first, some pong-like game on someone’s zx spectrum in early 80ties. it was brief and short but very first experience. later, karateka, tetris, games like that on my and others C64.

the first game i was hooked to was Elite on same C64. it was just wow. 3d, freedom, trading, pirating, leveling up. i played only Elite for long time, played it on Amiga and my first 386 later on. still stands as my first serious gaming memory.

I remember being in a friend’s house. He asks me if i knew what golden eye is. I said no, and so he takes me to his room. He turns on the tv, so I ask “oh we are going to watch a james bond movie?” He laughs and says no, and presses a button on a wierd plastic box that suddenly comes to life! The tv suddenly changes, and some wierd scene plays until we get to something that looks like a dvd menu. He then gives me a wierd ass controller.

I then spent the day figuring how to stop looking up while running away from my friend headshotting me repeatadly while giggling like a schoolgirl. I enjoyed every second of it. My brain was firing up and never have I felt so excited to even being aware of such an experience existing.

I remember playing the Neverhood on our first family computer back when I was 4. The art direction and story were really oddly appealing as a kid. I still think it’s a very underrated art style.

Seeing an Atari 2600, the original woodgrain model, at my cousin’s house and playing Space Invaders, Adventure and the one with cowboys.

I was convinced the cartridges contained reels of film, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work with all the different possibilities. I was only 4 or 5 at the time.

My cousin opened up a cartridge and I was amazing to see the circuit board with a couple of chips on inside. Blew my mind.

My dad coming home with a ZX81. I played various games on it but the one I remember most fondly and load up occasionally today, was Forty Niner. We needed to get a 16K RAM Pack for it so it definitely wasn’t the first I played on that system.

It was some educational game about a british kid in a hot air balloon. Not the slightest idea what it was called, but there was one frog song that little me loved.

My first proper gaming memory was when I played Myst on my dad’s computer, I didn’t get it at the time, but later when me and my sister got our own computer I played it much more intently, then came Riven and The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, they were really cool.

My first genuine FPS experience was Half-Life, but I was too scared of all the monsters, so I turned on cheats, god mode, get all weappons and make monsters ignore you.

My first multiplayer gaming experience was when me and my class mates got the demo of UT99 running on the school computers and gamed after hours, I sucked, but it was really fun regardless.

It’s either Sonic the hedgehog on the Megadrive or Tetris on the GameBoy. I don’t remember a time where I didn’t have them.

Pong.

Jill of the Jungle is the first one I can remember playing when I was about six.

Battlezone on the Atari 2600 https://atarionline.org/atari-2600/battlezone

Not necessarily my first, but my first clear memory of a gaming obsession is playing Defender on my cousin’s 2600

I don’t remember what the game was called, but I played it from a diskette on DOS, if I remember correctly. You were controlling a sort of space ship and jumping on different platforms while continuously moving forward. I loved it. But I don’t remember what it was called so I can’t look it up any more.

We also had some sort of maze game and Commander Keen. But I sucked at Commander Keen, so I never got past the first level.

Duke Nukem 3D

Playing Super Mario Bros. on my Dad’s NES. Probably in 89.