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First Games Machine

Started by pictsy, 15 November, 2013, 09:23:39 AM

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pictsy

I still remember the first game machine I played when I was five or six years old back in the 80s.  It wasn't even necessarily a games machine.  It was a cheap home computer my Mum got to do her word processing on.  But it played games as well!  The Amiga 500.

I loved the Amiga and over the years our family collected a fair amount of games.  Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasy, Speedball 2, Civilization, Settlers, Cannon Fodder, The Chaos Engine, Gauntlet 2, Mortal Kombat 2, Elite, Flashback - to name but a few classics.

Still, I always felt I had the poor-man's choice (coming from a poor family) and lamented not having a Master System or NES.  Only in recent years did I discover that the Amiga 500 was the more powerful than both those consoles successors!

The first games machine that owned myself would be a Playstation and I got it second hand not long after the release of the PS2.  I had a few good games, Tekken 3, Final Fantasy 7 to 9 and one of the Wipeout games.

shaolin_monkey

Are we talking consoles only?  The reason I ask is because the first games machine I ever had was one of those handheld versions of space invaders, with the lit up screen.  Then I graduated to Game&Watch LCD stuff, which was considered so cutting edge!

My reactions may have dulled over time, but I can still clock Octopus!

It wasn't until I was about 13 that I got a computer - my lovely Acorn Electron!  Man, I loved it - programnming, games, art packages, and even dabbling in music.  I locked myself in my bedroom and spent hours on it!

amines2058

Mine was the original Atari 2100 (I think) console! I remember spending many an hour in the early eighties on Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark...the hardest game ever!
Following that it was many years on C16, C64 and 386 / 486 PC's before getting a Playstation 1, then a PS2 and currently an Xbox 360 and a Wii. Still do most of my gaming on PC these days though with the consoles being predominantly for the kids.

amines2058

Quote from: shaolin_monkey on 15 November, 2013, 10:10:56 AM
Are we talking consoles only?  The reason I ask is because the first games machine I ever had was one of those handheld versions of space invaders, with the lit up screen.  Then I graduated to Game&Watch LCD stuff, which was considered so cutting edge!

My reactions may have dulled over time, but I can still clock Octopus!

It wasn't until I was about 13 that I got a computer - my lovely Acorn Electron!  Man, I loved it - programnming, games, art packages, and even dabbling in music.  I locked myself in my bedroom and spent hours on it!

Ahh game and watch I loved Donkey Kong Jr. You may want to take a little look at this to bring back all those memories. I have spent hours here since I discovered it!!

http://www.pica-pic.com/

pictsy

Not only games consoles.  Just game machine - whichever you consider most apt to be your first.

Molch-R


WoD

We had a barely working system which only had 'tennis' on it, then graduated through the ZX80 up to the ZX Spectrum 48k...always wanted the Coleco system though, but could not afford it - had a near-perfect Donkey Kong (and I think Mr Do!) on it...neighbour had one...lucky git.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco

WoD


IndigoPrime

First ever:



Although that might have been my mum's and she just gave it to me. First one 'under the telly':


radiator

#9
I never owned an 8-bit console - the very idea of me owning a NES was so far beyond reality (we were very poor when I was young) that I never even entertained the notion. I wasn't even jealous - it was just something other kids had, not for the likes of me.

My friend Andy had a BBC Micro, and we used to spend many happy hours on that playing Repton, Elixir, Citadel and the like (this would have been long after the Micro's heyday).

I didn't really have any proper experience of videogames until my Dad got a better job and bought an Amstrad PC, first an EGA, then later a VGA. So that was my formative gaming experience.

First off we had the Sierra adventure games like the King's Quest series, though I don't think we ever managed to get too far in them even with the aid of a guidebook as they were so insanely hard and unfair. My dad also bought me the Leisure Suit Larry boxset (he thought it was funny so let me play it even though I was very young, rightly assuming a lot of the humour would go over my head). I used to love the Apogee Shareware games that used to come on the covermounted PC Format demo disks - Secret Agent, Crystal Caverns... and also those wonderful Lucasarts adventures - Monkey Island, Loom, Day of the Tentacle and onwards (though we only ever got them to run on Andy's PC as my dad had some weird memory expansion software on ours that meant it refused to run most games.

I lived in Germany at the time and actually bought a Lucasarts box set of Zak McKraken, Maniac Mansion and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and attempted to play through them in German language - and with insane perseverance I actually got quite far! Ah, great days. And then later, Wolfenstein 3d, which had a huge impact on me. I pined after Doom when it was released but didn't have access to a machine capable of running it until many years after it came out.

The arcades were also a big deal - the one game I remember always hoping to see at an arcade was Capcom's Final Fight. I adored that game.

I remember desperately wanting a Game Boy, but them being out of stock everywhere on my birthday and having to settle for a Game Gear instead, which promptly broke after a couple of weeks of use. Come to think of it, I think that experience might go some way to explain my lifelong distaste for all things Sega (have always considered them vastly overrated and nowhere near as good as Nintendo) :lol:!

Then one Christmas my dad, out of the blue, bought us a SNES and Super Mario World. Best Christmas Ever. After that I had a Playstation and N64 (N64 would probably be my all time favourite console), then jumped ship to the original Xbox (mainly for Halo), and by the next generation was able to afford all three of the main consoles, though I obviously I don't have much time to actually play any of them.

shaolin_monkey

Before my father relented ( hated the very notion of computers) and bought me my Acorn Electron, I used to copy games from my friends and go play them on the display machines in Boots of a Saturday afternoon.  It was weeks before the staff clocked me.

Where there's a will, there's a way!   :lol:

radiator


Dandontdare

Quote from: WoD on 15 November, 2013, 11:01:34 AM
I remembered what the first system was...http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=3&c=1035


we had a cheaper knock off of Pong in the late 70s - it had tennis (singles/doubles) squash and even 'football' (three synchronised paddles per end). It was entirely in black and white and I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

JamesC


JamesC

Growing up in Great Yarmouth the first games I played would have been in the arcades. I have vivid memories of games like Pac Man and Mr Do!

I remember having one of those TV games which was a hand me down from our cousin when he got an Atari. It didn't have a mains power input and took loads of batteries (which were much more expensive back then) so I can only remember playing it once before it ran out of power and was put in the cupboard.

When I was around 5 or 6 my brother got a 16k Spectrum for his birthday which we both played a lot. It was later upgraded via Ram pack to 48k. I think Attik Attak was the first 48k game we had - before that I spent most of the time on 16k classics Gobble a Ghost and Scuba Dive.

Later on I had a Commodore 64 then a NES, Megadrive, Snes and various other systems at one time or another - mostly as a result of trading in or swapping with friends. I still have my original NES though. It's in almost mint condition, is boxed and is the rare Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles set.

Other games I had were Grandstand Pocket Scramble (still have that boxed too), Thundering Turbos Tomytronic 3D and Octopus (bought for 10p at a jumble sale)!

Looking back I was pretty fortunate. We weren't well off financially but I managed to get some great stuff. It helped that my Birthday is on December 17th so I often got a combined present. Lots of stuff was bought second hand or at the end of a generation too.