Gamers. What was the game that got you into the hobby?

I honestly don't remember because I was too young. However I do remember growing up on all the classics like Keen, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Rise of the Triad, Test Drive (1 or 2? definitely 2), Street Rod 2. The list goes on

Pokémon Blue, you could say.

Also, RPG Maker. It's wholesome seeing what people make.

Combat on the Atari 2600.

Specifically the 1v1 tank battles.

Am I really the oldest one here? Sigh.

Pong

Super Mario Bros. A game that’s nearly as old as I am, that fully stands the test of time. From the very beginning of my gaming days, this and Duck Hunt got me into it. Dig Dug 2 was the first game I ever got angry enough to flip the tv the bird. Sonic and Tails probably was the second major influence on my life, from a video game perspective. After that I was a gamer and will never turn away from the cathode-ray light!

We have a Home Movie of me at 3 years old playing Tetris on my cousin's Gameboy. I don't remember a time that video games weren't a part of my life.

The first game I remember realy clicking for me was Donkey Kong Country. I can still play that game off muscle memory alone.

I once stumbled into my parent's computer room as a little 6 year old and saw my older brother playing Sim City 2000. That moment literally changed my life.

Before that, I had seen my parents on the computer, but they were always just emailing or faxing stuff. I thought computers were boring machines for adults to do paperwork on.

The day I saw my brother playing Sim City on the computer was the day I realized it could do something awesome.

That was well over 20 years ago, and I've been a PC gamer ever since.

Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Elite back in the mid-90s. Jagged Alliance 2 and Fallout 2 a few years later got me finally hooked.

Sonic Adventure and Rayman 2: The Great Escape on Dreamcast

MASS EFFECT!!!

I’d played games pretty casually since I was a kid, but Mass Effect is what turned me into a gamer. Before Mass Effecf, I hardly finished games and could never really master controls, let alone the concept of movement with one stick and viewing with the other.

The Mass Effect story pulled me in so deep that I put in the effort and learned to actually play the game. After, ME I started playing just about everything.

Now, I’m in the process of recording my ME playthroughs and editing them into a show just for fun. I used to be normal at some point…

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Been playing Nintendo since I could remember. That's like everyone else's story.

However, I took a break. 1st kid was born and I wanted to focus on them. 5 years, no gaming... But Factorio... You see, that's where the trouble began to grow. That factory. That damned factory.

edit: fellow engineers, check the FFF blog, they've released news of the expansion!

Can't remember if it was Baldur's Gate 1 or Morrowind when I was a kid.

It's definitely not my first game, but the one who really gave me my love for games was Spyro the Dragon

Super Mario Bros on NES.. About 1991.

Definitely has to be full throttle. Such great games by lucas arts back then

RuneScape, back in 2007, not that I hadn't gamed before but that was my first real game.

I just installed the game after 13 years last week with a level 3 skiller in osrs. Just hit level 30 fishing, aiming for my first ever 99!

Surprised that I cant find it in the comments allready: Definitly Minecraft

Prince of Persia on our Family PC (Intel 486).

Galaga. Amazon Trail really got me hooked though. Then Earthworm Jim and Mechwarrior 2 turned me into a full-blown addict.

The first game I have a memory of playing is Sonic 2 with the Knuckles cartridge you could piggyback it on, so I guess that, but I was young so it could have just been the most memorable. I remember playing Earthworm Jim around the same time but having no idea how to play it.

Mario 1, 2, & 3 on the NES

Also Bible Adventures on the NES

My mom worked for the church part-time and she'd park me and my brother in the youth group room with the NES. Someone had stolen all the games (except Bible Adventures) but not the console. Our grocery store would rent you a game for a three days for a dollar, and we rotated between the three Mario titles until we mastered them all.

My dads collection of pirated games :)

Earliest memories of video games were titles such as Aztec, Spy vs Spy, Frogger, King's Bounty.

But what really got my eight year old mind captivated on a summer vacation in the 80s was Elite on C64. I've spent hours into the night trying to get as far away from Lave as possible, all while trying to make some profit on hauling food and computer parts. I did not understand the concept of saving and loading a saved game back then, so there was a lot of trial and error into permadeath involved.

The original Super Mario Bros on the NES in the late 80's.

The secret of monkey Island or doom.

Gaming in general would be the original Far Cry, Fallout 3, Battlefront 2, the Sims, and Age of Empires.

You can trace a lot of the games and genres I play today back to them.

Probably Space Invaders

Crystal caves, doom, Duke nukem 1, commander keen.. the incredible machihe, legend of kyrandia. Those are the earliest games I can remember playing. Fuck crystal caves I spent way too much time trying to beat that game.

Doom, played with my friends on the office computers via ipx networking.

Edit: totally forgot about my C64 and the shitload of games I played on it...

Doom and Doom II.

They certainly were not the first games I played. For my young self, games before then were either trivial games which you can figure out and play easily or difficult games without manuals which held my interest for brief periods of time. Games were (and are?) a certain difficulty and operate as they were designed. For Doom and Doom II, that was different.

Doom and Doom II were the first games I used cheat codes in (because they were the first games that I knew cheat codes for). The cheat codes in those games spoiled because they did more than just "make you invincible" but they also let you walk through the walls of the levels (noclip). They allowed you to see how the game worked (at least in a small way). You could also level jump (a more common cheat code) so that you can see levels that I did not have skills to reach. This made the games more than just a triviality since I could keep exploring and trying new things despite my skill level.

Those games were able to be modded though. You could easily get CDs with plenty of mods that changed the weapons, added levels, completely changed the game, and so on. This was the first game that I ever played that could do that. The CDs also came with editors which let me dabble in messing with weapons myself (where I managed to get around 1 FPS with all the rockets I fired at once from a rocket launcher). As such, the games could be made fresh and new again by modding it to be something different.

Those games also had a great sound track. It seems like a minor thing (and other games have great sound tracks as well) but I learned that music significantly influences my like or dislike for a game. Games that I played before didn't have bad music per say but nothing earlier really grabbed my attention like Doom and Doom II.

I do enjoy many modern games. Still, I miss that games typically do not have cheat codes (and things like noclip are a rarity in any new games) and modding has never seemed as "wild" as some of the Doom mods that were created back then. If Doom was never around, I'm sure that some other game would have grabbed my interest in different ways (likely it would still have a great sound track though). However, I would have likely missed the wonder of seeing how a game worked and seeing a game be modified.

Fortunately, these games are still playable today and still have new mods released for them today. As such, I can take a nostalgic trip and play them whenever I want.

Earliest game I remember playing was descent 2, which most people today have never even heard of.

I just remember that first game I ever played was Lode Runner.

First game I started that I actually owned was Congo Bongo.

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I've been into gaming since as long as I remember. My dad played halo 2 when I was a baby. First game I played tho was Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga.

It was called "Water Carrier". It was a simple labyrinth game that - because I had no way of saving it to a tape, disk, or similar - I had to type in line by line whenever I wanted to play it.

Yes, I'm a bit longer in the business than most of you.

Pac-Land. 10p per play in the cafe that my old girl used to go to in the mornings - she clocked that I wa I to that sort of thing and kindly got me an Atari 800 XE for a birthday or Christmas - I forget which.

It was all downhill from there.

I was kinda born into it? My earliest memories are of some Tom Sawyer game on an Apple IIe sitting on my mom's lap while she taught me how to play it. My parents had an intellivision with a good collection of games, the most notable I can remember being Microsurgeon. One of my aunt's had an Atari 2600. She even had E.T. I was born earlier the same year the NES released in the US, and when I was 4, I think, we got one but I had played Nintendo before at other kids' houses. I always loved Balloon Fight. I kinda latched on immediately and never let go.

Probably Mario on the first NES system. Then I got a Genesis, and I was constantly playing a little-known number called Ranger-X. THAT game was Dark Souls-hard.

Runescape skill farming to get into tech stuff.

Honestly? This hole in the wall food store in my home town managed to pick up a pretty early release of the arcade game Robotron. I was instantly enthralled, visiting arcades any time I could. From there, I played on friends' Atari 2600s and Commodores until I managed to get my own C64, and I've never stopped since. From there, I migrated through their products and stayed a diehard fan till the mid-90's - C128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and Amiga 2000.

I played a few early x86 games on demo machines in stores, but I didn't finally relent and build my own x86 rig until the release of the Descent 1 demo, which single-handedly destroyed all of my remaining resolve. I already considered myself a pretty consistent gamer, but that was the nail in the coffin. The rest, as they say, is history. It was only 4 years later that EverQuest came out, too, and that swallowed me whole.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

Only because Sonic Mega Collection wouldn't work on the defective GameCube I had.

Pretty sure it was Rick Dangerous on C64.

flashgames if it counts

Probably doom/Wolfenstein 3D (the original DOS title, obv.)... That started the whole thing, but FF6 and 7 were also huge catalysts for it back in the day. I think FF6 on the SNES was the first game I was addicted to. I couldn't have been much older than 10 at the time.... I can't say that I really understood the plot, but I enjoyed it a lot.

FF7 and 8 were both fun too.

After FF 6, we got LTTP and that's also huge for me. I've fallen away from LOZ, because I don't want to pay the Nintendo tax....

Sid Meier's Pirates and Minecraft

Minecraft

Dark Souls.

I remember the first game I played was Super Mario World on the SNES at my cousins place.

That game enthralled me because I was not good at it, but each time I played through after losing all my lives, I had the chance to get a LITTLE further, to DISCOVER something which I had EARNED.

Most games I played after that on Playstation 1 and 2 or Xbox had a lot more hand holding. There was not such a sense of achievement, though I learned to appreciate stories in games much more then.

Then I played Dark Souls 1. My BF at the time told me about it, and good god did I struggle with it. But like SMW, I found such a large sense of achievement as I inched further into the game. The non-standard story telling in the game was also really interesting, learning about this ancient lore from items and weapons and armor that I would find in the most desolate and obscure places of this dying world.

The combination of what I loved from high difficulty early games on the SNES in conjunction with what I loved from the story of games on later consoles were both present in Dark Souls, and to this day it holds a very special place for me.

Since, I think while Dark Souls 1 and 3, and Elden Ring have some of my favorite gameplay, Bloodborne has my favorite story of all time.

In Fromsofts games the world building is incredible and the difficulty is treacherous, so the journey is worthwhile.

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Spyro the Dragon on PS1

Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country

Two great side-scrollers

Think Brave Fencer Musashi or Zelda Ocarina of Time.

Mario Kart, I was a military brat my dad was kind of a jerk he played to beat me one day I got really good and kept beating him. He quit playing after that. Then he quit with everything else I beat him at.

Grim Fandango. Downloaded from a demo site, and went out with my dad to buy the boxed game.

sonic 1, first game i ever played

I honestly couldn't tell you exactly which game that hooked me for life. My first exposure was when I spent summers with my grandparents on their farm.

Grandpa and I would ride his trike out to the fields, and we'd... do stuff? To the plants? I don't really remember the work.

I do remember that work ended at noon, and we zipped into town on the trike. And we went to the pub. Grandpa would get me a root beer, and we'd split a poutine. Then he'd give me a roll of coins. I can go nuts on the arcade machines, he can have way too many beers, and WE DON'T TELL GRANDMA.

Anyway, a half century later I'm a recovering alcoholic. Good times!

Memory, Monkey Island, Diablo 1 and Street Fighter 2

Asteroids, the arcade game.

My dad bought us a multi game pong console, then an Atari 5200 years layer.

But we often went to arcades and got $20-$40 in quarters.

In later years I remember truly loving the Buck Rogers and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom arcade games.

First computer was an Apple II and I had about 500 floppies of pirated games by the end of its life.

Always always been a gamer. Also had a Merlin handheld game for car trips, which saw constant use.

I wouldn't call it a hobby, just some entertainment to pass the time/hang out with friends.

It was Counter-Strike 1.6. I didn't leave the house the summer I discovered it as a kid.

Mario Bros 1-3

Xmen arcade game

Lemmings or Descent, I don’t remember.

Super Mario Bros 3. Never beat it until the Allstars version on SNES, but it's the first video game I remember playing. Or maybe it was Gauntlet, but SMB3 was the funner one.

Monkey Island 2

Breakout, Sokoban, Prince of Persia, Command & Conquer, Tilt!, Space Invaders, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, Fallout, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Wolf3D.

This was in the '90s but some of those games were already quite old by that time.

Kingdom Hearts II

That game is the reason the X button stopped working on my PS2 controller when I was like 4 or 5

I'd have to go all the way back to pinball, since I've always been fascinated with games.

But the very first video game that really sucked me in was Batman on the NES. I'm talking fully immersed; no awareness of my surroundings. Jacked in.

The music paired with the grim visuals was such a vibe. Just playing it made me feel cool. My parents had to drag me away from that birthday party haha.

Daggerfall was the first game that really got its hooks in me. It had everything I wanted, a huge open world, tons of different items, getting to dress up my character :)
I must have spend hours just visiting every single town, playing tourist and just ignoring the story. It was all about exploring and role playing for me.

Pokémon FireRed

For me it was more a system than an specific game. I got a second hand GameBoy when I was like 5 or 6 and have been gaming consistently since then. Probably the highlight of that period was Super Mario though.

The early 90s Lucas Arts adventure games. Most notably Monkey Island 2.

Link to the past

Counter-Strike 1.3

Motocross Madness 2, baby. That's when I knew...

Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22 started it, Toy Story 2 for PSX detonated it.

The first game I ever really wanted to get good at was the arcade game spy hunter. The first time I got the speed boat was a dopamine high I've never recreated.

I always clicked with it really hard as a kid, but my parents banned me from it, so I just wound up making friends so I could play OG Red Alert or Commander Keen or whatever. I also played Tabletop 40k from a pretty early age, which my parents were more permissive of. In tabletop I have a very good systemising mind, so I wind up being the rules person, but I'm not super obsessed about any one system (I am a little "obsessed" with how few people play something other than D&D systems).

Pokemon games and older 2D Zelda games. I really got into it when I found Halo

Sonic 2. I was like 3 at the time.

Age of Empires II

Pokémon then was reinvigorated but Minecraft.

Watched my dad play kings quest 2 when I was a kid.

Age of Empires 2 on my parent's crappy old laptop.

The Little Big Planet series.

Couldn't give you the exact game that got me hooked, but I have been playing for pretty much my whole life. Earliest I can recall that could have gotten me hooked is either Yoshi's Story on n64 or some edutainment PC game where in one part you were moving pirate objects like a pyramid of cannon balls and other stuff away to clear a stone room.

Otherwise it could have been plenty of other games like some ps1 Egypt pharaoh themed game that was something like tetris or something similar.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Super Mario Bros got me in. It was my older sister's game, so it was just something we had around the house for as long as I can remember. I think that's a great first game to get into, because it has wonderful art and music, and simple, straightforward challenges to overcome.

On the flip side, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain got me out of gaming for the most part. I had never been more excited for something than by the story being painted by the trailers leading up to the game's release. I was already a big time MGS fan, and I'd say I still am. I even enjoyed MGS5 basically right up until the moment I beat it, and then I reflected on everything I just saw and felt utterly deceived. Empty open world, lots if time wasting interstitial moments, grind-based mechanics, and an unfinished story that didn't need to take as long as it did to tell (and was stupid, too).

Dune II

Boulder Dash on a Commodore 64 connected to a 20 inch CRT television in the living room of my grandmother, I guess around 1985 or so...

Pokemon Platinum

The First Metroid. We had a shop nearby with a NES and the multi cartridge switcher. There was Zelda, Super Mario and all the rest. But Metroid always caught my attention. To this day I think metroidvanias are my fav genre.

Final Fantasy VII. I've been gaming since the late 80's but the compelling story of FFVII completely cemented me as a lifelong gamer.

Fallout 4.

I started Fallout 4, instantly loved it, and got the initial few quests done and made my way into the open world. There were also side quests asking for help and stuff though. I thought to myself - let's knock out the small stuff so I can get the hang of this.

400 hours later I was basically fighting deathclaws with a high XP character and had barely completed past diamond City I think.

I didn't realize the side quests never stop and I'm an idiot but I was having fun anyway. I eventually looked up why I had to do so many and realized my issue. Finished the game shortly after because I had a maxed out character basically for beginner missions.

Played my first game on a dedicated Pong console but my first transformative gaming experience was either Ultima III, Archon or Starflight. Those games were on IBM DOS machines with only 4/16 colors and a floppy drive. In the arcades it was Dragon Slayer and a little later the original Street Fighter.

Sim Park

Idk if anyone else ever even heard of it, it was a late 90s Sim game where you built a wildlife park.

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Doom II was probably the first game I ever saw and it made me ask for a computer. Got a hand-me-down pretty much the next day.

First games i played were Pokémon and super Mario, but I think the first game that REALLY got me hooked was Banjo Kazooie.

Myst.

first game I got into was Pokemon Blue, but Guild Wars is what turned me into a gamer

Evercrack and Diablo 2 were my starter games

Oregon Trail.

Pitfall on Atari

First game was Safari Race on a Sega SC-3000. After that mainly played PC games when they were a thing and had a 1st gen Gameboy.

I gave up on games and tried to adult through my 20s... but after a bad breakup I bought an Xbox-360 and Skyrim and it's been a hobby ever since.

As far as multiplayer games, I'd have to say Descent, the original one from 1994. I actually had a copy of the game years before I even had a PC capable of playing it at anything over 3FPS LOL!

Once I did finally upgrade to a decent PC, we held LAN parties at my place and we had an absolute blast!

Oddly enough, I can honestly say I've never played any games over the internet though. For me it's either single player games, or LAN party whenever we would play multiplayer.

Carmageddon, it was the first 3d game I had played and I spent all my time at my grandparents house playing it. I still regard it as one of the best games ever made.

Asteriods, Atari 2600

Super Mario Bros. from the famicom

Super Mario Land on the Nintendo Gameboy, and Lemmings on PC/DOS.

Sonic Heroes

Planescape: Torment was the game that popped my cherry, my very first. After that, I played links awakening, and that was it I've been a gamer ever since.

Bubble Bobble on the C64 :)

Sid Meier's Civilization 1

Final Fantasy

I had a Sega Pico and a PS1 so early I can’t really remember. I was maybe 5/6, idk. But it wasn’t like today : I had to plug and unplug the console everytime I wanted to play, so I wasn’t playing a lot at all. Then I got a Game Boy Color and boi, game was on.

I’m from 1995.

Am I a gamer? Not sure. But Oblivion really blew my mind. I pirated it not knowing anything about it, I just googled "best games of last year" and that thing was the suggested result.

I was hooked. Years afterwards when my situation changed I bought it on Steam, along with Skyrim. I don't think I've ever played the steam copy.

The first game I regularly played may very well have been Chex Quest. Unless you count Math Blaster. Or maybe Chip's Challenge.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Dangerous Dave.

Super mario bros

Word rescue by 3D Realms, and maths rescue. Can still get them on steam!

Wolfenstein 3D. I had played other games before but this one blew my mind and made me a gamer for life.

Oh wow, this takes me back. I've thought video games were cool since the first time I saw a Space Invades arcade cabinet when I was like 4. But the game that got me really into video games? I dunno. It was either Donkey Kong or Ms Pac-Man.

Yes, I'm old. Yes, I've been playing video games since the 70s. No, I'm not particularly good at them. But ask me whatever I guess 😁

My first game was Lego Island! I played it a bunch when I was around 6 years old. My first online game was Red Alert 2 which really kicked off my love for gaming. I still remember my friends being jealous when I upgraded my RAM from 32mb to 256mb. It was a simpler time.

Link to the Past for me

Neverwinter Nights and Roller Coaster Tycoon when I was a little kid. I watched my dad play Neverwinter and had to indulge in my own tiny fantasy to play as a "dragon." Still at it.

Pokémon Gold, when I was 8, got it for Christmas. Technically my first game was Battleship, which I opened first, but I probably spent thousands of hours playing Pokémon Gold. :) I've played almost every Pokémon game since, up until Scarlet/Violet, which I haven't gotten yet, but maybe I will eventually.

Centipede.

Yes, I'm old

KOTOR It is still one of the best stories in a game.

Minecraft, and then Cuphead again

Halo/a slew of freemium MMOs I'd play on my dinky laptop in the mid 00s

My parents got me my first video game when I was 3 years old called Ready for Math with Pooh. I still remember some of the games!

Super Mario Bros. circa 1987. I’m getting old.

super mario brothers 2 baybeeeeeeee

Initially it was Animal Crossing: Wild World. One of my parents' coworker's daughter was babysitting me before school when I was in 3rd grade and she had the game on her DS and I fell in love with it. Still have the copy I got to this day. However, I wouldn't say I fully got into the hobby until The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess (Wii). TP especially got me to fall in line with video games as a storytelling medium artistically and narratively.

Monuments of Mars and later Command & Conquer were the two biggest.

How do all of you even know? I was like 4 and played an NES at a friend's house then got a game boy. Did you all get in at older ages? My memories at 4 are mostly gone.

Probably Commander Keen 4 and Prince of Persia in black and white on my dad's 286 pc.

While there was a bunch I played before it, Quake 2 and the rabbit hole of mods for it, were what really got me hooked. Really loving the remaster that just launched and what that is bringing to the mod community that is still going strong to this day.

Pokémon Blue on a used Gameboy color when I was like 8. All downhill from there.

Pong.

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Pong.

Dragon Warrior on NES is what really got me hooked. I'd played games on Atari but Dragon Warrior was my first introduction to rpgs. I'm glad the franchise is still going strong. Have slime magnets on my fridge.