Seeing an Atari 2600, the original woodgrain model, at my cousin’s house and playing Space Invaders, Adventure and the one with cowboys.

I was convinced the cartridges contained reels of film, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work with all the different possibilities. I was only 4 or 5 at the time.

My cousin opened up a cartridge and I was amazing to see the circuit board with a couple of chips on inside. Blew my mind.

first, some pong-like game on someone’s zx spectrum in early 80ties. it was brief and short but very first experience. later, karateka, tetris, games like that on my and others C64.

the first game i was hooked to was Elite on same C64. it was just wow. 3d, freedom, trading, pirating, leveling up. i played only Elite for long time, played it on Amiga and my first 386 later on. still stands as my first serious gaming memory.

I recall finding the hidden area in level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros 3. In it is a 3 made of coins. I remember going “look mom! That’s how old I am!”

I remember playing the Neverhood on our first family computer back when I was 4. The art direction and story were really oddly appealing as a kid. I still think it’s a very underrated art style.

I remember being in a friend’s house. He asks me if i knew what golden eye is. I said no, and so he takes me to his room. He turns on the tv, so I ask “oh we are going to watch a james bond movie?” He laughs and says no, and presses a button on a wierd plastic box that suddenly comes to life! The tv suddenly changes, and some wierd scene plays until we get to something that looks like a dvd menu. He then gives me a wierd ass controller.

I then spent the day figuring how to stop looking up while running away from my friend headshotting me repeatadly while giggling like a schoolgirl. I enjoyed every second of it. My brain was firing up and never have I felt so excited to even being aware of such an experience existing.

My dad coming home with a ZX81. I played various games on it but the one I remember most fondly and load up occasionally today, was Forty Niner. We needed to get a 16K RAM Pack for it so it definitely wasn’t the first I played on that system.

3-4 years old, my father was sitting down and I was leaning on him and played through Kirby’s Dream Land on the original Game Boy from start to finish.

My cousin had a bunch of Tiger Electronic and Game and Watch games just kinda tossed in a bag. I really did not like him as a kid but boy did I spend a lot of time at his house playing those games.

Several educational PC games in the mid 90s mostly, which I guess technically count as gaming. I remember Super Mario Teaches Typing, and Math Blaster of course. But there was another one that had a top down view and you had to rescue animals with a helicopter or something. All I remember was that I liked the weird sound it would make when you lifted the animals up with the heli, or maybe it was the sound of the monkeys.

As for “real” games one of my earliest memories is getting dragged to a house for a dinner party and my brother and I would just hang out with their older son in his room playing floppy disk games. The only one I remember was Arkanoid.

Duke Nukem 3D

Not necessarily my first, but my first clear memory of a gaming obsession is playing Defender on my cousin’s 2600

Battlezone on the Atari 2600 https://atarionline.org/atari-2600/battlezone

My first proper gaming memory was when I played Myst on my dad’s computer, I didn’t get it at the time, but later when me and my sister got our own computer I played it much more intently, then came Riven and The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, they were really cool.

My first genuine FPS experience was Half-Life, but I was too scared of all the monsters, so I turned on cheats, god mode, get all weappons and make monsters ignore you.

My first multiplayer gaming experience was when me and my class mates got the demo of UT99 running on the school computers and gamed after hours, I sucked, but it was really fun regardless.

Playing Super Mario Bros. on my Dad’s NES. Probably in 89.

I don’t remember what the game was called, but I played it from a diskette on DOS, if I remember correctly. You were controlling a sort of space ship and jumping on different platforms while continuously moving forward. I loved it. But I don’t remember what it was called so I can’t look it up any more.

We also had some sort of maze game and Commander Keen. But I sucked at Commander Keen, so I never got past the first level.