You know you’re old when most of the answers involve video games from one era or another.
The first video game we owned was a Coleco Telstar, which came out in 1976. It had a whopping 3 games:
- hockey
- handball
- tennis
Basically all were just variations of Pong…
Yep I naively expected to see board games and what not. Cos I keep forgetting I’m ooolllddd
Kick the Can.
Followed by your mom ringing a bell or using some other noisemaker to call you home for dinner. We’d have about ten kids from around our neighborhood playing kick the can. And we could all tell who had to go home based on the type of bell etc. and the direction it came from.
Probably Star Wars Battlefront, THPS/THUG, or Ocarina of Time
But Oracle of Seasons was the first game I owned
THUG and THUG2 were great.
xenos, interactive fiction from like 30 years ago
The Mind Maze game in Microsoft Encarta
I got a few.
N64 command and conquer I can still hear the commando blowing up logo and saying that was left handed.
Ocarina of Time
Skies of Arcadia
And kotor, but for some reason I remember the pazak mini game more than anything else.
And sadly, this game runs too fast on modern hardware. Back then the programmers used CPU cycles as a timing advancement technique. So like a Pentium 4’s cyclic operation kept the game playable. Try it under emulation on a modern CPU and the game is unplayably fast. Yes I tried slowing down the processor speed in Virtualbox, can’t find the sweet spot % so this game is lost in time. Like the dinos.
Gradius for the NES
I’d say it’s a tie between The Curse of Monkey Island and Wing Commander (1 and 2).
Oh, there’s a monkey in my pocket, And he’s stealing all my change, His stare is blank and glassy, I suspect that he’s deranged…
-Operation Wolf Dad would watch me play. He would bring other people to come in and watch how good I was. -Mario Golf Dad would play with us, he even kept a spreadsheet, on grid paper, to track his stats. -Ultima 3 First game on a PC. Mom got it to play with me and my little sister after Dad died. She couldn’t figure out how to get it to work. I ended up playing it alone years later, but only after learning enough MS-DOS to figure out how to even get it running. CD…
Hug your parents. Play with your kids.
Handheld Zelda link’s awakening for the Gameboy hits me the hardest as it was the first I owned myself bought with my first jobs mowing lawns and delivering papers.
Console, NES contra watching my older brothers get way further than I could at the time & teach me the Konami code
PC xwing, I had a f16 flight stick and my siblings would play splitting weapons/shield/engines distribution to a copilot and the pilot flying and aiming. That mission where you have to fly back and forth protecting the Corvette from imperial attacks from both sides jumping in and out of the area was peak retro space combat gaming.
Black and white 2
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego. Played it as a child together with my mom. She had all the worldly knowledge, but at the time I was the only one who could speak/understand English, so teamwork was key. That game meant hours of educational fun for the both of us.
Sid Meier’s Pirates!
I played the original when it came out on PC in like 1987. A friend of my dad gave me a copy, but I didn’t have the manuals or map or anything that came in the box, so in order to figure out how to get around the Caribbean I had to crack an encyclopedia to a map, and that got me both interested in maps and also in reading the history of all these places I’d been to in the game.
I still play the 2004 remake of that game a few times a year.
