Your earliest gaming memory
 

Whether we're talking board games, consoles, arcade machines. I want to hear what peoples earliest gaming memories are like. Doesn't have to be your first experience but the earliest one you can think of.

I grew up in the 90s so I grew up with NES, SNES and N64. I still credit my love of games today to how my childhood was. My parents would always try to get us the new games or consoles when they could afford it. Luckily I can just spend whatever i want on games now. It is definitely why Super Mario World is one of my most cherished video games even today.

Frogger Adventures on Gameboy Advance :)

Playing Doom and Duke 3d on my Grandfather's computer.

I was invited over to a friend's house circa 1993-94 and played Super Mario 3 (All Stars version) on his SNES.

First game system I owned was a Game Boy Pocket in 1995. First home console was a PS1 in July 1997.

Not a huge gaming person anymore though.

I feel like it was Lemmings on some random person's computer my mother or my family was visiting and I was sat in front of a computer while the adults did whatever they were doing. Haven't played Lemmings since.

Playing Super Mario 64 on my friend's console. It was a hand-me-down he got when his older brother got a Game Cube. The cartridge was all ****ed up (a dog chewed on it iirc) and didn't work right after five or so levels, so we would just play the first levels over and over.

Having been born in the Soviet Union in the 80s it was this Soviet knock-off of the Nintendo Game & Watch Egg game based on a Russian cartoon.

https://i.imgur.com/Ql6AB2E.jpg

I doubt it’s my earliest game memory, but one that stands out for me was the first time I saw Baby Pac-Man. It was mind blowing to me as a child that this game was pinball machine and a video game at the same time. I’m still not sure I’ve ever seen another game like that.

I beat the **** out of someone so badly in an FPS I was playing (Planetside) that by the ancient rites of gaming, and enforced by the order of the neckbeard, I got to sleep with his mom.

Like multiple others here, it was playing Super Mario 64 at my uncle's place. I think I was 3 years old. The memory that sticks out was him trying to teach me how to beat this *******:



Even at 3 years old - I kept trying to do the thing that made the most sense even to me today - throw his fat ass off the ledge. But every time he'd just come right back up. So my uncle kept trying to explain to me that, no, you need to just throw him on top of the cliff - and at 3 years old, grappling with the controls and the camera and everything in a 3D space was a challenge all its own. But I managed to do it, despite my uncle getting frustrated haha.

I grew up with an N64 and an SNES - so my earliest memories were Mario 64, Super Mario World, Killer Instinct and Super Punch Out. Beating this douche as a kid wasn't easy either - but man what a great game and a kickass soundtrack:



I mentioned it in a different thread, but man, that original SNES Killer Instinct intro/theme was just so awesome. A track this badass should not have been possible on such old hardware - even Doom's music didn't sound this good on SNES:

I couldn't beat Sandman for months!

Oh yes, he was by no means an easy fight. The game had a lot of difficult fights. For perspective - it was one of the earliest games I ever played. And I don't think I managed to beat everyone until I was in maybe middle school. I played the game on and off for years and getting the timing down for everyone in a circuit was no joke. This guy still makes me sweat just seeing his old wrinkly face:



Cane-using, cheatin-ass Mr. Miyagi

Same here, though the only video games-related experience I recall is my mom taking me to work with her a couple of times to let me play Digger cause we didn't have a computer at home. I also remember playing Prince of Persia and Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion for a bit on a friend's computer in Canada but that was it. Never really was my thing.

I was born in '81, so I grew up playing MS-DOS 5.0 shareware and similar games. Memorable favorites include the Commander Keen series by Apogee/id (1990), Wolfenstein 3D (1992), The Incredible Machine (1993), Prince of Persia (1989), many of the 90s adventure games by Sierra like The Black Cauldron, King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc, Aldo's Adventure (1987), Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back (1986), Hocus Pocus (1994), Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (1992), Test Drive 2: The Duel (1989), the Talking Parrot Sound Blaster demo application by Creative Labs, the MFED MS-DOS ASCII sound module editor, and the DOS-bundled QuickBASIC demo games like NIBBLES.BAS and GORILLA.BAS.

I later got an 8-bit NES and a Genesis but we could only afford a few titles so I played them to death when I wasn't messing around with the local BBS community.

https://i.imgur.com/lkfnPmCl.jpg

Edit - nearly forgot this classic...

https://i.imgur.com/9jcQe9Yl.jpg

Holy shit, I had that! I haven't thought about it in decades.

Definitely nokia 3310's space impact.

Dunno if anybody else played the Infinity City CD-ROM back in the day, but I just recently learned the name of one of the demos that was on that CD-ROM. It's literally taken me years and years to figure out what it was, and all I had to go off of was that it had a guy with a hat, and a blue dog. Welp, this was it:



I played it many many times when I was younger and never really understood it all that much, but I was thrilled when I figured out what it was. Then I dove deep into that particular time in my life with PC games and all the memories came back.

I'm shocked there's another person here who was born in the USSR in the 1980s and (I'm assuming) left it as a child, and I'm learning it only now. Privet kak dela chto slyshno i tak dalee

Привет!
I've kinda left the forum, only popping in sporadically. Been a bit more active during the last months though. I've been aware of you but yeah, I don't think we've interacted much.

When I was about 4 years old and I got really upset that my cousins wouldn't let me play Super Mario Bros 3 with them, this would have been 1990 when that game had just come out in North America.

The sh*tfit I threw was how I got a NES and the first game I ever played was the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge that came with it. My grandma and stepgrandpa sat down and taught me how to play it.

My earliest gaming memory was playing games with this huge joystick controller set up. I don't even remember the name of it. It wasn't an Atari but very similar. I looked up colecovision thinking that was it but I can't seem to fibd the exact controller box thing I had.

Anyways Space Invaders on Atari was a bit stronger of a memory playing that at my dads place during the summer.

I didn't have an Atari as a little kid because it was before my time but I did have one of those plug in Atari things when I was a teenager, it had Adventure, Breakout and Yars Revenge on it and I can't remember what else, I f*cking loved that thing and I got real pissed off when I messed it up trying to change the batteries using an electric screwdriver and it stopped working. But I've been a fan of Atari games ever since and I would love to have an Atari 2600, hopefully I'll strike gold at a thrift shop someday.

My mom told me about how she had a Magnavox Odyssey as a kid and she was surprised that I knew what it was.



This is as old school as it gets.

I found the device I was associating in my memory with a controller/joystick. It was actually a cable box remote from the 80s and looked like this.

https://images.app.goo.gl/pYNEKB8wnZwFZFAF6

When I later got a NES with the super mario/duck hunt combo. I used to just press the gun against the screen instead of being a normal distance away.

It looks like a small piano!

Yeah and it's a cable remote haha

My first console was a SNES that came with Super Mario All-Stars but for a few years I was playing games at other peoples houses, so I think my earliest memory is various text-based games on a friends C64.

You mean like Zork? The kind of game where you can go east, west, north, or south and then you get a description of where you are now and you have to figure out text commands to interact with the environment? I'm kind of fascinated with those games in the same way I'm fascinated with grid-based dungeon crawlers. It's such a weird way to interact with a game but oddly enthralling and evocative.

Oval track racing on a black screen. Cant remember how many cars were involved, but no more than two, barely looking like cars and in the same colour as the race track. The race track was made of two oval shapes and nothing else.

Wow, looks unusual. My earliest gaming memory is playing Super Mario Bros on the NES with my siblings. We spent hours trying to beat the levels and save Princess Peach. Another fun memory is playing Tetris and trying to beat each other's high scores. Recently, I’ve been checking out worldwinner , where you can compete in various games for prizes. Gaming has come a long way since then, but those early days were the best. Those old games still have a special place in my heart.

oh, wow. i had one of these! so many good memories.

anyway, my parents bought an NES in 1990 and the below masterpiece came bundled with OG Super Mario Bros on a single cartridge. i was four years old at the time.

so, yeah. Duck Hunt was my very first game, and i'll never forget it.