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...
I didn’t play it until a couple of years ago when I did my video on it. I imagine I would have had a lot more fun with it if I was a kid and had all the time in the world to explore the world. Sadly, my first KQ game was KQ3, which stopped you from having any fun every 2-3 minutes with the sudden appearance of a bossy wizard.
I didn’t play that until 18 when I bought the King’s Quest collection. I think if that had been my first experience, I wouldn’t have ventured into the adventure games world at all.
Somehow my friend from school had gotten wind of the “bye bye wizard” cheat code, and we STILL couldn’t get anywhere in the game. I’ll take falling off a space station to my death, thanks. 😂
Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest. Mostly because it was the first two I ever got copies of and I'd never seen anything like it, but there was another thing about them:
Whatever they may be as we look back on them in retrospect (neither have stood up spectacularly well in terms of their politics), both games were set in the 'real' world. While I'd played a ton of fantasy games in make-believe worlds, something that made me feel like the world was something I could relate to socially helped immensely. To this day I TEND to prefer "real-world" games, set in the modern day or the past. That's probably in part due to these two games.
To this day, it’s one of my favorite games of all time. I haven’t played it in a while, so thank you for making me remember! I’m definitely going to go for a new playthrough when things settle down here.
For 8 year old me it was Kings Quest V. Graham gives the wand a good shake, but it only fizzles and dies. I don't even want to know how many times Graham had to die before I finally beat the game.
We played around with it for a while, aimlessly moving rocks and pulling up carrots, until I one day typed "bow king" in the throne room. A quest was given! The game had a purpose!
The the road went to Lefty´s Bar and strange planets in the Space Quest universe. It was a wonderful time to be a kid in a CGA universe
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Add comment