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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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