Pong, in a bar near San Jose, around 1976. Because I had seen and played the game long before it showed up where I lived, by the time it did I was better at it than any local. A friend challenged me to the newly installed game in our own local bar. I easily beat him 20 or more times in a row, and his competitive nature wouldn’t let him quit until he won one. Which was never, because my margins of victory were almost always shutouts. Loser paid, so it was his money, no problem.
Probably Adventure or Hunt the Wumpus. Something on a paper teletype.
When I was in high school I programmed a little Battlestar Galatica ‘Shoot the Cylons’ FPS game in BASIC that kept refreshing an ascii character array and polling the keyboard for firing commands using INKEY (instead of KEYIN or INPUT, which required a carriage return, IIRC). Twin lower case o’s would converge on the randomly shifting cylon ship ascii art to score a hit. The whole thing was stored on audio tape and ran on a 4K WANG.
Pong, a tabletop one in the Pizza Hut on Second Street in El Cajon, CA, circa 1977. After that, only pinball until Christmas 1980 when we finally got a 2600.
I find it odd that I’m the first person to mention pinball in the 1970s.
I probably haven’t thought about that game in 25 years, lol.
Computer Space, followed quickly by Pong and Space Invaders.
Probably Pitfall on my cousins’ Colecovision. I imagine I begged my folks for one all the way home and never got it. Same cousins also had the Merlin game mentioned above and I loved that too. I think my folks bought me a similar handheld device, but it had LED lines that made up the variety of games (edit: it was Split Second!)
Other possibilities are Lemonade Stand on a Commodore PET, or Simon.
Eventually my family got a C128, which opened up the world of C64 games, and I never looked back. Now I lament the lack of time to work through my massive collection on Steam… which I just keep adding to.
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Laboriously typing in code from the back of the 2000AD annual for a Sam Spade, Robohunter text game on a ZX81 only for the 16K Panda RAM pack to inevitably work loose & the whole thing to bloody well crash. Again. And the Star Wars wire-frame Deathstar run arcade game with the three-screen display. Man, I loved that thing…
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Wizard’s Crown, at least the Apple II Version had an interesting bug where if you got killed in combat, the monsters would be deleted from your “save disk”, and you could cheat…
I had one of those. To the blackjack tables!
I had it on Commodore. The final battles were so hard, I gave up eventually without completing it.
Pong. One of the kids in the neighbouhood had one of the early Pong clones that you could play on the telly. Must have been mid 1970ies.
Later: Space Invaders, Commodore PET, VC 20, Apple IIe, Atari, VC 64…
One of my favourites in the mid 1980ies was the Star Wars arcade game, you know, fast vector graphics… oh, and Asteroid.
Midway’s Sea Wolf in a mall arcade that featured mostly pinball machines, circa 1977. This started me on an obsession with arcade machines that lasted for the next ten years or so and which was rekindled 5 years ago or so by the resurgence of emulation.
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My friend had a Magnavox Odyssey (1972, but it was probably about 1973 I encountered it). It had Pong and various other games, but the thing that stood out about it is, it actually came with colored plastic sheets you’d place on the TV screen to make the playfield (tennis court green, etc).
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What I came here to say (and claim my prize) but I missed out. It was in my Dad’s swinging bachelor pad with his 8-track cassette recorder, bumper pool table, furry water couch AND bear skin rug.
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I guess the first gaming experience was either peek-a-boo or belly smuschers, as a wee infant.
I have a couple earlier memories of games like Hunt the Wumpus and Pong, but most of my and my brother’s gaming time happened on a Magnavox Odyssey 2. We practically wore the 8 positional notches on the joystick box down to circles.
That’s an easy one. Mario Brothers 2 and Duck Hunt. First games I ever played. We also had Tiger Heli, and Silkworm.
I remember Silkworm from the local Pizza Hut. My parents were pretty cheap so we didn’t get to play it much, but I thought it was so cool that the game came with two different modes, you could play as awesome helicopter that could go anywhere it wanted on the screen, and a crappy jeep that had to constantly jump over obstacles to avoid crashing.
