghold, Stronghold Crusader, Rome and Medieval 2 Total War, and so on and so forth. But one day an older cousin (the same one who taught me to play AoE actually) gave me a demo for Warcraft 3. The demo involved only the “prologue campaign” of Warcraft 3, but interestingly with the addition of the extra missions where Thrall goes to the Darkspear islands and such. Like the AoE demo I played that like crazy (mostly in secret) until I was able to purchase my own copy of Warcraft 3, and the Frozen Throne expansion too! Something about that game grabbed me like nothing else - combining fantasy (which I’d always loved to read and watch) with the computer games that I loved absolutely blew my mind. I totally missed Classic, but I spent the late Burning Crusade period and pretty much the entirety of Wrath desperately wanting to continue the story. I wanted to know what happened to my favourite characters: Arthas, Kael’thas, Illidan, Jaina and Thrall being the ones I thought were the absolute coolest. I discovered wowwiki and wowpedia and such (can’t remember if they were the same at one point or if I just used both a bit) and read as much as I could, keeping up with the story that way. I was a teenager, and couldn’t afford a subscription… until I got a part time job. Then, like a month after Cataclysm’s release, I jumped right into WoW and haven’t really looked back (although I admit I’ve struggled to stay engaged this expansion).

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Since as I mentioned before I was terrible at RTS games as a kid I am amazed you were good at AoE at 7. I had it when I was a little older than that (maybe 9 or 10?) and I always wound up using the machine gun sports cars. I remember playing around with the map editor more than actually playing the game so my memories of what the actual campaigns of the game were are murky at best. And uh using text commands to play sound clips from the princess bride pops into my mind when I think of that game but idk if that was some kind of modification or what because movie clips being in a commercially released game seems weird looking back

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I don’t recall the EXACT first game, but it was something on the Atari 2600. It wasn’t Pac-Man, because I recall getting that for Christmas the year it launched, so it had to have been a game before that.

The first game I remember truly “beating” was Legend Of Zelda. I didn’t get a Nintendo when they came out, but my neighbor had one so we would sit there and trade-off the controller trying to beat different parts. Took us about a month of playing like that, but we got through it, only to find out there was another “harder” level beyond that…

There we some early Commodore 64 games that would put some games shortly after that era to shame. In fact, I would say in every generation of gaming there have been games from the end of the “old” generation that just absolutely destroyed anything from the “new” generation.

I used to play a very old Friday The 13th game on C64. When Jason was finally “revealed” in every game, the game would scream LOUDLY. Here I am, sitting in the dark, looking for Jason and suddenly getting a loud jolting scream, hoping my mother wouldn’t hear it, and simultaneously scaring the heck out of me from the shock.

Long story short, I was hanging with a group of people (online) and we jumped from game to game together. First, it was Star Wars: Galaxies, then Guild Wars, and finally WoW (we may have played a couple of minor games in between). I didn’t want to jump to WoW at first but they were all into it. I FINALLY jumped in and shortly after they all left the game and disappeared from my life entirely.

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First game I ever played was Digger, I think. My dad had a lot of older computer games he’d play on the computer like Dragon’s Lair, Digger, and like, some kind of duck game where I had to save ducks on various platforms?

The games I properly got into first were Civilization III and Age of Mythology. Age of Mythology got me into Greek mythology. Then that evolved into a passion for fantasy, and look where that’s led me.

I was a kid though so my experience with Civilization III was building 3 cities in a few hundred turns then getting rolled by a single Aztec knight while my only defender, a spearman, died of disease in a jungle. In Age of Mythology I didn’t even know there was a story after the Trojan War arc because I could never beat it. Yes, the arc that was about 3 missions long at the start of the campaign.

The first game I beat was Spyro: A Hero’s Tail. It was uh… more my speed at my age than strategy games. To this day my little sister and I race to see who can speedrun it faster from time to time. She has the record of about 3 hours, I believe.

What amazed me most back then was when I finally did beat the Trojan War campaign in Age of Mythology, went to the Underworld, and popped out in Egypt, where I learned there were other cultures you could play. Mind. Blowing. IT WAS A WHOLE WORLD, GUYS. THERE WAS A WHOLE WORLD OUT THERE.

The scariest thing at the time was Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter computer game. He threw firecrackers at you, it was so hard! My siblings and I had to get my dad to do that part every time. And don’t even mention the pace my heart beat at when we reached Voldemort :scream:

I got into WoW before Warcraft, actually. My dad wanted to get my into DnD so he was like “Heeey, you ever hear about this game World of Warcraft? You can be your own hero.” I wanted to be a tauren and name him Kamos after the guy from Age of Mythology. The name was taken >:c

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The Elder Scrolls Skyrim was a religion experience and the Legendary edition guidebook is like a bible to me.

The lore of the Elder Scrolls has yet to be trumped by any other universe in gaming, and I wait eagerly for Hammerfell.

The cosmological pantheon’s were diverse and original, yet each divine remained enigmatic. The Daedric Princes felt complex and managed to avoid the stereotype of demons and instead were more morally grey (Though there are exceptions)

The cultures were diverse and unique (Shout out goes to the Dunmer and Argonians.

The way magic worked in the lore also made it out to be extremely powerful if used correctly, as in the first game the villain manages to fool the entire Empire using Illusion magic into believing he is the emperor while locking the true emperor in a dimension outside of the river of time. Or one mage who used an illusion spell to fool a vampire into believing that they were paralyzed when they weren’t.

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I should have included a question for “what weird software did your parents have that you played”

For me it was Encarta Mindmaze

This was a quiz game that came with microsoft’s encyclopedia Encarta which I would play with my sister a lot, despite us both being way too young to answer any of the questions.

It was kind of fun for us anyway because um you got to see some fun pictures of medieval-costumed characters with each question

Here’s someone doing a let’s play of it

I’m sure someone else played this too without getting any answers correct because encarta was on lots of computers before wikipedia existed

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God, I loved Encarta. I spent hours just looking through things on there and playing that maze game.

I’ve basically been playing games my whole life, starting with the NES and Mario. We were mostly a SEGA family, though, so most of my earlier memories were on the Genesis. We never had much money, so that thing was my main console all the way through the Dreamcast. I could have absolutely been a Sonic speedrunner back then, if I knew speedrunning even existed.

I think the game I probably put the most time into back in the day was Shenmue, though. I loved my Dreamcast more than anything since I bought it with my own savings. I made a goal of collecting and stopping for everything in Shenmue and damn near wore out the discs for it. It was probably the first big “story” game I remember playing, and I’d never done a game that just plopped you into an immersive world like that. It’s super slow by today’s standards, but man I still love it.

I was never good at RTS, but I played a ton of Command And Conquer back then. I only really picked up Warcraft II because my friends were playing it, so I specialized in building a sea turtle army and was really the only type of unit I was actually decent at against my buddies.

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You could pick your own avatar and everything!

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think my first was an atari game. i remember one that had a tank in it. i think alot of my gaming time from my earliest years were arcades. at some point, i got a nintendo. mario game, duck hunt, some kind of track and field game. mario is the one that got me hooked i think.

from there, i just kept getting more consoles as they came out. sega, nintendo 64, playstations, etc.

it wasnt until i was a freshman in college did i get an xbox. it was a 360. i just played my friends xbox in highschool.

anybody remember game genie? i do. it was so cool back then lol.

man, i miss mario 64. star fox on 64! final fantasy games on playstation. man, ff 8 was the best thing i had ever seen. golden eye!!!

i was never a pc gamer. barely used it growing up. i had one of the warcraft rts games. i cant remember which one. it was ok. i was too stupid to understand how to play it properly. my dad was into flying so we had a couple flight simulators. those were fun.

ok, my earliest memory of a pc game was… Beauty and the Beast: Be Our Guest. haha.

once i got my xbox 360, i went full on fps games for years.

thanks for making me go down memory lane :smiley:

edit: gotta do a shout out to gameboy and sega game gear.

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Video games started really hitting around 82-83? I was 10.

1 - I didn’t know anyone who could afford actual consoles
2 - We played outside. My childhood was hoops, breakdancing and fishing. Kid moved to the block when I was 11(?) and he taught me to skateboard and brought his D&D books, his love of LOTR, etc. DRAGONS MAN. DWARVES. HOLY WHAT? That kid opened a whole world for me. He probably saved me more than he realizes. Absolute brothers for life.

What was the first game you played?
Only arcade. Scrounging for quarters. Pinball mostly, but I remember Contra and Pac Man of course.

What was the first game you beat?
I think the first real game that I beat was CoD. I was never really into video games. I got into them later, when I was in my late 20’s/30’s… Early 2000’s.

What amazed you?
I sucked at video games then. I suck at video games now. I’m amazed by people who don’t.

How did you start with Warcraft specifically?
Same friend up there^. My last deployment in the Army ended with an explosion, so I rode out my last yr in hospitals. Did my 20 and got out. We always kept in touch and I knew of the game, but hadn’t really played. He came to visit because I was in pain, miserable and depressed. He was playing and thought it might keep me distracted and help with some of the physical and memory problems I was having. He was right, as always. It still helps.

I think my generation was probably the last generation before it just became standard to grow up on video games.

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Alright- so I’m going to make myself a baby in here now based off of the other responses.

I cannot, for the life of me, remember exactly what my first game was. I won’t include the flash games I bricked a lot of family PCs with. One of the first games I remember playing, clearly, that was not for real young’uns was Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars on… whichever Xbox was out in '07. 360? I think it was the 360. I think I played The Sims 1, which I found it stashed away somewhere, before that.

First game I beat? That’s also difficult, mostly because my memory is awful. I’ll leave out the games for young’uns (mostly because I can’t remember) but I think it was probably “Agatha Christie: Death On The Nile” which was one of those ‘search in cluttered rooms for objects’ games.

I think the most amazing thing to me was that ‘imagined’ worlds could be made ‘real’ for lack of a better term. Games and my early exposure to them definitely kicked up my story writing habits up to 11.

What scared me? Well, I was terrified when my first sim burned to death. I can’t say I ever really get frightened playing games, but I also tend to avoid horror games like the plague (I get extremely tense during them and it causes the worst shoulder/neck pain.)

Warcraft is also a hard question. I googled more RTS games after I delved into CnC3 and enjoyed it, and then I started to get ads for WoW shortly after (around early WotLK.) I went off the deep-end until late Cata with a lot of ‘hardcore’ PvE over on EU (family) and migrated over when I got burned out with 4.2/4.3.

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I actually vividly remember coming home watching my older brother playing Ocarina of time and immediately something in my brain just kinda…zapped. Like I don’t know what that is, but I want it. I want to play it, I wanna have it, I wanna be a part of it.

Ocarina was likely the first game I beat. I remember when beating games was an achievement as a kid, rather than just a slow burning Obligation. I don’t know if games have gotten easier, or I’ve gotten tougher on myself, but these days I get down if I get stuck on anything when back then it was just part of it. I had a whole collection of games I’d rotate between, never really able to pin down or beat a single part of it.

Majora’s mask, which I couldn’t handle the time management.

Star Fox 64- I’d get stuck on either the train level, the lava planet, or if I got really lucky, venom itself.

Rome total war- I would just play the battles that happened, take what territory I could, and usually end up bankrupting myself and dying. I think as a kid I didn’t understand taxes and cost and would always recruit way more soldiers than I could actually afford.

Rogue Squadron- the same deal as Star Fox. There were three very easy early levels, then a jump in difficulty as you attack a moonbase, I believe, then 2-3 levels after that that I could not beat for the life of me. Never figured out what was past that.

Empire Earth- I could reliably get to the 2nd level of the Greek Campaign before I’d get trashed, the 4th level of the English, the 2nd level of the German, and I couldn’t do jack in the Russian Campaign.

And then finally, Warcraft 3. I’d play the human campaign over and over, trying to get past Stratholme, and I couldn’t figure out how to make my own men attack the buildings. So I’d just wander Arthas around in a killsquad I didn’t have the knowledge to keep up, ocassionally duking it out in frustrated impotence with Mal’ganis’s group before inevitably losing. When I tried the nelf campaign in Frozen throne, I’d usually lose around the time we got to the Tomb of Sargeras. Weirdly enough, I managed to beat the Founding of Durotar back then…idk how I got away with that.

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I wouldn’t quite say “good at” lol but I could beat random games on easiest difficulty, and that demo campaign on standard… after a great many attempts. Even today I’m hardly a master strategist - can’t win AoE games on hardest difficulty and rarely win on hard. But I have fun with it nonetheless.

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Answers in order.

That I played? Tyrian 2000

First Game I beat?

D.O.O.M, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem!

What Amazed me? - The simple fact that I grew up during the primage and pilgrimage of watching the internet literally go from dial up, having to find codes to beat certain games LOOONG before anti-cheat was installed. There is a certain pirate game that locked you out if you were a literal Pirate of the game.

All of the other games have pretty much progressed. From Diablo 1, I ran max level on 2, 3 and the expansion to 2 and 3. After that, I started to heavily get into Warcraft 1, 2 and 3… See a pattern here? I grew up in the world that -I- wished I was in… I didn’t lose my sanity due to this mentality and perspective… Though, it has helped me keep other addictions like drinking on lock.

I’d rather spend 100 a week on WoW, than spend 100 a week on booze. Just my opinion, do not judge me.

What scared me…? This is, an interesting question since, reflecting at it… Nothing really scared me. I, in love with the computer and the magical world behind it called the internet. I sort of taught myself to make real life a game, and then make games on the computer my reality.

A few phycologists and therapists tell me that is fine, giving me mental conditions. The thing that was the real kicker for me, is that I played Diablo 2 and GTA 1 - 3 and never turned out violent or anything along those sorts.

Ah, where has the time gone…

Warcraft Specifically - I was a young lady, digging around in the file codes and somehow, found a way to make all of the voices on the npcs (yours, enemies and allies) to make them squeak like the stupid Hampster Dance song. It kept me amused until I hit Warcraft 3, Reigns of Chaos and Frozen whatever. From Warcraft 1 and 2 I learned how to basically play the 1v1 skrims and I rarely played custom games…

I started with WoW with my parents actually. I was still a youth and only had my parents, nay. Allowed -my parents- to only do profession related crap back when it was OG Classic, TBC, and so on.

They hate computer games (most of them) but they are still getting a kick outta pokemon go.

With hugs and cuddles.

Dlovet.

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First game I ever played was a Trucking simulator on the Apple II.

First game I ever fell in love with was River Raid for the Atari 2600.

First game I remember beating was an old Macintosh title…the name is lost on me, but you played as part of a Moon Base crew as Earth was being invaded, and thus you were the only “resistance” for Humanity. You’d walk around the base, talking to your friends/companions/girlfriend (This was a Big Deal™ to young me), and then get into the Rocket to play a Tank game in a early CG city and have to fight a UFO at the end of the level. I wish I could remember the name of the dang game.

As to what amazed me…stories. The original NES had Deja Vu and Shadowgate and these were huge games to my young mind. Nightshade was also one that’s stuck with me through the decades, though that’s an obscure title. Bit RPG but with a Fighting Game battle system I’ve never seen since N64’s Hybrid Heaven (Itself an obscure gem).

As to what scared me…killing animals. Humans, demons, robots, mutants…I’m cool with. I just ate damage from the dogs in Wolfenstein 3D. Hated to hear the whines.

Also this:

How did I start with WarCraft specifically? WarCraft 2: Tides of Darkness. A friend and I passed the CD back and forth between us (Honestly can’t even remember who actually owned it).

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Playing Guerilla War on the NES with my dad at 4 or 5 years old.

We played Contra as well, and other games, but I loved this one as a kid. The 3d movement, vehicle combat, destructable blocks, it was just so cool.

I also really liked Battle City. You could design your own levels, which was insane at the time now that I think back on it.

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I can’t remember if it was the first game I played, but I remember Crash and Spyro the most - and my father giving me pokemon Red with the old translucent purple gameboy colour after my surgery. I do also remember Syphon Filter and a lot of Perfect Dark multiplayer. I think Pokemon Red was the first game I ever beat - I know it wasn’t Crash 1 (Curse you High Road-).

I can’t remember being particularly amazed with a game up until… Halo 3 custom shenanigans. Which… wow, I really miss that. Particularly getting beaned by oversized wire spools.

The first ‘scary moments’ I remember was actually Ocarina of Time- I’d always get my father to beat Gohma, the water temple boss, and… the entire Shadow Temple. I don’t think I ever actually beat the game by myself until the 3DS remake. If we’re going more modern? The regenerator monster from Dead Space. Yeaaaah. No. Nope. Always stopped in chapter 5.

Annnd I remember starting Warcraft 3 because of the battle chest… box… thing, at Zellers. And custom games. My cousins eventually talked me into trying WoW sometime in Wrath, said they’d gank me if I went alliance (Remember PvP servers?), so I rolled a troll shammy named Alzaklok and went from there. Didn’t get into the game too much (or even hit max level) until halfway through Cata, got into RP, and ended up maining on WrA halfway into WoD give or take!

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My memories in general tend to be pretty spotty and as such my recollection will likely lack much detail. While I can’t remember the very first video game, I played I think it’s safe to say it was likely on of SNES as I remember owning one at the time, as well as a Sega Genesis at some point. I think the first game I beat was also on the Genesis; some baby game featuring Barney the Dinosaur. I often mostly just dabbled with games back then; I don’t think I cared much about completing them.

In general a lot of the games I played I rarely fully understood. I experienced them, sometimes alone and other times with my cousin, and sometimes fantasize about things that I thought maybe could happen without any real indication of the likelihood of such. This was especially the case by the time I got a Playstation. I also recall always wanting to watch cinematics and the like when they came up. In retrospect I can’t think why. I figure it might have been a combination of things, such as wanting to see a story or simply marveling the reality of what was playing. A bit later in life I was more specifically moved by the sheer variety of experiences that video games generally offer. Even with my comparably limited tastes at the time I could experience things technically tangible but often very difficult to actually attain irl; not to mention those more obviously fantastical scenarios.

A bit extraneous but I mostly played racing and action sports games when 3d was common, up until I got Grand Theft Auto 3 for Christmas. Even after that GTA games were some of the only titles not of those genres that I bothered with until the PS3, and even then my first PS3 game was Ridge Racer; though that had more to do with the lack of games overall than my personal proclivities. Ironically I can’t remember the last racing game I’ve played since switching exclusively to pc gaming. I think it was the original Dirt or perhaps Grand Tourismo 5: Prologue.

My earliest experience of a game scaring me was likely when watching my cousin play Resident Evil 2. If memory serves, he was annoyed by me running in and out of his room at the time, so he made me stay thus forcing me to watch. Prior to that I hadn’t experienced much like it, and I suspect that was a large contributor to how it affected me. Survival Horror titles in general usually scared me with their imagery, at least until my early teens.

For Warcraft WoW is literally the only thing I’ve personally played in the franchise, as well the only thing by Blizzard I’ve played. I think my very first exposure to it was either one of old celebrity tv spots or an Xplay review of one of the expansions; then there was also that South Park episode. Eventually near the end of High School I started a trial and shortly after that ended convinced my mom to pay for a full account. For the record I didn’t even realize WoW was part of a franchise until well after I started playing it; I always assumed it was its own thing until looking into the lore. WoW was also the first major pc title I played, but in retrospect not my first MMO; that would be Motor City Online, which I could barely run and barely understood at the time.

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Time to date myself here.

The first game was Space Invaders, it was new and I’d sit atop a bar stool at this bar my stepdad worked at and plunked quarters into it. I remember the first time they got Pac-Man in, mom and me were picking him up and he mentioned the game and I was allowed to go in and play. I had NO idea what to do.

The first game I beat? That’s a toughie because older games had an objective, but would just start over. It was either Adventure or Superman for the Atari 2600.

If I have to pick a game with a definitive ending, I’d go with the Legend of Zelda for the NES… Or would WarGames on the ColecoVision count?

What was amazing to me was seeing a Neo-Geo arcade cab and then getting the home system. At last, I could play arcade games at home!

Toss up between Resident Evil 2 and 4 for scariest.

The last is easiest, I like RTS games and WCIII had been released, so I gave it a go.

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