Community Did lil baby you start off on computers, consoles, or in the arcade?

[Crayon]

Well this a simple premise isn't it?

What I had in mind was more like what kind of games were first gernerally accessable to you. Basically, when you went pro. Not necessarily the first game you ever played.

All aboard the oldboat to memory lane.

You feel me?

Or you know what?

You can just drive by and post nostalgia pics.

 

[Deleted member 113]

I started playing games frequently, in the early 80's, on two platforms:

-on a Spectrum 48k, which I had at home.

-on a PC (one without a hard drive, just a few KB of RAM, that used 5 1/4 floppies, and first had a green monochrome monitor, and later monitors had a couple of very bright colours), that my father had in his office, playing games like Alley Cat:




As for Arcade machines, pretty much every local Arcade that we had didn't allow entry to people below a certain age, so all I could do was stare from the outside, and see people playing.

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

You're not the boss of me!

I think my progression went Arcade machines in the dodgy garage over the road, Arcade machines on holiday, Atari over friend's house, Atari clone at Home, ZX Spectrum at friend's house, ZX Spectrum at Home then a complete mongrel mix of computers and consoles ever since.

First Arcade game i really remember:

There were others but that one stuck in my mind... and the next one used to give me electric shocks when i played it at the hotel on holiday.

There was an Atari Clone and my first computer which i still have.

 

[Ge0force]

Here's my story:

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[Ruvon]

I started to play on computers back in the 80's on TI99/4A.

We had 3 games : Burger Time, Space Invaders and a game with a Kangooroo who punches boxes to trap bad guys.

Few years later, I got a MasterSystem, played a lot on it but in 93, we bought a PC and it was a real turning point in my gamer life. It was an asthmatic 386sx25 (designed by Commodore ) with Sim City, Dune and Monkey Island 2. They were my first games on PC and they defined my player tastes for decades : I still love and play city-builders, strategy games and point & clicks.

 

[Swenhir]

The first gaming hardware I ever had was a gameboy, followed by a PII 266mhz rocking Windows 3.1. That was quite the thing to little mind-blown me, all the complexity of how an OS and a computer thrown at me with nobody to teach me.

I broke it. A lot. Enjoyed lemmings and a few other games I can't recall on it. But when the upgrade to 95 came, that was when the world opened wide with 3D graphics and absolutely amazing RPGs and all the generation of games that followed. I think my most vivid gaming memories of the time were Outcast, Homeworld, Baldur's Gate. And the demos, so many of them. I think I wasted days on motocross madness.

Aside from games, flight simulations were where things were at for me. Pro Pilot, Fly!, Falcon 4.0, good times for a lonely kid .

I guess the answer to the question is handheld, even though PC (with Genesis on the side) were what truly blew my mind.

Edit : Actually I think I got confused. I started on a second-hand 386 with 3.1, but the PII was where the world opened up.

 

[Milena]

The first gaming related device that I actually owned was a computer.
I might have played with my cousins on some weird consoles earlier than that, but I didn't own them, so computer!

Got my first one when I was almost 5 years old, it was an old IBM computer that my uncle gifted to me. It had like 5 games installed (but I only remember one of them being Prince of Persia and the other a videogame about winter sports), the monitor was in black & white and I couldn't read yet, so I just had to memorize what to write in DOS.

Then I got a PC runnning Windows 3.1 when I was 6 years old, same uncle gave it to me. He had Monkey Island 1&2 installed, along with SimCity 2000. I used it to play pretty much any adventure game from LucasArts (because both my uncle and my aunt were huge fans) and any game I could actually run on it. It lasted me a lot of years, I even installed Win95 on it, trying to squeeze everything I could out of the poor thing.
It died in 1999. RIP.

 

[Eferis]

I started with 80's games even if I was born in '93 because I had one of those cheap bootleg Chinese 9999in1 consoles with many NES games (and other stuff I can't recall) pre-installed. Also, I used to spend most of the summer with my grandparents who lived in a small town on the Italian shore and pretty much every beach establishment had a relatively big number of Arcade machines available (with many classics like Meta Slug, Puzzle Bobble, Pang, Crazy Taxi etc.) and I played there every afternoon. I also got a Nintendo 64 a bit later.

I got my first computer when I was like 8 or 9 (with no Internet connection until almost 5 years later) and I used to play pretty much only what I found in the magazines they sold back then, even if I can't recall many of the games. I remember playing Starcraft, Stronghold, Deus EX, Thief, System Shock 2, The Thing, one of the Monkey Island games and many smaller titles.

 

[z1ggy]

My first device was an Atari 2600, i think it was in 1985 or around that (i was 4)

Then i got a PC in 1999 and my mind blew away with Fallout 1&2, Half Life, Quake 3 Arena, Thief and so on. Good times for a RPG nerd.

 

[PC-Patriot]

bah ya all younglings compared to me. I was there back in the day. I was at the forefront when the best social gaming was that bloody "simon says" game



But I was having none of that social gaming with the family. Nope I was sat in my bedroom playing this :-



For 2 bloody years I played that invaders game. Till I got my very first computer a stonking ZX81 with 1k of ram and a 16k expansion pack.

 

[MJunioR]

I started with a mega drive, but I was three and don't remember much. I remember playing a fighting game, there was a F1 thing too. This MD is probably somewhere in my grandma house.

Then a SNES, don't remember much either. I finished my first games there though.

Then a Saturn and shortly later a 64. I had five games on my Saturn, all Japanese and I didn't understand shit. On the N64 I had FIFA 99, Destruction Derby 64, Toy Story, a horrible fighting game, Pokemon Stadium and Harvest Moon I think. Didn't play much by then.

Then a PC and a bunch of consoles over time.

 

[deftonesrcool]

NES toploader w Mario Bros 3, Kirby's Adventure, Battletoads Double Dragon, and that godawful TMNT game

Awesome thread idea

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

I played this til i got anything electronic, kids these days. GET OFF MY LAWN!

 

[Tizoc]

Consoles then Arcade and PC around the same time thanks to KoF 97, Capcom beat'em-ups and Full Throttle...and Solitaire.

 

[NarohDethan]

The first recollection of gaming I have is OG Prince of Persia, on an old ass computer which wasnt that old at the time. But then consoles came and remained there until ~2014.

 

[Arsene]

Big nintendo fanboy until I got a PS1, then I became a Nintendo/Sony double trouble fanboy.

Then I started using Newgrounds on my grandparents PC in 2004, Transitioned to ROBLOX thanks to a shitty Newgrounds ad in 2006 which I played religiously up until 2009/2010. I downloaded Steam for Alien Swam (I still have no idea how or where I found out about it) and got introduced to Valve's insanely good backlog of games that I somehow missed up until then. My real life friends all transitioned to PC gaming around the same time too which was great because they were all Xbox fanboys and I was on PS3 so 99% of the time I played games it was Single-player or Online with random's.

From 2008-2016 I was using different shitty laptops I got at Walmart to play PC games, they were weak as fuck and couldn't run shit but hey it could run GTAV and Overwatch at lowest settings in 480p (it was a nightmare please don't shame me) but I built my first PC after years of debating doing so (I was worried id fuck it up or get a faulty part) in November 2016. The winter sale was really fun that year to say the least. I think the first game I played at launch on my first PC was Resident Evil 7 and it was so wild.

I think the worst thing to think about is that I had 2000 games on Steam before I built my PC. So you can probably imagine me trying to play all these games and either not being able to or having to at lowest settings/lowest resolution. I don't regret any of it though. I had a beefy PC, A massive list of games right out the gate, and now I'm learning about PC building and tech in college.

Its kind of insane to think about PC gaming and how it impacted me, I met my now best friend on ROBLOX back in like 2009, and we still talk daily. He's always been there for me even though we never met in person and I honestly wonder if I'd still be alive today if we never met. Thanks Newgrounds for showing me that crappy ad.

 

[Ruvon]

I played this til i got anything electronic, kids these days. GET OFF MY LAWN!

I played on this device ! But I can't remember when... I was 10 at most.

 

[PC-Patriot]

I played this til i got anything electronic, kids these days. GET OFF MY LAWN!

Ohhhhhhhhhhh I would have killed for that. The best I got was this :-



I kid you not this was ACTUALLY A THING I spent hours (not) controlling my car around and around that circular "map". This is why whenever I hear someone go "ah the good old days" I have to resist the urge to buy steer and go from an auction site and smack the person over the head with it.

 

[Copons]

I VOTED EVERYTHING!

Which actually means that I can't pinpoint the first game I've tried, to be honest.
I remember I got a NES for a xmas (could it have been 1987? 1988?), but I also remember I used to play with a Super Mario Bros. coin-op in the seaside town where I went for Summer back in the 80s, but I also remember playing Alley Cat on my mother's computer in her office.
So: EVERYTHING!

 

[PhaZZe]

This all happend when i was 3 or more.
I had a nintendo clone, know as creation, it was great, you can use jpn and usa cartridge.
In my town i remember playing some arcades, snow bros and mortal kombat.
I won the first family pc in a random raffle did it by the local mall, it was windows 95 and packard bell. In another point my big brother bought a geforce 2 mx 400 so now we can play monster truck madness, midtown madness, etc.

 

[ScreamingTrees]

First games I have a vague memory of playing at all I think were Zaxxon, Bad Dudes, Frogger and Qbert on a PC with a 4 colour monitor. The games were a couple years old at that stage I think and played them in my Dad's office.

First games I remember playing properly were Space Quest 3 on PC, TMNT arcade game and Double Dragon in the arcade as well. I was around 6/7. Kept playing PC games like Monkey Island but got a NES with Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt around the same time. Continued with Nintendo consoles and PC alongside it until I got a Dreamcast (they were selling them off really cheap) which was my first non-Nintendo console.

 

[Parsnip]

I and most of my friends had NES so SMB, Mega Man, Duck Tales and such were my childhood games.

 

[Alexandros]

I played a few games on a friend's Atari 2600 and a cousin's Atari home computer but my first games machine was this:

That's an Amstrad CPC 6128 and the store owner my parents bought it from threw in a disc with ten or so games, pirated of course. Original games back then were incredibly rare and incredibly expensive. Some of the games on that disc were the following:

Space Invaders
Nigel Mansell Grand Prix
Roland in Time
Exolon
Saboteur 2
Target Renegade
Game Over
Technocop
Ikari Warriors
International Karate plus

Out of those, Target Renegade was by far my favorite.



A straightforward beat 'em up that me and my brother played for hours upon hours.

 

[Deleted member 113]

Out of those, Target Renegade was by far my favorite.



A straightforward beat 'em up that me and my brother played for hours upon hours.

I played the Spectrum version of that game.

 

[fsdood]

Damn, amazing stories in this thread, mine is not special, lol. Started off with the SNES in it's later years, played Super Mario, some Natsume games and Donkey Kong, but the mod chipped PS1, PS2 and the gameboys shaped my childhood. Games were cheap, had so many diverse genres and it helped that everyone had one, you couldn't go to a household without one. I still remember the gatherings where my cousins and I play Tekken 3 or Street Fighter Alpha 3 and kept mashing buttons. Basically any competitive games like fighting games or sports games such as Captian Tsubasa or Winning Eleven were a big deal for us.

A lot of people shit on LPs, but it sometimes reminds me of the time of me watching games my sisters would play like Resident Evil or Harvest Moon, and how we would talk about the stuff that's going on in these games. For gameboy games, I keep forgetting a lot of them except for Pokemon and Capcom games lol. As a kid, the jump from PS1 to PS2 and seeing MGS2 being played for the first time would never be topped. It's the biggest generation jump I can think of besides maybe Gears on 360. My nostalgia biases still makes me believe the PS2 generation had the best games, even though many great games keep releasing to this day.

I haven't gone too deep into PC gaming until recently in comparison (3-4 years ago). I played the occasional Doom, some point n click games like full throttle or Windows 98(?) pinball on my brother's PC, but that got outdated really quick. I sometimes get nostalgia for the "good ol' days" of how simple gaming is, lol.

 

[Ge0force]

I played a few games on a friend's Atari 2600 and a cousin's Atari home computer but my first games machine was this:

We had these things at school

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

Alexandros CPC128 Disk Drive! Rich Kid Spotted! lol They were expensive as all hell here until late in their lifecycle.

I think this is the channel i was watching ages ago which compares different versions of famous games especially Speccy/C64/Amstrad but i may be wrong.



Can't listen to confirm at the moment but hey ho. Folks, this is pure Euro 8-Bit Nostalgia. Probably an alien country to the US MC Crew. lol.

 

[Taborcarn]

This is one of the first games I remember playing, on my dad's Commodore 64

Also some games on my cousin's Atari 2600, most notably Combat and Asteroids. I got my own NES not too long after they launch, but PC gaming was always in the background too.

 

[Nabs]

I didn't get into PC gaming until I was 14 or so. Console was where it was at. I'd say SNES or Gameboy is when it all started clicking for me. With Gameboy, we're talking Duck Tales, Tetris/Dr. Mario, and Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. SNES was Yoshi's Island, SMW, and the Mortal Kombat series. I'm still really into these types of games all these years later. #BringCrazyCastleBack

I went NES (Mario/Duckhunt/World Class bundle) > Gameboy > SNES > Game Gear > N64 > Dreamcast > Gamecube > Xbox > Wii

I really miss the Dreamcast. That was a special year or so until Sony messed everything up.

 

[fsdood]

I really miss the Dreamcast. That was a special year or so until Sony messed everything up.

Daaaamn I forgot about the Dreamcast lol. I had that and I played a lot of fighting games on it like GGX, CVS or MVC2 and third Strike. Shame it died the way it did

 

[m_dorian]

Sometime between 82-83. Mostly arcade machines and consoles at friends/relatives.
I got my first PC in 1989, an 8088 processor, can't remember how much kB ram and 20 MB HDD with a 5 25 floppy. I had a green Hercules type monitor and. I remember playing alley cat, the first Larry and King's Quests, Bubble Bobble, Fantasie III and some more with it.
Good times.

 

[Stevey]

I started on a ZX Spectrum 128k +3

Was great at the time.

 

[Dinjoralo]

I grew up on Nintendo consoles. Now I play everything on PC, but I still like the kinds of games you'd find on the Gamecube.

 

[Deleted member 113]

I started on a ZX Spectrum 128k +3

Was great at the time.

It was. And, at least here, it was a bit rare.

After the 48k that I own (yeah, I still have it; missing a couple of caps for two of the keys, but still working ), the market was flooded with the 128k + 2.
I only knew a person who owned a 128k + 3.

It was quite the difference from those tape decks that the previous versions used.

 

[Alexandros]

Three of my favorite games of that time:




Based Ocean Software.

 

[Monado]

I started off with the SNES and I was on Nintendo consoles and handhelds for most of my gaming years. Also owned a PS2 and PS3. I played some Steam games on my laptop during college, but I didn't seriously get into PC gaming until recently when I built my own PC. Now my consoles are gathering dust while I am catching up on all the PC games I missed out on.

 

[Crayon]

Oh! Good morning everybody.

I was expecting way more people to say NES. Reason being, if you're of a certain age range, NES was completely ubiquitous.

Arcade machines always caught my eye as a child, and I got a couple of quarters to play them here and there. I don't remember getting into the games overly enamored with any particular game. I think I was mostly just fascinated buy any video game.

I wasn't aware of games you could have at home until the NES came out. They would be under glass cases at stores. You would go to a good guys, and this thing was a real spread. Controllers, guns, and a freakin robot in the box.

I got one soon for Christmas. Super Mario Brothers and Zelda. At 7 years old, there's no coming back from that combo. This is where I became completely obsessed.

....

Did you plug this thing into a monitor or a TV or what?

 

[lashman]

i pretty much started the same way FunktionJCB did ... except i went straight to PC

a shitty 286, no HDD, no mouse, no windows

and, funnily enough, one of my first games also was Alley Cat

... and Hostages! (none of those were brand new or anything, mind you)

 

[Panda Pedinte]

The first memory I have regarding playing with a videogame was with my uncles Atari 2600. I all remember from the game was you controlled what in my mind looked like a spaceship and and to navigate through a maze, and touching in the walls could kill you.

The first console my father bought for me and my brother was a NES clone called Phantom System. Just look how beautiful is that plastic box:

One the ad that aired in TV:



With the console we also got 6 games:

• Super Mario Bros
• Pac-Man
• Ghostbusters
• Crime Busters
• Duck Hunt
• And some racing game that I don't remember the name.

After that we got a Mega Drive, PS1 and Dreamcast. I started playing on PC when I was almost 16 or 17 because my father bought an used PC. The processor was an AMD K6-2 where I played HL1 for many and many hours, as well some other old PC games and also emulators.

After that we bought a decent PC with a Pentium 4 HT but by that time I wasn't playing many games as mostly of my time was used playing a F2P MMO. Fast foward to 2010 and I got a simple laptop where I discovered Steam, indie games and Kongregate. Nowadays I just play on PC and don't own any console anymore.

 

[PC-Patriot]

....

Did you plug this thing into a monitor or a TV or what?

Philistine this is the puter of the people this. This is the glorious Sinclair ZX spectrum 48k the cheapest computer available at the time. Trust me if you had a Spectrum 48k a monitor was about as real to you as a bloody unicorn : , You plugged it into a normal television and were treated too 8 colour games .......... well ok 2 colour games because of colour clash which meant no two colours could be near each other.

 

[Stevey]

It was. And, at least here, it was a bit rare.

After the 48k that I own (yeah, I still have it; missing a couple of caps for two of the keys, but still working ), the market was flooded with the 128k + 2.
I only knew a person who owned a 128k + 3.

It was quite the difference from those tape decks that the previous versions used.

I still had the tape deck connected by some sort of aux cable as there seemed to be a lot more games on tapes.

Also had the light gun, Operation Wolf felt amazing with that.

 

[Kurt Russell]

A mix of computers and arcade machines in my case. As kids we used to go to a place called Sacoa, which was full of arcade games for kids (as well as those damn machines that steal your cash while you try to grab a plush toy ) I probably played my first game there, and then my parents' Olivetti 386 machine did the rest (we spent way too many hours playing Gorillas with my sister).

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

A mix of computers and arcade machines in my case. As kids we used to go to a place called Sacoa, which was full of arcade games for kids (as well as those damn machines that steal your cash while you try to grab a plush toy ) I probably played my first game there, and then my parents' Olivetti 386 machine did the rest (we spent way too many hours playing Gorillas with my sister).

Enjoy!

GORILLAS QBASIC : Microsoft : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

'QBasic Gorillas' is the legendary turn-based strategy game supplied with the first QBasic version. The game in which you take on the role of a giant gorilla...

archive.org

 

[Kurt Russell]

Enjoy!

GORILLAS QBASIC : Microsoft : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

'QBasic Gorillas' is the legendary turn-based strategy game supplied with the first QBasic version. The game in which you take on the role of a giant gorilla...

archive.org

 

[lashman]

Enjoy!

well, i mean ... you could just, you know ...

 

[Ruvon]

well, i mean ... you could just, you know ...

Damn lashman I just spent 10 minutes of my life playing this... I still know hom to aim at this game ! But you're not helping, I have other things to do !

 

[lashman]

Damn lashman I just spent 10 minutes of my life playing this... I still know hom to aim at this game ! But you're not helping, I have other things to do !

oops, sorry haha

 

[Crayon]

Seems like Alley Cat was the hot shit!

I played this til i got anything electronic, kids these days. GET OFF MY LAWN!

This fucking thing. oh man. I actually think about this from time to time. The impression it made on me was so strong. Granturismo, eat your heart out.

Omg look how tiny it is.

Philistine this is the puter of the people this. This is the glorious Sinclair ZX spectrum 48k the cheapest computer available at the time. Trust me if you had a Spectrum 48k a monitor was about as real to you as a bloody unicorn : , You plugged it into a normal television and were treated too 8 colour games .......... well ok 2 colour games because of colour clash which meant no two colours could be near each other.

I've heard of ZX spectrum, along with the other home computers that I never had access to. you could say they were before my time, but my time would have been prime for getting one is a hand me down or such. I had just never seen any at all. I have never heard of such a thing until the mid-90s. Didn't know they existed.

This one in particular looks so tidy and stylish though. Superficial as that is, it makes your little spectrum there my favorite weird of self-contained computer thing.

 

[lashman]

Seems like Alley Cat was the hot shit!

it really was!

 

[Crayon]

Whoa ha I was not expecting that to pop up dosbox on my phone LOL. I guess I had never seen a link to one of those before.

Having seen it first-hand now, I understand how it was the Destiny of its time.