First game/s you played on PC.

[MadMaxHellfire]

honestly i forgot. among the first cds i've been fed to, i remember only "rogue... something". was it "rogue squadron"? the one with the "camera progressively, inexorably moving away" bug. the one where you had to manually move the rope around the at-ats' legs, only you lacked any kind of spatial reference to do that in such a barebone 3d environment. basically, the one which sucked.
damn, i loved that game.

 

[Mexi]

Probably the Oregon Trail. I think the first game I owned was Blade Runner adventure game, though. Hard for me to remember, but I think my dad bought it at a garage sale. Worst thing about it is the fact that we had the whole box that came with it. It was enormous, and I think we lost it. We actually bought one of those PC game sticks or whatever because it looked cool, but it wasn't compatible with any game we owned . Piece of fucking junk.

Anyways, I think I was like 12 or so when we got our first PC. Pretty sure we were only playing Solitaire and Minesweeper until we got our first PC game. I'm pretty damn sure it was the Blade Runner adventure game, though.

What's super fucking hilarious, though. They were showing the premiere of Blade Runner on the SciFi channel, IIRC, and they were hyping the shit out of it. We stayed up to watch it together, me and my cousins and brother, and we fucking hated it. It was fucking boring. We were expecting something as cool as the game. Anyways, we were super young at the time. I rewatched it when I was in high school, and for sure, one of the greatest Sci-Fi films ever. Anyways, we were young and dumb.

 

[Bester]

Looks like you all played dope ass games, while I played some dorky shit. This was my first:

 

[Data4]

 

[mediocrepoet]

First personal computer game would've been Ultima I on the Apple II.

The first PC game I played was probably Thexder, with Zeliard being around the same time.

 

[Bad Sector]

Willy the Worm

This was the very first PC game i remember playing, though it was on a monochrome monitor with a Hercules card and IIRC if the game detected that it used a text-based mode where the worm is represented by an S and the other items by various DOS ASCII characters (though you could use SIMCGA to make it work in graphics mode if you wanted).

The game was basically a Donkey Kong clone except you couldn't directly jump but had to use these springs placed on the level and time your motion so that you avoid the rolling "barrels".

IIRC the first game i played on a PC i owned was Alley Cat

though it could also have been Prince of Persia, i do not remember since i played both of those at the time.

Also looking for a screenshot for Alley Cat i noticed someone made a remake of the game with some additional content (but also can be made to look like any of the official releases for IBM PC, Atari, etc):

 

[Endemic]

 

[Eirinjas]

First PC game I ever played was on a friend's C64:

Bruce Lee


He also had a bootleg PacMan game where instead of going around eating pellets and avoiding ghosts, you gobble up dicks and avoid STDs. Instead of power pellets in the corners, you have vaccine syringes. I couldn't find video of it, unfortunately.

I didn't own a PC until I was an adult, and the first game I bought was:

Fantasy General

 

[JDR13]

Bruce Lee

Yeah that game was pretty sweet. I remember playing it on my cousin's C64.

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS TALKING ABOUT AN ACTUAL PC AND NOT C64

IF WAS MY FRIENDS PC SOME TEXT AND ASCII GAME ABOUT AN INSECT INVASION

I REMEMBER UNNECESSARILY USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS THOUGH MORE SPIFOXALLY PC OR C64

BRUCE LEE OR PHANTASIE THREE C64

ONLY GAMES I REMEMBER PLAYING WITH MY FIRST PC I OWNED ARE ULTIMA SEVEN AND DOOM

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I think it was probably a DOS-based Flight Simulator, or X-wing or TIE Fighter around a family friend’s house. They had a DOS machine, but my parents had an Acorn and we would play games on that, mainly educational games and others I can’t remember the names of. I think it was those three games mentioned at the top of the post that really showed me the power of PC gaming as a 7 or 8 year old.

I was able to play some games when we got the Acorn to boot Windows 95, and I'd play some games like Virtual Springfield and also Doom around other people's houses, but it was only when my parents got a Windows 98 machine that I started gaming for real. I would get Ultimate PC and PC Zone magazines and play the demos.

A friend introduced me to Dark Forces and Jedi Knight. I bought a game collection that included TIE Fighter Collector’s CD, my favourite game of all time. And I bought Age of Empires during a holiday in the US. I look on that period as being when it all started.

 

[Maxie]

 

[samuraigaiden]

My first PC experiences were in the 3.1 days, a looong time ago, it’s all a bit of a blur.

Some of my earliest PC gaming memories are Wolfenstein 3D and Stunts. They were hidden in the school’s computer lab machines and kids in the know played when nobody was looking.

I also remember Lemmings as one of first games to show up on my dad’s PC.

The first PC game I remember buying was Day of the Tentacle, the disk version with no VOs. It used something like 7 or 8 disks, took forever to install.

 

[DraQ]

I don't remember the very first in general or first I played on my *own* PC, but the first I played on PC for any significant amount of time was DOOM.

 

[NJClaw]

I used to play this a lot with my mother, especially the bug drop thing. I had completely forgotten about it, but a single frame of that video brought up so many memories.

 

[Ol' Willy]

First game on PC - Wolfenstein 3D
First game on my own PC - Star Wars Empire at War

 

[luj1]

Wolfenstein 3D and Stunts

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I can’t say with 100% certainty, but I think it may have been King’s Quest 2, which is somewhat ironic since it’s one of my most loathed games from that era.

 

[DalekFlay]

I can’t say with 100% certainty, but I think it may have been King’s Quest 2, which is somewhat ironic since it’s one of my most loathed games from that era.

Most of my early PC memories are early Sierra adventures and while the nostalgia is strong, man are those games terrible. They got much better later on, don't get me wrong, but the early ones are rough as fuck with dead-ends, poor writing and dumb puzzles. You all know it to be true.

 

[JarlFrank]

I can’t say with 100% certainty, but I think it may have been King’s Quest 2, which is somewhat ironic since it’s one of my most loathed games from that era.

Most of my early PC memories are early Sierra adventures and while the nostalgia is strong, man are those games terrible. They got much better later on, don't get me wrong, but the early ones are rough as fuck with dead-ends, poor writing and dumb puzzles. You all know it to be true.

Early Sierra adventures are a clear case where "you only like them because of nostalgia" is true.
Later ones were much better, mostly because they were designed by people who actually had some kind of idea about good game design (Jane Jensen single-handedly turned King's Quest into something good with KQ6, and then made Gabriel Knight, one of the best Sierra games).
Roberta and Ken Williams were good businesspeople and knew that using fancy graphics (for their time - as primitive as the KQ games look to us today, back in the day the graphics were considered amazing on a PC) would capture a large casual audience, but they were utter shit as game designers.

 

[Parsifarka]

The earliest I recall is Titus the Fox: To Marrakech and Back (probably unknown outside of west-euro), though it was already a bit old when I played it as my memories of it are somewhat simultaneous to those of Command & Conquer: Red Alert and the demos of Heroes of Might & Magic II and (a bit later) Quake II, both of which I played til knowing each scenario by heart. Then came Tomb Raider II, which I loved to watch my father play (I just couldn't operate the keyboard competently enough to play it at the time).
At some point around that time my father took an interest in racing games and both Moto Racer and Screamer came into the house. Oh, Moto Racer, how many hours I spent on that virtual beach crashing (sometimes willingly) against other riders; I recall having dreams of motorbikes cruising through forests and on the very Great Wall of China.
The day my father purchased a brand new 3D accelerator card which came together with a full version of MDK (which already blew me away with the parachute mechanic, the movement speed and the massive amount of enemies on screen) and the id tech 2 moved from software to openGL rendering my jaw fell to the floor. Before the days of Futuremark benchmarks that was photorealism.
And of course, those freeware releases of Mahjong for PC.

 

[Blaza]

My first PC game was a 2d mmo called Tibia. Speifically the 7.6 flavor. Would have been around 2002/3 to about 2006. Tons of great memories of grinding rotworms after school with my buddies

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I can’t say with 100% certainty, but I think it may have been King’s Quest 2, which is somewhat ironic since it’s one of my most loathed games from that era.

Most of my early PC memories are early Sierra adventures and while the nostalgia is strong, man are those games terrible. They got much better later on, don't get me wrong, but the early ones are rough as fuck with dead-ends, poor writing and dumb puzzles. You all know it to be true.

Early Sierra adventures are a clear case where "you only like them because of nostalgia" is true.
Later ones were much better, mostly because they were designed by people who actually had some kind of idea about good game design (Jane Jensen single-handedly turned King's Quest into something good with KQ6, and then made Gabriel Knight, one of the best Sierra games).
Roberta and Ken Williams were good businesspeople and knew that using fancy graphics (for their time - as primitive as the KQ games look to us today, back in the day the graphics were considered amazing on a PC) would capture a large casual audience, but they were utter shit as game designers.

I largely agree with you both, but King's Quest 2 is a particularly egregious offender. The first game can get by on its historical value, while 3 also pushed the genre forward with much more complex puzzle structure and plotting. 2 has nothing to offer; it has inferior puzzle design, is chock-full of sadistic "gotcha" deaths, no plot to speak of, and actually looks substantially worse than its immediate predecessor. The only good thing I can say about KQ2 is that it's the reason we got the excellent "Remake" from Tierra ("remake" in quotes because it's a completely different game, and probably the 2nd best KQ game period).

And while I agree that KGVI is the highwater mark for the series, I think the clear departure point in terms of a quality jump is IV. It still has some bullshit design, but the constraints and strengths of the genre are clearly much better understood IV. The progression of IV>V>VI made good use of iteration and I would say all of them are still playable today (provided you don't mind the text parser in IV).

And I think you're being too hard on Roberta Williams. While she certainly didn't have the talent of Jane Jensen, the Two Guys from Andromeda, or even Al Lowe, she did put out some decent games. Laura Bow 1 is one of my favorite games to this day, and it showed a keen understanding of how to create and implement new mechanics in an already established design space. I wish more Adventure games had taken some queues from it, but oh well.

 

[Farewell into the night]

I think it was Wolfenstein 3D.