What was your first PC game ever, and how did you react to it?

s804@kbin.social to PC Gaming@kbin.social – 65 points –

Our first computer was an IBM, and the first pc game that i remember is called Kindergarten, i wish i remembered more about it though, i would love to watch on youtube and get a nostalgia boost haha

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GTA Vice City. I remember "concealing" weapons by switching to the empty hand near police officers, since open carrying a minigun didn't seem legal. The cheats were very fun in that game aswell, like cars driving on water, or who could forget the classic "panzer". Also it really looked like real life, but if one were to play VC now, you'd wonder what was wrong with my eyes as a kid lol. That seems to be a common sentiment about old 3D games though, really impressive how advanced 3D tech became in a few years.

'Where In the World is Carmen San Diego' on a Commodore 64 in elementary school! I loved that game so much. Looked forward to computer class every week. Also, my cousin had a mac, I think, that had a game where you played two tanks on opposite sides of the screen, and the tanks shoot each other and drop bombs on each other. Edit: wiki tells me it was called Scorched Earth. I can still remember the sound effects...wish I could remember the name of that one! The first PC game that I really gave huge chunks of my life to was Ultima Online (Pacific shard woop woop). My first Guild experience...first dungeon crawl..ahh the nostalgia..those were good times. Cor por!

a few months ago i saw the netflix show of carmen!

It's very likely one of my first PC games was a Humongous Entertainment game. Putt-Putt Joins the Parade or Putt-Putt Goes To The Moon were probably my introductions. I also remember playing Elf Bowling on my Grandma's Windows 95 computer every time I would visit her house.

The Putt-Putt games were some of my first too! I used to love Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo.

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Played it on a monochrome green EGA monitor. The "copy protection," such as it was, asked us who Richard Nixon's running mate was and we didn't know enough English at the time to comprehend. After trial and error, managed to get into the game and didn't have a flaming clue what we were doing. A ripping good time, it was.

Oh man, that game was an experience. My friends and I had to discover everything through trial and error. I remember laughing so hard when we clogged the toilet in the bathroom and drowned haha

I went on to play all seven (well, technically 6: see here) and the two reboots by a German studio that came out a year or two ago. Al Lowe's is a master of the lampoon style of humor

It would have to be the Learning Company's Treasure Mountain!, which the computers in my classroom had in Grade 1. I liked it just fine, but a few years later my Grade 4 computer had Ancient Empires and that's the one I really got into. My teacher once agreed to break school rules and send the floppy disk home with me because I refused to get off the computer at the end of day.

Math Blaster for our Tandy 4000. My parents got it for me because I was shit at math. I’m still shit at math.

Loderunner. Yeah, back when people had 5 1/4" disks for games.

My uncle gave us a bunch of PC games for my 286 pc. Among them was a Spider-Man game, a chess game, a couple classic arcade games, and ascii game that started with a Z that I can’t remember the name of, Leisure Suit Larry, and a side scroller with a woman with a sword. I was so young. I learned DOS fast and was playing the games. I liked to walk around as Leisure Suit Larry but I never understood the point of the game until I saw the sequels in my later teens.

these are such great memories hahaha

Zork? Zork was rad.

i have never played this game, seems like it was a gamechanger

SimCity 2000. I loved building giant grid cities and then destroying them. My dad was always kind enough to cheat in a bunch of money for me.

Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo. I loved that game, and all the other Humongous Entertainment games

This might be my first one too. Either this or SkiFree.

Roller Coaster Tycoon is the first that I really remember. I don't even remember which cereal it came in but that was the best value ever.

The first computer my family had was a really old one with MS DOS. First game was either Nibbles, or a weird platformer called Dark Ages (can't remember which I tried first).

Best I can remember it was a DOS game called Number Munchers. You had to dodge monsters while solving math.

it was really smart to make games that help educate you and are fun. i remember i played a mario words game SO MUCH!

Oregon Trail. I died of dysentery.

so much death in this game. depression simulator

That's probably the first game I remember playing, but that was at the computer lab at school.

I'm having a tough time remembering the first game I actually had on our own computer at home. It might have been Encarta Mind Maze which came with the Encarta Encyclopedia CD.

Yeah, I played it in the computer lab. At home my first game was probably solitaire or minesweeper on Windows 3.1. That Encarta maze was fun!

Frogger on DOS, fuck I feel old.

I'll make you feel younger. My first game would have been something in BASIC I typed into the computer from a C-64 computer magazine. And when I fixed the typos and got it running, I saved it on tape to my Datasette. I think it was a lemonade stand simulator where you had to use your profits to buy more stuff for the next batch.

My first pc was a 286 sprouting an amazing 1mb of ram with cga graphics on an amber screen. Games like Leaderboard Golf, Police Quest, Leasure suite larry and so on were played. The quest games were probably our first serious PC games I had a Commodore 64 for more arcade style stuff. Back then it had better sound and graphics.

Oregon Trail for sure at school, but I also remember playing The Secret of Monkey Island on our Tandy at home alongside a Wheel of Fortune game.

i cant believe there is a pc called Tandy!

My first computer was an ancient Tandy that my uncle gifted to me when he upgraded. It used large cartridges for programs, and while it was mostly (very primitive) productivity software, I did have a very janky Pacman-style game.

I spent many hours playing that game. Many. It as objectively awful, but it was all I had, even gruel looks like a delicacy when you're starving.

The first PC game I ever played? That's a bit subjective, but I'll bite:
The first computer game I played was either Word Munchers, Number Munchers, or Oregon Trail on my school computer lab's Apple ][e. Again, this wasn't mine, nor was it a PC!
The first PC game I ever played was likely Math Blaster, but again, this was on a school PC this time. Not mine though.
Finally, my first PC was a 386. The first real game I played on it....Battle Chess!

Yes, same! I loved primes on Number Munchers so much. I was truly terrible at Oregon Trail, but just kept trying and dying. Also, Odell Lake in which you were a fish.

Battle Chess was surprisingly universal! Few people remember there was also a Star Wars Battle Chess made by The Software Toolworks.

My first game was King's Quest 6, on an old IBM PC running Windows 3.1. I had no fucking idea what I was doing and could never solve the first puzzle. This was 1996, so I was like 4 years old. I loved it though, the music was so good and I loved the beach sound effects. I fucked around it with for hours.

kings quest games look so pretty!

nfs2 se and i was blown away. i was later blown away by the cheats and whatnot you could race as.

nfs underground and 2 were my childhood! especially the music

Unsure which actually came first but it was a rotation of Lego Rock Raiders, Lego Racers, Lego Island 2 and Roller Coaster Tycoon.

i wish i played lego games growing up

My first was hangman in kindergarten. I think it was on a Tandy. It was so simple but still enough of a reward that the fear of losing access to it was though to keep most kids in line.

In the 90s, my father had an IBM running DOS so he could get work done at home. He also had a huge floppy of Friendlyware, which was a suite of family friendly games. Some of these were clones, but they all definitely had their charm. I played the hell out of those games. One of my best childhood memories.

Me and my sister would also love to type gibberish at the DOS prompt and try to pronounce what crazy mess we typed. That was a game in and of itself.

For the curious and nostalgic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendlyware

the first PC game I actually played was WoW. And how I reacted was proceeding to grow up addicted to wow, spending over $3000 dollars on the game, and now play league of legends.

The first computer we owned that I was allowed to use was a windows 95 machine, so my earliest games were built in stuff like Hover, Chips challenge, and skifree.

First game I bought was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's stone, it ran horribly on the computer for a little bit, then crashed and would never run again.

Sonic Adventure DX and the Putt-Putt games were my first exposure. And then later Sims 3.

i have watched video reviews about the putt putt games, seemed liked so much fun!

California Games for DOS on a monochrome orange and black monitor. This was the late 80s and I was just starting school. I remember it being extremely difficult but thought it was amazing all the same.

Hocus Pocus on DOS. I was only 4 or 5 at the time, and my brother would have to set it up for me since I didn't know how to use DOS. I'd tell him I wanted to play my Lucky Charms game, because for some reason my child brain associated the main character wit the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

93' Sid Miers Civilization on a Macintosh LC III.

I still cannot find that game anywhere or emulated. Anytime there's hope, or anyone gives a link, it's always the chonky dos version.

Hmmm

Probably SkiFree on an old win3.1 pc.

But if we want to play with the rules, i "played" the fuck out pf MS Paint.

SKYFREE! such an insane game. and yeah i loved drawing lines and then coloring with the bucket in paint haha

And making a mess of everything with the spraycan.

It was for my Mac, an Apple Performa 550.

Marathon. Made by some relative unknown company, Bungie.

So much god damn fun

I think Heart of Darkness was one of the first PC games I played. I was probably around 5 years old at the time. I remember finding it really scary, so I never managed to finish the game 😅

heart of darkness is a beautiful game!

I can't really remember which was first but I think it was Rollercoaster Tycoon or Warcraft 3.
It could also be some random learning game my parents got me lol.

warcraft 3 is one of my all time favorite games, i still play custom maps sometimes

The first I remember was in my cousin's computer in 99 or 2000, and it was Motocross Madness or Motocross Madness 2.
I remember just going out of bounds for hours just to be thrown into the air ahahah

When I got my personal PC in 2005, my first game was, Need for Speed Underground 2, followed by Pro Evolution Soccer 4, CS 1.6, GTA: San Andreas, and Football Manager 2005

God, probably Starcraft? I got it on the supercheap at Walmart a bit after I got my first PC (around 2000 or so).

Our first computer was a crap 486dx with a turbo button. My dad bought a red demo cd with a bunch of different game demos.

Boy that CD had some shitty games but some were golden.

My days were filled with typing d:\go.bat And seeing which games I could bludgeon into working by editing their ini files in doshell.

thats such a cool way to get you into coding!

Age of empires. Straight out of a Nutri-Grain box like 20 years ago. Always thought I was pretty good at it because I played when I was a kid. Turns out I used cheats a lot and the game is actually super hard for me.

big momma was the best when you were a kid.
I remember making a ton of ships and just sailing them around, watching the sails. So realistic lol.

Red Alert 2. I played the shit out of it in elementary school and once in a while afterwards up to this day. What a banger.

red alert 2 and generals were so cool, played so much with friends

Morrowind. As a kid I would watch my mom play it, and around age 12-13 I began playing it heavily. Learned how to install mods by .exe and by hand if necessary, grew up in the Morrowind mod community (which was great people) tried to make a few mods myself...good fuckin times man. Sometimes Morrowind scared me but mostly I marvelled at the beauty of it, and I love it to this day.

The first actual computer game i bought was Morloc's Tower for the Apple II+, which i bought when visiting San Francisco.

Channel Crossing on the ZX81. A frogger rip off on a computer so primitive the only graphics were numbers and letters plus some predefined block shapes. Of course in glorious black and white. We still thought it was amazing.

The first ‘computer’ game I ever played was some lunar lander on a teletype hooked up to a mainframe. Make updates to your thrusts and watch the results print out on paper

The first actual game with a screen was the original Adventure game on a minicomputer.
XYZZY motherfuckers!

Awesome. My first game memory was a game called Klignons, that run on a Sperry mainframe. My father had to keep me busy while he worked overtime. It did have a green screen. Early 80s if I recall. I found a .net c# port of it a few years ago and even tried to implement it in Turbo Pascal in high school.

Treasure Mountain, when I was like 4

I still play the old TLC games now and then. They're pretty fun, just they get repetitive really fast.

It was Marble Madness. I was terrible at it, so I mostly remember the first level.

The first game I played on PC that I can remember was probably Word Munchers or Oregon Trail in elementary school in the late 80s.

Same here - Oregon Trail was my jam. Played on an old Macintosh Classic.

90’s, Oregon Trail and games like Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego and Magic Schoolbus on the library computers. Checked out the disk at the desk and signed up for 1/2 hour slots.

My older brother was very much into pc gaming while I was a few years behind so things get a bit foggy, however my best friend's dad at the time has multiple computers for work and we ended up playing adventure Island and commander keen a fair bit, later on my memories of games at home include stuntz, Street rod, the incredible machine, jetpack, there was one where you where a drug dealer?, Diablo, blood, doom, leisure suit Larry and so on but I guess my earliest memories would be of adventure Island and at the time I thought it was pretty fantastic and it was cool to play a game that wasn't my brothers

The first game I purchased with my own money was tomb raider and I'll be honest, it was mostly because of the cover art but looking back it was quite a technical achievement

tomb rider was insane when it came out :O

I don't remember anything about our family PC but the first games I played on it were Runescape, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires 2. Runescape I mostly just played with friends from middle school but I spent hours upon hours on Age of Empires 2

age of empires 2.. i played so much of this game! age of mythology was awesome too

On disc?

I think the Hercules PC game.

I remember it to be really fun and addicting

Stunts on the PC of my rich buddy, the graphics plus building tracks and then racing them blew my mind. Also Winter Games was fucking great, loved that ski jumping. I only had played some games on robotrons in school and on an old sinclair zx81 before.

It was like 2006 or 2007 and my Dad had an old Win98 pc he gave me, and I pirated Quake 2 because I always wanted to try mouse and keyboard in an fps. 2 years later I started mowing lawns to save up for a real rig and bought Left 4 Dead.

My families first PC was a Packard Bell, first game I played was Age of Empires. Damn just trying to remember the timeline of things and what I did and when has made me remember alot of stuff.

Times were simpler back then eh.

My first "real" pc game was Team Fortress 2, before that it was probably Lego Island 2 or some Spongebob flash game.

probably SimCity 2000
I don't think I understood it at first but I did love messing around in it but overtime I did actually learn how to make a successful city

The one I remember being one of the first PC games was The Adventures of Captain Comic. I also remember the first game I played with a sound blaster card instead of PC Speaker was Blues Brothers Jukebox Adventures.

My first PC game was Portal 2 iirc. I was ~10 at the time and it really opened my eyes to the wide world of PC gaming, and the different types of games that were on PC compared to console. It also slowly got me started and eventually transitioning from Controller to Keyboard and Mouse as my preferred input scheme.

I think my first PC game was Doom 2. I was little and only ever played it on god mode lol. I still know at least one of the cheat codes.

IDDQD I think it was

god mode finding the secret head in the end hahaha

Preinstalled games from Sierra Interactive on my dad's Windows 95 first one was called Torrin's Passage. It was a click through animated explore / puzzle adventure. I've yet to meet another stranger on the internet whose played it. Also Mech Warrior 2 came installed but I wasn't allowed to play it until a few years later.

i am prettu sure it was zork 1 but there was also kings quest 3

Rats on a #Zx81 an 8 bit machine with a 'touch' sensitive keyboard. It ran a chess game in it's 1k memory. I then got a 16k memory pack that meant it could play rats. A maze game. Oh, I just remembered, it had a fast mode where it switched the screen off to save processing power while it was thinking.
#computer

1st game I actually played on a PC was some Formula One racing game on a friend's "Schneider PC" ... I laughed at him because the CGA graphics were incredibly crappy compared to my Amiga

The first game that really stuck with me was Warcraft II. I remember my babysitter brought over a bunch of games and installed them on our Windows 95/DOS PC.
He installed a few other games too: Deer Hunter, Loderunner, Quake (only my Dad could play that), Sim Town + Some game demos, and some journal game I don't remember the name of. WC2 is the one I played the most for sure though.
I remember playing the campaign over and over with cheats, but the godmode cheat didn't work against magic, so it was dang near impossible for me to beat the last level. The level editor blew me away too, I would spend so much time in it just setting up large unbalanced scenarios to destroy the NPCs.

First computer game was called head over heels on the amiga, a very long time ago. Never heard anyone ever mention it but it was a brilliant game. Weirdly enough I remembered it looking amazing when I first played it but in reality it was 1 colour and around 32 pixels, I did find a remake on an emulator years later with updated graphics which was lovely to play.

It was definitely some educational game, I'm quite sure it was "Leer 't lekker zelf", edutainment from the Netherlands. You had to subscribe and you got a new disc every two weeks. I just looked it up and people have actually archived it online.

thats so cool! yeah educational as a kid were big for me too!

I can't remember which game was my actual first, but my grandfather had gotten a PC, probably because my uncle wanted one. It ran DOS and had some games.

It had some games on it I remember:

there were more but I can't remember them all anymore.

My brothers are about 10 years older than me, and we had computers from the mid-80s due to dad's work, so I would've seen my first game probably before I could talk!
The earliest games I remember playing are Digger, Moonbugs and other CGA/EGA era stuff. This would've been around 1990 or so.

Populous, and I still consider it one of the best games ever made.

It was either Police Quest or the shareware version of Wolf3d. Other than that prolly the Jump Start games

First computer was a csx64 8 I still have it but I was so young when I first played a game in it I don't remember... maybe tuk goes to town??

Wow, a lot of peoples first games were “real” games! My first was definitely one called The Treehouse which was an educational game. If I get to talk about my first “real” game it would either have been DOOM or Commander Keen, I think DOOM though because it arguably would have been easier to grasp the core concept as a child. This was on I think Windows 3.1?

I think it was Titus the Fox on a 386 in elementary school. I loved that game, I've played the shit out of it.

My very first one was NFS 3 on my father's PC. Remember playing it during the secondary earthquakes in 1999 here in Athens and getting scared.

Then I used to play 102 Dalmatians at a whoping ~10 fps on my aunt's PC. As a 5-6 year old, it was super helpful having the game run on slow motion...

The first one on my PC was The Sims. It was amazing having such a game as a child. Me and my sister have played the series for hundreds and hundreds of hours

The first game I bought with my own money for my PC was either "JetFighter III", "Master of Orion 2" or "Super EF-2000". The first PC game I played? It was probably "Galactic Conqueror" by Titus Games, though I'm not sure. It definitely was a game by Titus, as I remember the fox. Then it was either Microprose F-19 Stealth Fighter, Civilzation 1 or F-117 Stealth Fighter 2.0 (there's a good chance I played F-19 on an Amiga, not a PC). I should also mention Wing Commander 1 as a possibility; my friend even bought the speech pack back then.

Ah, obviously the first games I played, are the reason why I like complex games and I also have programmed primitive small games inspired by them.

I don't remember my first PC game but I do remember I was hooked right away. That shit was magical.

The guy living across the hall from me at Georgia Tech in about '80 had bought an Apple II with a 50hz power supply. He was an electrical engineer and rigged up a new power supply for US grid. All he had was the motherboard and a keyboard, the screen was an old TV. The memory was a regular audio cassette player. He had a game called "Orbital Mechanic" and we played with it quite a bit. It turns out that the paths of objects thrown from one orbit to another are not so intuitive - so it was a real challenge to toss a wrench from Astronaut A in orbit 1, to Astronaut B in orbit 2. That game used WASD for aiming the throw, and when I later began playing PC games, I wondered if that old game might have been the originator of the concept or if it goes even further back.