Here, I'll start. When I was 8 years old, my parents went to a dinner party and plonked me down in front of the host's computer so I'd stay out of their way. The game they booted up to keep me occupied was Space Quest II. Little did they know what impact that would have on me...
Like many on here, Zork was my first adventure game, and King's Quest 1 my first graphical adventure game. Interestingly, growing up I really only played the Infocom and Sierra games, the LucasArts games somehow completely escaped me unfortunately.
The first adventure game I bought and played was an Infocom interactive fiction ... I think it was Stationfall. Before I had briefly played Magnetic Scrolls' Fish! at someone else's computer. Fell in love with text adventures and started collecting them, I have a few of the Infocom folios as well (sadly not the Starcross saucer). The first graphic adventure I remember playing was King's Quest IV.
These games, along with later games like Monkey Island, had a huge influence on me, I learned programming to write adventure games myself but spent more time writing adventure game engines (both text and graphic ones) than actual games, and today I'm a software engineer (not in the game business).
Little Big Adventure: Twinsen’s Oddysey was probably the first real adventure game I played as a kid. Such a great mix of action and puzzling, and little kid me was so enthralled by the story it told
I got to play Zork in 4th grade on the single C64 in the classroom. Was obsessed with that computer. I beat Zork with a couple classmates and help from the hints book. The teacher gave me a physical Zorkmid coin that came with the boxed game, I still have it somewhere. Zork got me so hooked on computers that it was all I wanted to do.
I had a hard home life, my dad was an abusive addict. I lived in fear of his seemingly random behavior, one day he would be overjoyed and another miserable about everything. The computer was predictable, if it didn’t work right, it was because I did something wrong. The teacher saw how much that computer meant to me. He taught me what he knew about BASIC programming, he gave me the manual. I’d sit in my room and read it cover to cover, trying to understand everything without having a machine to try it on.
One day near the end of the year, the teacher pulled me aside and told me that the school was getting rid of some computers, and that I could have one. I think they were getting Apple II’s, so he put aside a VIC-20 for me. I had to get my mom to drive me to school on a weekend and the teacher met us there. In hindsight, I don’t think he had permission or anything.
Damn, that brings back memories, I had an Amiga 500 (in fact still got it, I don't think it works anymore though) and my first adventure game I think it was Loom, but it could have been Maniac Mansion too.
I still have the first Monkey Island on its original box, sadly it's missing a disk, only have 3 out of 4.
Pretty cool if you still have it, those machines are getting rare and valuable now! I later got my own Amiga 600, but I regret selling it to fund a move to PC in the mid nineties.
Well technically it was text-based Zork that first blew my mind. But I'd say the adventure game addiction didn't become chronic until "Ultima III: Exodus" on Comodore 64. (I'm going to have to insist RPG and Adventure game are the same genre, because back then we didn't make a distinction.) Good times.
The Secret of Monkey Island. As a kid (4? 6? No older than 8) the sheer amount of interactivity and dialogue was mind-blowing. And, of course, I loved the humor.
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