I honestly don't remember because I was too young. However I do remember growing up on all the classics like Keen, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Rise of the Triad, Test Drive (1 or 2? definitely 2), Street Rod 2. The list goes on

Pokémon Blue, you could say.

Also, RPG Maker. It's wholesome seeing what people make.

Am I really the oldest one here? Sigh.

Pong

Combat on the Atari 2600.

Specifically the 1v1 tank battles.

Super Mario Bros. A game that’s nearly as old as I am, that fully stands the test of time. From the very beginning of my gaming days, this and Duck Hunt got me into it. Dig Dug 2 was the first game I ever got angry enough to flip the tv the bird. Sonic and Tails probably was the second major influence on my life, from a video game perspective. After that I was a gamer and will never turn away from the cathode-ray light!

We have a Home Movie of me at 3 years old playing Tetris on my cousin's Gameboy. I don't remember a time that video games weren't a part of my life.

The first game I remember realy clicking for me was Donkey Kong Country. I can still play that game off muscle memory alone.

Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Elite back in the mid-90s. Jagged Alliance 2 and Fallout 2 a few years later got me finally hooked.

Sonic Adventure and Rayman 2: The Great Escape on Dreamcast

I once stumbled into my parent's computer room as a little 6 year old and saw my older brother playing Sim City 2000. That moment literally changed my life.

Before that, I had seen my parents on the computer, but they were always just emailing or faxing stuff. I thought computers were boring machines for adults to do paperwork on.

The day I saw my brother playing Sim City on the computer was the day I realized it could do something awesome.

That was well over 20 years ago, and I've been a PC gamer ever since.

MASS EFFECT!!!

I’d played games pretty casually since I was a kid, but Mass Effect is what turned me into a gamer. Before Mass Effecf, I hardly finished games and could never really master controls, let alone the concept of movement with one stick and viewing with the other.

The Mass Effect story pulled me in so deep that I put in the effort and learned to actually play the game. After, ME I started playing just about everything.

Now, I’m in the process of recording my ME playthroughs and editing them into a show just for fun. I used to be normal at some point…

Can't remember if it was Baldur's Gate 1 or Morrowind when I was a kid.

Been playing Nintendo since I could remember. That's like everyone else's story.

However, I took a break. 1st kid was born and I wanted to focus on them. 5 years, no gaming... But Factorio... You see, that's where the trouble began to grow. That factory. That damned factory.

edit: fellow engineers, check the FFF blog, they've released news of the expansion!

RuneScape, back in 2007, not that I hadn't gamed before but that was my first real game.

I just installed the game after 13 years last week with a level 3 skiller in osrs. Just hit level 30 fishing, aiming for my first ever 99!

Definitely has to be full throttle. Such great games by lucas arts back then

It's definitely not my first game, but the one who really gave me my love for games was Spyro the Dragon

Super Mario Bros on NES.. About 1991.

Surprised that I cant find it in the comments allready: Definitly Minecraft

Mario 1, 2, & 3 on the NES

Also Bible Adventures on the NES

My mom worked for the church part-time and she'd park me and my brother in the youth group room with the NES. Someone had stolen all the games (except Bible Adventures) but not the console. Our grocery store would rent you a game for a three days for a dollar, and we rotated between the three Mario titles until we mastered them all.

Galaga. Amazon Trail really got me hooked though. Then Earthworm Jim and Mechwarrior 2 turned me into a full-blown addict.

Prince of Persia on our Family PC (Intel 486).

The first game I have a memory of playing is Sonic 2 with the Knuckles cartridge you could piggyback it on, so I guess that, but I was young so it could have just been the most memorable. I remember playing Earthworm Jim around the same time but having no idea how to play it.

Earliest memories of video games were titles such as Aztec, Spy vs Spy, Frogger, King's Bounty.

But what really got my eight year old mind captivated on a summer vacation in the 80s was Elite on C64. I've spent hours into the night trying to get as far away from Lave as possible, all while trying to make some profit on hauling food and computer parts. I did not understand the concept of saving and loading a saved game back then, so there was a lot of trial and error into permadeath involved.

I just remember that first game I ever played was Lode Runner.

First game I started that I actually owned was Congo Bongo.

Gaming in general would be the original Far Cry, Fallout 3, Battlefront 2, the Sims, and Age of Empires.

You can trace a lot of the games and genres I play today back to them.

Earliest game I remember playing was descent 2, which most people today have never even heard of.

Doom, played with my friends on the office computers via ipx networking.

Edit: totally forgot about my C64 and the shitload of games I played on it...

Crystal caves, doom, Duke nukem 1, commander keen.. the incredible machihe, legend of kyrandia. Those are the earliest games I can remember playing. Fuck crystal caves I spent way too much time trying to beat that game.

The original Super Mario Bros on the NES in the late 80's.

Probably Space Invaders

The secret of monkey Island or doom.

My dads collection of pirated games :)

Doom and Doom II.

They certainly were not the first games I played. For my young self, games before then were either trivial games which you can figure out and play easily or difficult games without manuals which held my interest for brief periods of time. Games were (and are?) a certain difficulty and operate as they were designed. For Doom and Doom II, that was different.

Doom and Doom II were the first games I used cheat codes in (because they were the first games that I knew cheat codes for). The cheat codes in those games spoiled because they did more than just "make you invincible" but they also let you walk through the walls of the levels (noclip). They allowed you to see how the game worked (at least in a small way). You could also level jump (a more common cheat code) so that you can see levels that I did not have skills to reach. This made the games more than just a triviality since I could keep exploring and trying new things despite my skill level.

Those games were able to be modded though. You could easily get CDs with plenty of mods that changed the weapons, added levels, completely changed the game, and so on. This was the first game that I ever played that could do that. The CDs also came with editors which let me dabble in messing with weapons myself (where I managed to get around 1 FPS with all the rockets I fired at once from a rocket launcher). As such, the games could be made fresh and new again by modding it to be something different.

Those games also had a great sound track. It seems like a minor thing (and other games have great sound tracks as well) but I learned that music significantly influences my like or dislike for a game. Games that I played before didn't have bad music per say but nothing earlier really grabbed my attention like Doom and Doom II.

I do enjoy many modern games. Still, I miss that games typically do not have cheat codes (and things like noclip are a rarity in any new games) and modding has never seemed as "wild" as some of the Doom mods that were created back then. If Doom was never around, I'm sure that some other game would have grabbed my interest in different ways (likely it would still have a great sound track though). However, I would have likely missed the wonder of seeing how a game worked and seeing a game be modified.

Fortunately, these games are still playable today and still have new mods released for them today. As such, I can take a nostalgic trip and play them whenever I want.

Minecraft

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

Only because Sonic Mega Collection wouldn't work on the defective GameCube I had.

Sid Meier's Pirates and Minecraft

I honestly couldn't tell you exactly which game that hooked me for life. My first exposure was when I spent summers with my grandparents on their farm.

Grandpa and I would ride his trike out to the fields, and we'd... do stuff? To the plants? I don't really remember the work.

I do remember that work ended at noon, and we zipped into town on the trike. And we went to the pub. Grandpa would get me a root beer, and we'd split a poutine. Then he'd give me a roll of coins. I can go nuts on the arcade machines, he can have way too many beers, and WE DON'T TELL GRANDMA.

Anyway, a half century later I'm a recovering alcoholic. Good times!

Pac-Land. 10p per play in the cafe that my old girl used to go to in the mornings - she clocked that I wa I to that sort of thing and kindly got me an Atari 800 XE for a birthday or Christmas - I forget which.

It was all downhill from there.

flashgames if it counts

sonic 1, first game i ever played

Think Brave Fencer Musashi or Zelda Ocarina of Time.

Pretty sure it was Rick Dangerous on C64.

Probably doom/Wolfenstein 3D (the original DOS title, obv.)... That started the whole thing, but FF6 and 7 were also huge catalysts for it back in the day. I think FF6 on the SNES was the first game I was addicted to. I couldn't have been much older than 10 at the time.... I can't say that I really understood the plot, but I enjoyed it a lot.

FF7 and 8 were both fun too.

After FF 6, we got LTTP and that's also huge for me. I've fallen away from LOZ, because I don't want to pay the Nintendo tax....

Honestly? This hole in the wall food store in my home town managed to pick up a pretty early release of the arcade game Robotron. I was instantly enthralled, visiting arcades any time I could. From there, I played on friends' Atari 2600s and Commodores until I managed to get my own C64, and I've never stopped since. From there, I migrated through their products and stayed a diehard fan till the mid-90's - C128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and Amiga 2000.

I played a few early x86 games on demo machines in stores, but I didn't finally relent and build my own x86 rig until the release of the Descent 1 demo, which single-handedly destroyed all of my remaining resolve. I already considered myself a pretty consistent gamer, but that was the nail in the coffin. The rest, as they say, is history. It was only 4 years later that EverQuest came out, too, and that swallowed me whole.

Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country

Two great side-scrollers

I've been into gaming since as long as I remember. My dad played halo 2 when I was a baby. First game I played tho was Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga.

Grim Fandango. Downloaded from a demo site, and went out with my dad to buy the boxed game.

Dark Souls.

I remember the first game I played was Super Mario World on the SNES at my cousins place.

That game enthralled me because I was not good at it, but each time I played through after losing all my lives, I had the chance to get a LITTLE further, to DISCOVER something which I had EARNED.

Most games I played after that on Playstation 1 and 2 or Xbox had a lot more hand holding. There was not such a sense of achievement, though I learned to appreciate stories in games much more then.

Then I played Dark Souls 1. My BF at the time told me about it, and good god did I struggle with it. But like SMW, I found such a large sense of achievement as I inched further into the game. The non-standard story telling in the game was also really interesting, learning about this ancient lore from items and weapons and armor that I would find in the most desolate and obscure places of this dying world.

The combination of what I loved from high difficulty early games on the SNES in conjunction with what I loved from the story of games on later consoles were both present in Dark Souls, and to this day it holds a very special place for me.

Since, I think while Dark Souls 1 and 3, and Elden Ring have some of my favorite gameplay, Bloodborne has my favorite story of all time.

In Fromsofts games the world building is incredible and the difficulty is treacherous, so the journey is worthwhile.

Spyro the Dragon on PS1