What game turned you into a gamer?

[ramee001]

What game/s turned you into a gamer? This brings back childhood gaming memories!

 

[racofer]

Probably The Wussies: Rise of the Spambots.

 

[oldschool]

Galaga

 

[shihonage]

Russian Lode Runner (Йети).

 

[Dire Roach]

Sucking at sports and getting picked on at school, thus becoming increasingly antisocial during my formative years and finding solace mostly in single-participant forms of entertainment?

 

[Rohit_N]

Wolfenstein 3D.

 

[Fat Dragon]

Elite. Game was the fucking shit.

 

[Satori (original)]

Sonic 1 for the Megadrive, I think I was 2 or 3 at the time and always had to get someone else to run across the piranha bridge on 1-2.

 

[Suchy]

An arcade Invaders clone back in '85. Got a C64 two years later and I'm hooked since then. The first thing I managed to run on my C64 was Gyruss. I remember it like if it happened yesterday.

 

[L'ennui]

Star Trek: Judgement Rites or Marathon on the Mac. First games I played to any significant extent.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

age of empires 2 - first game i ever bought, and it barely ran on my family's pentium. how far we have come...

 

[derill]

Dark Sun : Wake of the Ravager

and then my gaming died down after a few other rpgs...

but warcraft 2 rekindled it.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Quest for Glory I. Actually took my first steps towards learning english because of it.

 

[Jaesun]

Might and Magic II for my Amiga 500. I never did finish it at the time, due to actually having a very active social life (lead guitarist for a metal band). When ever I DID have some free time, that was the game I kept loading up and playing.

 

[vrok]

Started casually with NES when I was about 6 and then exploded with Wolfenstein at 11. After that it's been all gaming all the time.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

Player of games? Super Mario Bros. I was five and a friend's older brother had a NES a ton of games for it.

Obsessive gamer? Command and Conquer: Red Alert, which coincided with literally getting hounded out of middle school for being "gay" and my subsequent decade long social shutdown. Red Alert was cool because it was my first RTS -- a genre which was totally new to me having come from SNES/N64/PSX land. I played Red Alert exclusively, for at least 2 hours a day, for the better part of year.

PC gamer? Fallout 2. By the time I bought Fallout 2, the only games left on consoles that had any appeal to me were JRPGs. Once I played Fallout 2 though, I realized how pathetic JRPGs are in comparison and never felt the need to buy console games again.

 

[kingcomrade]

I've been playing games since forever. My family had an Atari and my dad was a gamer who played Doom. I still remember being little and playing Mortal Kombat. I had a Sega Genesis, too, and then much later on I had a playstation. It wasn't until pretty recently, around high school, that my family finally got a computer capable of playing relatively recent games. It was Return to Castle Wolfenstein that turned me into an Internet gamer, it was actually when my dad started playing it online that we finally got broadband. I remember hating Starcraft when I first got it because it was too hard, when I played a skirmish I would always die early to 1 or 2 zerglings that the computer would send my way.

 

[Melcar]

Shit, hard to think so far back. The first game I ever played was Centepide on an old arcade machine. From then on I was pretty much hooked on games. However, if I had to pick one game that totally changed my life (possibly for the worst) and turned me into a "hardcore gamer" I would say Baldur's Gate. From then on I started free basing RPG and strategy games to the point of almost flunking my sophomore year in HS and becoming a social outcast.

 

[DriacKin]

Well, back in '91, my parents bought a computer. And, the first game they bought for me was Secret of Monkey Island. I've been hooked to games ever since

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Golden axe, and the best game ever, Golden axe 2...solidified it.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

I had a NES when i was a kid, but what really got me hooked was Normality on the PC. Sweet memories...

 

[beaker]

Donkey Kong. And River Raid.

 

[lightbane]

Little big adventure. And Fallout 1.

 

[janjetina]

Secret of Monkey Island

 

[Zhuangzi]

Well, back in '91, my parents bought a computer. And, the first game they bought for me was Secret of Monkey Island. I've been hooked to games ever since

OMG yes. My Dad bought a CD rom drive in 1990 (it was 3/4 speed, if you remember what THAT means) and it came with Secret of Monkey Island CD. Watching that intro was a seminal moment for me. A couple of years later I started playing Master of Orion obsessively, and the pattern of a lifetime was set.

I had a similar blissful experience with King's Bounty: The Legend in 2008. Doesn't happen often anymore...

 

[Bluebottle]

Monsters on the BBC Micro was pretty formative, but it was probably Commander Keen that really cemented it.