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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.
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.
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.
3-4 years old, my father was sitting down and I was leaning on him and played through Kirby's Dream Land on the original Game Boy from start to finish.
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.
I love claymation! Neverhood was fully hand-posed, and it's an amazing style
I recall finding the hidden area in level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros 3. In it is a 3 made of coins. I remember going “look mom! That’s how old I am!”
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.
My cousin had a bunch of Tiger Electronic and Game and Watch games just kinda tossed in a bag. I really did not like him as a kid but boy did I spend a lot of time at his house playing those games.
Several educational PC games in the mid 90s mostly, which I guess technically count as gaming. I remember Super Mario Teaches Typing, and Math Blaster of course. But there was another one that had a top down view and you had to rescue animals with a helicopter or something. All I remember was that I liked the weird sound it would make when you lifted the animals up with the heli, or maybe it was the sound of the monkeys.
As for “real” games one of my earliest memories is getting dragged to a house for a dinner party and my brother and I would just hang out with their older son in his room playing floppy disk games. The only one I remember was Arkanoid.
Duke Nukem 3D
Not necessarily my first, but my first clear memory of a gaming obsession is playing Defender on my cousin's 2600
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.
Not my first memory but legacy of time was something I loved. The puzzles and bad fmv cutscenes. Good stuff
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.
Pong.
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.
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.
Pole vaulting in summer games!
Finishing the first level of Doom II and thinking i had beat the whole game. hehehe
You're already ahead of me. I'm 36 (almost) and I've never played any of those older DOOM games. I'll hand it my gamer card at the next meet-up I guess.
The first game I can remember playing was Desert Demolition: Starring Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote on Sega Genesis. I don't really remember the gameplay well. I still have the game (with the box and manual), but it's stored away somewhere (probably a bin in my closet).
Jumpstart games and Tonka games
For me it was playing Mortal Kombat 1 on SNES since I could button mash and still have fun. This was probably in 1996 or 97
Watching my older brother play warcraft 2.
Late 70s, not sure of system. Green text old school terminal. 8x8 grid of dots, Z for zombie, Y for you, Star symbol for swamps. Zombies move towards you per turn, you have to move to guide them into swamps to stay alive. I think I was around 4?
Around the same time but I don't actually remember this happening. Colossal Cavern text adventure, at the end none of the adults could kill the dragon. It's said that little kid me typed (said?) "with hands" and killed the dragon with my bare hands. I don't know if that's true or something my dad made up.
Six years old. My parents had got a Spectrum +2 bundle from Curry's for Christmas, with a bunch of games in nondescript grey boxes. First one we played was a top-down snooker games called Snooker.
Many years later I ended up working with the guy that made one of the games in that bundle and, I think, ported another from the C64. Small world and all that.
The first thing I remember playing is some Tom Sawyer game on an Apple IIe. I could probably recognize a picture of it, but I can't remember the name or really what the goal was. Just that it was a single screen platformer like Donkey Kong somewhat.
Oooff, it's long enough ago that I have some vague memories or Lemmings and (a clone of) digdug on the Amiga, a ZX spectrum game where you could morph between plane and car (Swif? That had a concept similar to it). Tank on the Atari2600. I mean, I know the Spectrum is older one there, but I really don't know which was first for me.
My most solid early gaming memory is Toejam and Earl on the megadrive. Getting it for my birthday, and finishing it some 5 years later.
Another is seeing my older brother play the orignal Alone in the Dark, and finding it sufficiently scary that I had nightmares for days.
Skramble on C64. It was a lot of fun figuring out what it is, how to play, etc.
Snake on a gray Gameboy.
Off the top of my head, it would be getting a Super Nintendo for Christmas and thinking my parents must've sold the car to pay for it.
The day-care I went to when I was a little kid around 2007 had an old Super Nintendo hooked up to a giant CRT, which we'd all play Super Mario All Stars (+ World) on it, taking turns whenever we'd lose a life. I remember we'd go into the bonus vertical "1 in 3 chance of a 1UP" rooms in World and as we'd hit the blocks, we'd go "life, liiiiife, LIFE!" and celebrate if we hit the right block. I remember not knowing how to jump properly in World, and would just spin jump everywhere instead.
I was about 17 when Pong first came out, so it would have to be Pong and all the Atari games (we had the console) that had one little square to represent a human and a bunch of other squares that would be walls or enemies or trees or whatever.