Retro gaming

[swamp thing]

The first games I owned were Robocop 2 and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles on Atari 1040 STe around 1990. I had a second hand console before that with controllers that looked like phones and it played Pong. Don't know what it was called but it was shit.

[maildude]

My earliest game memories:
--Playing the first Pong! console at the local bowling alley. It was followed up by Tanks and Space Wars.
--When game centers starting popping up, there was Clowns, 280Z, and soon after came Asteroids. Not too long after that came Space Invaders.
--Later people were crowded around Pac-Man and Battlezone, with Donkey Kong on the horizon.
--The earliest sports game I remember enjoying was Atari Football, with the big trackball you had to spin as fast as you could to move your chosen players...which were Xs or Os instead of computer people.

[kogi]

Ah yes.. Shogun Total War 2. good ol' days. Must be at least a month ago...

Anyway. I harken back to the C64 days with Forbidden Forest, Bruce Lee, the Pawn (excellent adventure game with pictures!!!) Scramble, and later on Enigma Force, Delta, Uridium, and basically anything with Rob Hubbard music. I haven't forgiven them for omitting the master in Way of the xploding fist though. Supposedly he was to up show for a final showdown when you achieved your 10th dan. But he was nowhere to be seen after 3 hours of hopeful playing. I bet Varagorn share my pain.
Crusade in Europe.. a WW2 strategy game on a division and army group level. Countless hours...

And those old C64 games were brutal in difficulty. Nothing like these sissy modern games where you can choose easy difficulty. No wonder youngsters today can't handle the trials of life! Autosave, yeah, right...!

[mxyptlk]

My first gaming machine was a Commodore Vic20 followed soon after by a Commodore64.

The Vic20 used either cartridges or a tape drive for loading the game and I don't remember much about those games (one called Crossfire comes to mind).

The Commodore 64 was my gaming machine for many years. Personal record for gaming was one called 'Oubliette' where you created a party of 6 characters and proceeded on a dungeon crawl. Very basic graphics but a lot of fun. It logged how many hours of playing time you had for each party. I had several different 'teams' and some of them had over 200 hours playing time! I still have fond memories of that game. (and bringing back those memories made me google 'oubliette game'. Its out there for download! I must get it and play it.... )

Another major fave was 'Wasteland', the predecessor of the Fallout games and a true classic. I played that through many times and have actually played it as recently as a year ago on a modern PC.

I've always been a PC man and have never had a 'gaming console'...

[sweatyhat]

PM me if it's crap and I'll take it down.

[alucard007]

-leisure suit Larry on my atari st
-circus atari, kaboom, warlords with the atari paddle controllers.
-Playing Dragons Lair for the first time and realizing it's 4 fucking quarters to play.
-battlezone with the tank controllers.
-playing joust and wondering WTF is a "flap" button.
-pitfall, river raid and choplifter were Activision gold.
-Intellivision "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" ruled with the little dude with the sack of arrows.
-I owned a "pc-engine"(Japanese turbographx) with the cd-rom drive and ruled the city being the only person in town with a copy of Dracula X(castlevania).
-Being bummed out when the metroid in super metroid sacrifices himself to save your sorry ass(still in therapy over that one).
-10 player bomberman on my sega saturn on my projector on the side of a barn smoking dubies with my pals.
-finishing mega man 1 on nes without cheating(god damn that was tough).
-4 player micromachines on the genesis.
-doctor robotnicks mean bean machine(puyo puyo clone).
-being the only person that could clean house at street fighter 2 in the arcade and successfully pulling of 360's with Zangief.*
-Super Mario Cart on SNES.
-4 player Gauntlet at the 7-11 after school,"wizard needs food badly".
-seeing starfox on the supernes for the first time and saying,"a game made of polygons.....blah that will never take off".
-Hotboxing my VW Beetle in the bowling alley parking lot then going inside and playing 4-player Virtua Racing with my pals.
-A Playstation link cable, 2 tv's, 2 playstations, 2 copies of doom, wipeout xl, and need for speed for head to head action.
-Zelda on 8-bit nes ate up alot of my free time as there was no google or maps to help you lol.
-Contra 30 man code on nes. u,u,d,d,l,r,l,r,b,a then start.
-Nes Ice Hockey ruled when you used the fat player for leverage and the skinny dude to make you fast goals.
-FF7 on playstation was really heartbreaking when Aeris died.
-Resident evil on playstation when you got the rocket launcher for the first time and the dogs jumped out of the windows, scary shit.
-Scorpion from Mortal Kombat...."get over here".
-Rygar in the Arcade was fucking HARD.
-Narc was a cool shooting game with drug dealers lol.
-NHL 95 on Sega Genesis ruled.
-4 player Goldeneye on N64 rocked.
-Castlevania SOTN was so cool I finished the Jap version 6 months before the US one came out.
-Zelda a link to the past was amazing on SNES, "what!!! I'm not done theres a dark world as well".
-Golden Axe when you had full magic power and the dragonhead ripped shit up.
-Guitar Hero helped people come back to game consoles but I really wouldn't consider those peeps real gamers.
-Hoping there would be real life versions of the girls from Dead or Alive beach volleyball.
-Shadow of colossus ps2 was cool as you it was you VS 16 giants.
-I got Shadowgate on NES by accident on a rental and finished it the same day and got a new game as a free exchange lol.
-Samus from Metroid was really.......a girl.
-Playing Double Dragon in the Arcade and seeing sticks, knives, guns and cliche big black bosses. Lol such a racial game.
-3 player arcade super sprint racing.
-4 player arcade super off road.
-4 player Konami Arcade sidescrollers ie:TMMT, X-MEN, sunsetriders, Simpsons, crimefighters.
-Contra 3 the alien wars on SNES.
-Playing all the hard levels for my kids on crash bandicoot while they cheered me on lol.
-Donkey Kong Country was amazing on SNES.
-Thanks to companies like Williams, Gottlieb, Stern and Sega for keeping the Pinball scene alive for many years. I will never forget F-14 Tomcat, Addams Family, Funhouse, High Speed and many more.

[penfold007]

First game was the "tennis" game, played through our black and white TV in the mid-late 70s. Got a ZX81 at the end of 1981, taught myself BASIC and played 1K breakout, what an awesome game that was, running in the 1K RAM the standard ZX81 had. Also remember playing a lot of 3D monster maze. Around that time the local cinema had a couple of arcade machine in the foyer, Space Invaders and Galaxians. I was hopeless at both, although I entertained everyone with my playing style, I physically used to duck trying to dodge the ships that were attacking.

The ZX81 was followed by a Spectrum - had loads of games on that, remember the Ultim8 play the game titles most (Lunar Jetman, Knightlore etc), then a BBC Micro. Planetoid (Defender) ws my early favourite, until Elite and Revs came along.

[alucard007]

Arctic fox on the Amiga ruled as well as...
-battlechess
-archon(action/chess)
-all of the bardstale and wizardry sets.
-marble madness.

Anyone ever play those tabletop Coleco games like PAC-man and frogger. Fun times.

I also owned a Vectrex that had only a handful of games made for it and came with it's own tv.

[3745 Laddie]

My earliest gaming memory is playing the Killer Shark arcade game (seen briefly in the first Jaws film) on a childhood holiday to Spain,way back in the 70's.

Previous formats owned are a blip TV games plug in thingy,Spectrum,Commodore64,Amiga1200,Sega Mega Drive,PlayStation,PlayStation2 and Xbox.The last I still have together with a 360,Nintendo DS Lite and PC-though I don't do much gaming on the computer.

Always liked Sega's games,especially the OutRun's and Super Monaco GP,and I have many happy gaming memories of my 8 bit buddies.Also really loved owning and using the original PlayStation,which restored my faith in gaming at a time when I'd been seriously considering leaving the scene.

[sweatyhat]

It is around 40 years since the first digital arcade machines appeared. But in recent years they have suffered badly due to the popularity of personal consoles
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...ne/9567052.stm