A long time ago, during the last ice age you could play video games even if you didn’t have one. You only had to call the SBT TV station, shout pow and win some prizes.
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young whipper snapper!!!
I’m guessing one of your parents was more anti-TV than the other. 
ETA: My first computer game: Radar Rat Race
But I had a few of those LCD games too.
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My folks were early adopters of personal computers. We had a TRS-80 (“Trash-80”) and loaded games up with a tape drive at first. An ordinary cassette tape player with a wire going from output to the computer.
The first game I had was this mess:
Once we graduated to a floppy drive this one became a fave
I was a deprived child.
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Apple IIe.
also had a Merlin.
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Being a vile yank, I looked it up, and my first thought was, “That’d be a great case for a Linux box.” Something about it is just… comfy.
In the USA, they were sold as “Timex Sinclair” and didn’t hit the market until after Commodore, Atari, Texas Instruments and Tandy were already out on the home market. So it tried to market itself as an affordable computer, but I do know one or two kids who had one in the hobby room, hooked up to the old junk TV.
I think that was a common tenor: older, smaller televisions got recycled into being the first home computer monitors, or used mostly for the video game console. So that the kids wouldn’t block the main television all the time. I used an older “bedroom TV” sized television for my C64.
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It’s a popular target for PI housing hacks. The keyboard is really horrible, though – legendarily unpleasant to use in a way that photos can’t illustrate.
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We also had a TRS 80 in ~1980ish. DinoWars was our favorite game on there.
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Wait, Pong was still a thing in 1977? Yikes.
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yep, my mom was the militant. I think my dad built the decoder antenna more for the technical challenge than for the content. The output required a large dollop of personal satisfaction in order to be watchable.
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I never knew those came as a kit! I remember my dad considering one of these (already built) but it was branded “Timex Sinclair.” They were $100, which I had saved up. Instead, we took my $100 and his $200, and bought a Model I TRS-80 from my cousin. This was in 1982, so by then the thing was already 3 or 4 years old. We paid a (presumable) Tandy employee, moonlighting out of his garage, another $100 to add Level 2 BASIC (jumping from 4KB to 16KB RAM) and lowercase letters. But he got something backwards, and we had to press “SHIFT” to get lowercase. I still have the working Model I but I don’t have a functional cassette player (i.e. “tape drive”).
But come to think of it, we got an Atari 2600 a month or two before the TRS-80.
ETA:
Came back to say that, on second thought, the first video game in our house was “TV PIXX,” but view-only, because we were never contestants.
I only knew one other person who had one. He got a dot-matrix printer for it, and it used 4" rolls of paper, kind of like really wide cash register (or adding machine) tape.
Same here – I upgraded from the TRS-80 to the C64 in 1987, when my (other) cousin got rid of his (in favor of an Amiga). I never knew what some of those games looked like in color. Mostly I played games on it but I did write my junior theme on it (in a spreadsheet).
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My dad and I split cost on a model 1 TRS-80 with 4k memory and a tape recorder for storage. $700. Amazing to look back at that now, actually.
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I tried to call once. But it was even more difficult to get answered than playing the real video game.
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My first game was Tombstone City on a TI-99.
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Haha, I had the firefighter version of this, with the endless stream of babies falling out of the burning building.
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I remember one with a little caveman and dinosaurs hatching from eggs. I think it was Radio Shack-branded.
