Flashing back to the early days of computer games...

I haven't snowmobiled in about 8 years but prior to that spent many weekends in Pittsburg, NH. Oh and I used to build PDP-8's and 11's. I remember the old pong TV games, and had a Atari 2600, Xbox 360 and Wii. Never into any specific games heavily. Don't do any gaming right now but would probably get a Nintendo Switch if I bought something. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Leisure Suit Larry. 😮
 
I stopped with DOOM and DOOM2 because I started to get pains in my wrist, and if allowed to progress that could cost me my job. So computer games for me ended there.
 
Most modern games can be played on a console or PC. I'm currently playing Final Fantasy XIV on PC but there are many who play it on PS5 or Xbox.

Microsoft recently released a new Flight Simulator, which I used to play on my Dad's pc in the late 80's.
 
Some of the earliest computer games I remember from my teenaged years in the late 1970s and early 1980s:

There was this driving game called Superbug and its descendant game Fire Truck which had a screen with a still image (of a VW Beetle or fire truck) in the center you would turn with the steering wheel. Super Bug (video game) - Wikipedia

I remember the first time I finally made it to the Extended Play mode, the screen flashed and made a loud noise I got startled and crashed the car.

There was this game called STRTRK (a Star Trek-based game). My friend had it on cassette tape originally but later on the faster 5" floppy disk drive. It was written in Basic and it took a long time to play it. I remember the combat features which were pretty good.
 
There was a free game of breakout I spent too many hours with in between jobs, forget the name but it was cool because you could get all kinds of options like "bombs" that blew up a section of bricks, something where for awhile the ball couldn't fall off of the screen, etc

Despite the superior graphics, I couldn't really get into Madden Football.
 
Actually, the first computer game I played, I actually coded. I typed in the code from a magazine. And of course it had a bug... syntax error. Finally got it working, though. It was "Mastermind" with colored blocks. On an Apple II C, owned by my Uncle. What made me think of it was that reference to saving to cassette tape.
 
I am actually re-playing Doom2 right now. Some developers have re-done the game with ray tracing and the result is pretty amazing. I believe that there is supposed to be another significant update release on September 3.
 
I've played nearly all of the mentioned games, including Pong. I also play the most up-to-date RPGs.

I keep going back to Master of Orion (original version, early 1990s). It has great replay value and I can finish a game in a few hours, a bit like a longer version of solitaire.
 
sengsational said:
Actually, the first computer game I played, I actually coded. I typed in the code from a magazine. And of course it had a bug... syntax error. Finally got it working, though. It was "Mastermind" with colored blocks. On an Apple II C, owned by my Uncle. What made me think of it was that reference to saving to cassette tape.
Click to expand...
I started to make one way back, just a text-based game, but never finished it. It's surprising how much fun such a game, with no graphics at all, could be. I'm even half-tempted to try and find on online for the heck of it.

Another game I liked was Fable. Again very character/dialogue-oriented, but also plenty of action/combat...pretty modern graphics and while you had to learn a little about how to shoot/fire things and various ability upgrade you could buy, it wasn't too busy that way. You could also have "virtual relationships" with villagers, which I ignored (I suspect appealed mostly to young girls). You also had the option to go through it as a good guy or bad guy, but really it turns out there wasn't much difference in the game.
 
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motley said:
I started to make one way back, just a text-based game, but never finished it. It's surprising how much fun such a game, with no graphics at all, could be. I'm even half-tempted to try and find on online for the heck of it.

Another game I liked was Fable. Again very character/dialogue-oriented, but also plenty of action/combat...pretty modern graphics and while you had to learn a little about how to shoot/fire things and various ability upgrade you could buy, it wasn't too busy that way. You could also have "virtual relationships" with villagers, which I ignored (I suspect appealed mostly to young girls). You also had the option to go through it as a good guy or bad guy, but really it turns out there wasn't much difference in the game.
Click to expand...
One of our guys did that on one of our HP instruments. We went through rolls of printer paper and the boss wasn't too keen on that so we had to quit. He was nice about it and let us sorta get it out of our system. He was OK with playing the games on the mini computer screens but nothing that would leave wads of paper in the trash (too many prying eyes from other departments - jealousy, ya know.)
 
motley said:
It's surprising how much fun such a game, with no graphics at all, could be. I'm even half-tempted to try and find on online for the heck of it.
Click to expand...
If anyone's interested in the cave text adventure game: Adventure

Trying it now and getting stuck early on....
 
The first computer game I remember playing was sttr1 on a HP 2000C computer using a Teletype Model 33 ASR. Had a lot of fun with that game, although long range sensor printouts took a while since the baud rate was so low.

This was possible because my high school setup one teletype terminal connected to the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse as a part of the LACE initiative (La Crosse Area Computers in Education) in 1976. This was a significant impetus in getting an electrical and computer engineering degree by the doofus typing right now.

My most recent game playing is Team Fortress 2 (old) and Balder's Gate 3 (new). They both run great under linux (Thank you Mr. Torvalds).
 
Return of Heracles. Our copy was damaged and there was no way to win except physically beating the Sphinx (nearly impossible). FINALLY after days and days of attempts, my Greek heroes beat the unbeatable Sphinx…. But we never got to see the Sphinx smile 🫤
 
Someone mentioned typing in code from a magazine. I’d forgotten about that. I also recall that when the computer was shut off, everything was lost. This was before I bought the cassette deck.
 
True story in 1973 I went to work for NCR right out of vocational school . I went into supply chain a friend went into computer operator. At lunch time we would hang out with the software engineers . NCR had a 726 mini computer to run their POS cash registers . But the engineers created a real primitive football Madden type football game to run on the mini computer . The CEO came down at one time and was crazy mad because Pitney Bowes had the scanners . He yelled at the engineers they had six weeks to turn Pitney Bowes to a ghost . NCR came up with a much better scanning POS system .
 
In the early 80’s my boss got an Apple II at work ( first personal computer which drove the IT people crazy cuz they were not in control of it). He let me take it home to work on ( yeah those were the days!). My wife who is NOT a tech person got totally hooked on Space Invaders 😂.

My first FP walk through was Myst. I don’t think anything ever quite matched how amazing that was.
 
Most of the PC/DOS games mentioned here are preserved as part of the eXoDOS collection (I suggest the Lite version).


C64 Dreams is also great nostalgia:

forums.launchbox-app.com

C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)

Updated 4/30/23 to version 0.60 with 506 additional games. Full details here. Current progress: working through "R" TLDR / What is it? This is a huge work-in-progress collection of hand-picked C64 games (3500 currently), demoscene demos, SID music, C64 magazines, and diskmags. 100% of the collect...
forums.launchbox-app.com forums.launchbox-app.com
 
Duke Nukem and Doom took a lot of my time.
Downloaded from a local bulletin board on my super fast 1440 dial up modem :)
 
Played Wolfenstein and Tetris mostly.
Did master the original Pacman, where I could play as long as I wish on one game.
 
My first exposure to games were the Sierra (perhaps there was more to the name) ones. Things like "Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards". There was a whole slew or games of that type. I spent way too much money on all of those games. These were, of course, played on my Tandy 1000 computer.
 
Pong.

DH and I bought our first Atari in the late 80's. We had learning games on it for our first born.
Reading Rabbit and Astro Grover Math. That kid had the entire math game solved at age 4.
He continued to test very high in Math and Reading all through school. I know those games helped, even though we paid no attention to "screen time" back then!
Reading Rabbit I can still find occasionally on old game websites, but have never found Astro Grover.
 
Pong.
 
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