When I was young, my parents were against getting my brother and I one of the fancy new video game consoles, so my first experiences with gaming were on the PC. I fondly remember playing games such as Gizmos and Gadgets from a floppy disk. Some of my other early favorites were the Jump Start series of computer games as well as the Magic School Bus games. As you can see I was geared towards educational games early in my life. I feel like these games did a very good job of being educational while also being fun. Though I do admit I just guessed on some of the harder puzzles in Gizmos and Gadgets until I eventually got lucky and solved them.
I did end up getting my first console eventually, the amazing Nintendo 64. A gift from my uncle on Christmas, I’m not even sure if my parents knew it was coming. The first game I ever played on a console was Mario 64. I spent many hours of my childhood playing that game, but to this day I still have yet to get every star.
I’m curious what other students first experiences with video games were. First game? First console? Early favorite games?
My first game experiences have always been social/with people, given being the youngest of three brothers. When we had the SEGA Genesis, a lot of the game my parents bought were geared towards multiplayer. Also, those old games had a way to make taking turns a viable thing without one feeling like the other was going to wreck their progress. Even with single player games, it was always with friends. FFVII had 3 people backseat gaming while one kid was playing. When my bud had Chex’s Quest (Doom reskinned for promotional purposes), it was still a group event.
What’s interesting to me is how uninterested I am with MMO games. To me, a lot of these games are boring and don’t scratch that itch that playing with live friends did. Sure, MMOs offer a sense of community and connectiveness, but for me, gaming was sharing the experience with another and everyone add their fingerprint to it.
Some of the first games I remember playing were on my father’s ColecoVision. The ones I remember the most were Pitfall!, Space Invaders, Centipede, and River Raid. River Raid was the one I remember playing the most. Essentially, you were the pilot of a one man aircraft, maneuvering around different levels, shooting down adversaries while making sure you did not touch the borders. I don’t recall ever beating that game because I always would bump into some sort of barrier. Pitfall! was my favorite of the bunch because of how addictive it was.
The first console I was given as a present was the Sega Genesis where I was able to play some of my favorite games including the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Vectorman, Mortal Kombat, and NBA Jam. I would play NBA Jam for hours, and the CPU was more than capable of providing actual competition. Sonic 2 was the best of the series for me, because that was the first to introduce the spinning start Sonic in order to gain momentum. Vectorman just provided hours of puzzle type of quests and difficult enemies to last until I was 10. My memory is a bit foggy, but I believe there was a Vectorman 2 so I am not sure which one I enjoyed more. Lastly, Mortal Kombat was one that provides many memories, as my mother would sit down and play with me. I shouldn’t say play, she button-mashed he way to victories, but I remember it fondly. MK and Sonic are the only games I’ve purchased on Xbox Live.
I remember Glover! Not exactly the fondest memories… but not that bad either, I guess.
My first game console was an NES, which my sister and I inherited from cousins. We played some of the typical classic NES games; Mario Bros 1 and 3, Double Dragon 2… some Mega Man and Metroid. There were a lot of games, but I wasn’t particularly good at any of them and didn’t finish many.
My Dad had a computer or two and I remember playing some DOS games like Commander Keen and Jill of the Jungle. We also had a few adventure games over the years, like Myst, Timelapse, and Titanic: Adventure out of Time.
These are my earliest gaming memories, but I suppose the fondest would have to be after getting an N64. Diddy Kong Racing, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong, and Zelda Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask (saved the best for last)
…man, those were some good times. Now if you would excuse me, I need to go tell some ten year old kid, “Johnny, these are the best years of your life! Go play your videogames!”
Like you, I started out with educational PC games. Jump Start was one of my absolute favorite series. Despite belonging to the mostly sub-par 1990s genre known as educational games, I think Jump Start did an exceptional job of telling a compelling story that helped justify many of the contrived and arbitrary educational mechanics. As long as the story was interesting, I had no problem “grinding” through all the boring educational problems to find out what happens. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? also had a great story that kept my attention. Oddly enough, I actually learned something too. In high school, I knew the differences between Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns because of that game.
However, my first favorite game was not educational at all. It was a silly 1996 PC game from Humongous Entertainment called Putt-Putt and Pep’s Dog on a Stick. Here is a video walk-through of the entire game. It was a modern re-interpretation of the 1982 classic arcade game Q*bert. However, being born in 1990, I had no idea what Q*bert was. All my six-year-old mind knew was that it was the best puzzle/platform game ever. I loved the zaniness of a purple convertible car named Putt-Putt flying over an isometric configuration of trash cans and dropping a dog on a pogo stick named Pep into the action. All of the overly encouraging voice acting made the experience all the better. My personal favorite was when Putt-Putt warned you to “watch out for the rascally critters”. By rascally critters, he was usually referring to “rascally” brown bears that were obsessed with hugging you to “death”. This game had up to 100 progressively harder levels and lots of really interesting mechanics. Best of all, the game included a really nice level editor where you could design your own levels and then test them out. This game might be the reason why I became interested in game design in the first place.
I talked about this a bit in my profile, but I’ll reiterate some of it here. My first console was the same as yours, the n64. My first game however was Glover. The gameplay consisted mostly of trying to get a ball to the end of a level using the ability to change the characteristics of the ball, such as turning it into a bowling ball. However the controls for the game were terrible and it was extremely easy to lose control of the ball and die. So easy in fact that I never beat the game, I don’t think I even got very far. I’m sure some of it was also my terrible hand eye coordination as a small child, but I like to blame the wonky controls. In terms of ascetics the game is very Banjo Kazooie. A sequel game was planned but was cancelled. A playable demo of the sequel did appear online many years later.
My first favorite n64 game was probably Toy Story. I spent many hours playing the game over and over but I never beat it. The game required use of an external memory card for saving, which is something I never acquired. Therefore I had to replay the game from the beginning every single time, needless to say I got very good at the beginning.