I might be a bit older than you. My first gaming system was an Atari 2600 but I was also too young to actually earn my own money so all of the games that I ended up with were either birthday or Christmas gifts or borrowed from friends.
By the time the NES came out I was already working a part-time job, so I was able to make my own purchases and even though it was a very long time ago, I still remember the very first game I ever bought. It wasn't a great game, but then again, it was a very long time ago. I still remember the large amount of time that I put into deciding which game I was going to buy and I don't remember how much it was but I would imagine that it was around 20-25 US dollars.
The choice I made in the end was Kung Fu
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This was during the very early stages of the Nintendo and all boxes had a similar art style. I don't know if 3rd party games were required to do this as well or if 3rd party games even existed at the time. Regardless, all boxes had a similar art style and since there was no internet at the time or even very many magazines dedicated to gaming yet, you had to depend on the box and screen shots on it in order to make your choice.
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Looking back it is pretty remarkable to me that I found this game entertaining at all because it was so simplistic. We had very different standards back then though since prior to the NES all of our games consisted of a bunch of boxes floating around that barely resembled humans or anything really.
You jumped, punched, and kicked and except for that one wizard boss where you had to crouch and punch him in order to hurt him at all, there wasn't really much reason to ever do anything other than kick.
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anything other than a crouched punch would just result in him vanishing and taking no damage
The pink simplistic enemies wouldn't actually strike you, they would just hug you and drain your health. It was pretty silly when I think back on it. There was only 5 stages and once you had them figured out that was basically the entire game. The only thing to do from that point was to go for a high score and this was during a time where high scores were kind of being phased out in gaming in a general sense.
I was a pretty stubborn gamer back in those days and I would imagine I defeated the game on the very first day. It's not like there were a ton of controls to master on the NES after all. There were only 2 buttons. Some people have become insanely good at this game and the speedrun world record for completing the entire game at the moment is just over 3 and half minutes.
So that was the very first game I ever purchased and even though it just seems dumb these days, I absolutely loved it at the time
What was your first game purchase?
Oh my. Hmm, not 100% sure but this was among the very firs at least! Outrun for the C64 on cassette 😄
Funny how a picture of kung fu continuous to bring up a sense of frustration.
wow, i didn't expect a response to be a game that was actually pre my era. A friend of mine had a C64 but it operated off 5 inch floppies. It was frustratingly slow to load and if I remember correctly, very expensive. He didn't have the cassette add on, was that meant to be faster?
I had Outrun for the C64 too but on disk. Technically the C64 came out a little before the NES, but they largely overlapped. I believe Outrun was released for the C64 in 1988. I think Karate Champ was released for the NES in 1986.
you are probably correct about this. Without consulting the internet I remember that me and my youth gaming pal were playing Sega Genesis, NES, and C64 all at the same time so this makes timeline sense.
Haha, no the cassette was slower :) Found a video of it,
almost 5 min to load outrun! But I must say I have fond memories of the conversations with friends while hanging around waiting for games to load.I first bought the Super Mario I.
ah yes, well I suppose that would have been mine as well but since it was packaged with the NES system I didn't count that one. Kung Fu was the first stand-alone game that I ever purchased.
The first game I chose to get means the most to me. I didn't buy it myself, my mother did. Warcraft II had me addicted since I first tried its demo that had 3 levels from each race - orcs and humans. Up until that point, gaming was a fierce hobby, but it would become a part of me as a person after WC2 Tides of Darkness.
Oh the Warcraft games captivated me as well. I still love RTS games and I can still hear some of the things that the units in WC2 would say when you click on them. Such an amazing game that was. You don't see RTS games getting made that much lately, which is a damn shame.
Played any recently that you've had good experiences with?
I've lost touch with RTS, but I'm pretty sure SpellForce should be amazing https://store.steampowered.com/app/311290/SpellForce_3_Reforced/
It does have a bit more RPG in it than Warcraft 3 though
AI WAR offers you the best long-term coop experience. too hardcore for me
Mindustry has an automated touch to it
8-bit armies is like reskinned command & conquer
Boid is free and amazing, pvp-only, but it's dead. it does have a campaign dlc though
Ultimate General and RUSE come to mind too
I'll look into those. Thanks for the advice.
When I first started making money, it was already way into the piracy age, so I eon't remember anything significant.
Yeah the piracy age was an interesting one. I remember I would go to great lengths to copy games to the point where I would go to Wal-Mart, carefully heat up the proof of opening sticker by heating it up, carefully remove the CD so as to not disturb the packaging, copy it, carefully put the disk back and then reattach the open sticker using clear glue.
All this prep on m part was in vain because as it turns out Wal-Mart doesn't really care what you return and they will accept it no matter what. To this day I am convinced you can return stuff to Wal Mart that you didn't buy at Wal-Mart.
The first game I ever owned was Super Mario World for the SNES while the first game I bought for my own money was Pokemon Yellow for the old school Game Boy.
Super Mario World was a truly amazing new direction for that series to take. I remember sinking countless hours into that gem of a game. I think it was a high-point for the Mario franchise in general. While I haven't played any of the Switch Mario games I was rather unimpressed with the ones on the Gamecube.
Yeah, mine was I think was ONI. Back in 2001. I played games bought from my family before then, this was my first ever purchase.
I had to look up what ONI actually is because I have never heard of it. As it turns out it is considered "Bungie's forgotten game." I wonder why I never even bothered to look into this game because I was at a gaming high point in my life when it was released in 2001.
They probably buried it somewhere deep, so nobody would find it.
My first game system was the Atari 2600 but I was too young at that time to buy my own games. A little later on I got a Commodore 64. While I was still too young to have a job I did use money saved up from Christmas and Birthday gifts to buy games. I remember three games in particular that i bought though I'm not entirely sure which one I bought first.
1 ) Ace of Aces (I THINK this one was first, bought at a Walden Books I think...they had a software section)
2 ) Echelon (probably bought at Sears)
3 ) Pool of Radiance (bought via mail order...I really wanted this one). I also later bought Heroes of the Lance but that one was a big disappointment.
!hivebits
I probably would have been really excited about the D&D games as well but I remember reading something not that long ago about how most of those games were considered disappointments by the gaming community. I can't say that I ever played any of them though but then again, I didn't have a C64
The Gold Box D&D games were awesome for their time and I think they were generally well reviewed. There were some other great fantasy RPG series from that time as well like the Bard's Tale series and the Ultima series. I loved the later Baldur's Gate series as well. The Gold Box games (and Baldur's Gate which was really the spiritual successor anyway) let you have an entire party of characters which was nice. I don't know if there are any more modern computer RPGs that let you do that. You didn't have to have a C64 to play the Gold Box games though you did have to have a computer. I think they were available for the Apple II and PC (DOS) as well. Pool of Radiance even came out on the NES though I don't think any of the other Gold Box games did.
you just brought back a bunch of memories there. I played Baldur's Gate so much and probably saved at least 20 times per screen since it was permadeath if you lost a party member.
Ultima consumed a lot of my time even though our family computer was not powerful enough to enjoy it properly. I didn't know any better though since I had never seen it on any other system. It would be a year later that a friend of mine had it on a "real" computer and I saw how fast the game was supposed to be and was just blown away.