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My first controller was a paddle [Old School Gaming]
If your earliest gaming memories involve use of literally floppy disks, this thread is for you.
We got an Apple II+ when I was in 2nd grade. If there was a single constant influence throughout my childhood, it was computer games.
I wanted to show my seven-year-old what that kind of gaming looked like so I showed him one of the Apple II emulator sites. He was not impressed.
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it was good stuff, I played a lot of Pickaxe Pete
It pained me.
Our first PC was a 486DX2 with 4 megs of RAM. The first game I got was Star Trek:25th Anniversary which our computer was juuust powerful enough to play, but not with sound.
but then in 8th grade I heard that the computer class was going to give away some old computers, so I went and got me an old-ass computer, a 486
so I kinda got to experience the oldschool gaming stuff but super sped up because my dad quickly gave me some upgrades to my computer
Anyway, remember Commander Keen? That game was good as hell.
I had games that refused to run because the DOS pc I had growing up only had the pc beep speaker.
I used to play Commander Keen 5 with PC Speaker specifically. My logic was since it took place in space, the beeps and boops were more appropriate.
Cd..
Hello thread.
Our first non-Apple PC was a Leading Edge 8088, 4.77 Mhz processor with Hercules monochrome graphics. The challenge I had for the longest time was that games I wanted required a color graphics adapter (CGA, EGA, or VGA) and all I had was shades of glowing brown.
I eventually found an emulator that tricked color games into thinking you had color, but it was hit-or-miss.
The next big obstacle was when I couldn't play Battle Chess because I didn't have a mouse. I can't count all the time I spent desperately futzing with key combinations to try and make the game playable.
My first memory of the auditory revolution that was the Sound Blaster was in playing Prince of Persia. There was this vertical slamming blade jaws trap that my friends and I called "meep machines" because, prior to the Sound Blaster, the sound they made was best explained as a "meep". The metal slamming sound they made after the upgrade really felt like it changed everything.
It was a file management software for DOS that I used, and it was actually super dope. I remember being legitimately irritated when we switched to Windows and Windows File Explorer wasn't nearly as good.
No CDs, no downloadable installers, just a stack of disks one after the other.
Also, the copy protection back in the day. "Oh, you lost the manual? Well, forget playing this game chump, your parents aren't going to sign up for AOL for another 4 years."
tank wars 2.0 was my favorite but I also played a lot of Wolfenstein, Doom 2, and Descent
also this really cool space game called Nomad
it's abandonware now but it was very much in the Elite style, where you're just in space and trying to get by as a trader or mercenary or what have you (though there was a main quest about a race of robots that wanted to exterminate all organic life, which I never got very far in because I wasn't smart enough to play this game well)
the Wikipedia page for it is kinda funny
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomad_(video_game)
it's written in that really effusive style you don't often see anymore, where the person obviously loves the subject and they're trying so hard to hide it, and failing
oh and I once saw my cousins playing Quest for Glory 3, creating a lifelong obsession
years later I tried to get those games running on a win95 machine and it was a goddamn nightmare
Steam
I hadn't thought of it in years but I absolutely remember that
It was rad as hell, and I still feel weird waves of nostalgia thinking of it.
yeah we had that on our 386, or something very similar
our next computer had windows 3.1 and I think whoever built that machine decided it wasn't necessary
pops was not happy
he also hated Microsoft Word, because Word Perfect was so much better
Also had an old NES and SNES growing up.
I think the one I got the farthest into was Geneforge but I generally found them to be pretty boring
Exile 1 and 2 I found really difficult, but ended up making it most of the way through Exile 3 before stalling out in the very last area.
I also always admired those games for including a character editor so you could just cheat your way through if you wanted to.
I was probably six years old when I became obsessed with the ad for the tabletop version of Galaxian in the Sears Christmas catalog. The listing called it "Midway Galaxian" and I had crafted this elaborate fantasy in which this was somehow an augmented version of the Galaxian arcade cabinet, with a special 3D level called the "midway".
I asked for it for Christmas but didn't receive it. Probably for the best.
Just spent 20 minutes resesrching
We had an Aquarius!
I remember playing Snafu, Utopia, and Night Stalker!
I remember sound cards being huge pains in the ass 90s and then mostly rendered obsolete by motherboards with built in sound processors starting in the 00s, does that count
Our first PC was a Gateway 2000 with a Pentium II so I was well into the CD era by then, but definitely got familiar with floppies for hardware drivers and stuff. Earliest PC gaming memories are of The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis and the games from Humongous Entertainment (Pajama Sam, Spy Fox). The first game I remember really digging into was Mechwarrior 2, which set off a lifelong love of the Battletech franchise and mecha in general. Homeworld was definitely the defining game for me on PC though, basically cemented the kind of experiences I want out of video games on a computer. DKC2 was the same but for console games.
Pretty sure my grade school had 486 systems, I remember the turbo button clearly. Didn't get to do much gaming on those beyond Oregon Trail and Math Blaster.
wait no I forgot, before we had the mac we had some sort of TV console I played a couple times when I was like 4, there was some sort of side scrolling shooter game on it, the controller was a little black joystick with some buttons. I have no idea what system that was or what the game was.
Whoa, I don't remember that one at all. Night Stalker sounds familiar though - there may have been a version of that for the Texas Instruments computer? I want to say I was intrigued by the name of the game but didn't have whatever system you needed to play it.
the first PC game I can remember was a golf game called World Class Leaderboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21a_bbajmjQ
the audio you hear was played through your MODEM if you didn't have a sound card. and for some reason we had an atari-style joystick that worked with this game. i dont know why.
i want to believe that this game was the inspiration for Lee Carvello's Putting Challenge
The second game was another DOS era game called Street Rod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ_ikC_V8oY
DOS ruled.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIj51k6b_g
I mean hell, all the old Lucasarts games had fantastic music
I have no idea where we got or how we ended up with it but I remember it was after the life of the console was past because we couldn't find any games for it.
I've entertained the idea of buying one on eBay but they are either expensive or broken.
I remember it with.... perfect..... clarity....
~dies~
Some of my earliest fully formed gaming memories were playing simon’s quest with my dad and playing a huge chunk of the original final fantasy alone at like 5 or 6 years old.
We borrowed it from my dad’s friend for like 6 months. When we returned it, i had managed to save with a tent out in the middle of nowhere with everyone poisoned and out of PUREs. It was basically impossible to get back to town alive.
I eventually got my own copy a couple years later and beat it, which is now sitting on my shelf signed by Hironobu Sakaguchi.
Asked my dad, apparently it was a Commodore 64 he got from my grandpa. It's weird how time rubs the rough edges off of memories of images and such, I remember it looking more like a Genesis or SNES game graphically but that's impossible if it was a C64.
e: actually looking at screenshots of searched up commodore 64 side scrolling shooters, yeah these look about how I remembered them, the C64 had pretty good graphics for something made in 1982!