What was the first Arcade game you played?

[telengard]

Space Invaders. Don't remember being any good at it though.

 

~telengard

[darthkur]

The first arcade game for me would have been a pinball machine back in the early to mid 70's. Used to play them a lot along with other mechanical types like the baseball/pinball games and shooting ones that looked like they had a real rifle mounted on the machine. For video games it would probably be one of these: Starship I, Sea Wolf, 280 ZZZAP, Battle Shark, F-1,or something along those lines.

Edited September 28, 2009 by darthkur

[tremoloman2006]

The first game I got truly addicted to was "Space Invaders Part II" which was in the front of a Zellers in Milton, Ontario. I was vising relatives and I had to keep finding excuses to go back to that store so my cousin and I could blast aliens all day.

[Chris++]

When I was in Kindergarten, living in Cleveland, there was a yellow game console that sat in our living room and got plugged in on special occasions. It played Pong, but my folks referred to it as Hockey, so maybe that’s what the clone was actually called. Anyway, I thought it was really cool that you could control something on TV, let alone play a game against someone. You could never affect the picture on the screen before. It was definitely more interesting than a pinball machine. We kept the unit when we moved to Milwaukee, but I don’t remember seeing it after that. I mention it because my reaction to Asteroids drew on comparing it with this Hockey toy.

 

In 1980, when I was 9 and we'd recently moved to Albuquerque, my father dragged my little brother and I to his gym to wait in the lobby while he worked out. Looking forward to a dull afternoon with nothing to do (a couple hours is an ETERNITY when you only have nine years' worth of life as a reference point), Mike and I brought along a matchbox car and a book (respectively). We saw a strange coffee table between the couches, and walked over to investigate as Dad went off to torture himself by deliberately lifting heavy things and putting them back down a bunch of times.

 

It was a table-top model of Asteroids -- my first encounter with a non-Pong video game. The lines and square ball had evolved into the shapes of boulders and an actual spaceship, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the entire world. You could SHOOT at stuff! Holy jumpin' shitballs! It was a scenario, not a simple tennis-court affair with a square that was supposed to be a ball. I remember how it became a whole new game once I discovered the "thrust" button! New elements like that never arose in Pong. (Current "classic game programmers" should keep those twists and new player-discoveries in mind; for instance, Activision offers a whole bunch of great lessons in adding the "shark," as they called the twist for years, in reference to Fishing Derby. Consider the bear in Frostbite.)

 

I ran after dad and asked him for some quarters. He gave me the ones he had, but my brother and I quickly used them up. We could then only look at the game’s automatic playing mode. I became so desperate to be in the little spaceship again ("Creative people who are dissatisfied with the world as it is for one reason or another, will create their own around them" -- some really smart, dead guy) that I worked up the nerve to approach one of the gym’s members, a complete stranger who was standing in the lobby, and ask him if I could have a quarter. This was unheard-of for me. I was a notoriously shy and quiet kid. The stranger came over and looked at this weird new thing.

 

"Yeah, you'd better show me how to play," he said, and got us a couple dollars’ worth of quarters from the person behind the gym counter. (Remember when strangers did nice things like that sometimes?) My dad came out to check on us, and saw us still playing the game. The stranger winked and told him, "They’re showing me how to play." My dad thanked the guy, a little embarrassed, and returned to his unnatural self-punishment.

 

A little kid playing Asteroids obviously has no idea about aesthetic adrenaline triggers, but I think the colors are the chief reason why I was kind of disappointed with the VCS version when it came out. I wonder if the original would have grabbed me so much if it had been colorful; the VCS game was only marginally exciting, compared with the cold vacuum of space evident on the understated screen of the original. There's even something eerie and atmospheric about the silence of Adventure that I can't quite articulate, but which works a lot better than some damn game soundtrack on a newer console.

 

One night later in the year, Dad had an argument with Mom and decided to bring me to the bar with him. He seldom drank; but when we got there, I beheld the actual object of his patronage: Pac-Man. He showed me how to play, and I was fascinated. I didn’t even know that these things were called "video games"; there were just Asteroids machines, and now, Pac-Man machines. I played a couple of games, and the wild, multi-character "AI" -- something that wasn’t taken for granted yet -- blew my mind so thoroughly that I could clear little more than a corridor’s worth of dots. "It takes practice," my dad said in that typical state-the-obvious Father Voice.

 

Our first VCS was brought home in 1981, along with Space Invaders and (of course) Combat. I couldn’t play the thing enough. That’s all I did; and all I thought about was getting more games. I invented new ones that I fantasized about programming, drawing them on notebook paper instead of learning about some damn American pioneer or something. ALL the games were exciting to me, because they were all new experiences. There wasn't any of this "The graphics are blocky" crapola. You applied your imagination to these beautifully abstract images. What an improvement on the so-called Hockey machine we’d once had!

 

A funny thing: When I first played Defender in a Safeway grocery store, I dropped in the single quarter my mom had given me, blew away a few bad guys, and got the dreaded GAME OVER message the second I finally figured out the controls. This was a new peak of involvement. Left without anything else to do, I watched the demo -- until I finally realized that you were supposed to shoot enemies and rescue the people they kidnapped, returning them safely to the ground. What a cool idea!

 

Manic to play the game now that I knew what was going on, I begged my mother for another quarter, but she didn’t have any more, and didn’t feel like getting change. rrrrrrrr.

 

But I can't think of anything having that sense of being NEW anymore. I don't think it has much to do with my age at the time, believe it or snot; they were new to everyone. Skip ahead to the present, with vast, super-involved first-person exploration epics, and all the rest. What’s beyond the main game styles that the industry's settled on? How can the actual game-play methods and player involvement that we’re now seeing be surpassed? New stuff isn't fun to me anymore, because I've seen it all before. Good as Stargate, Star Wars, etc. were at the time, it was easy to think about what could be added to make them even more exciting. It’s something to think about -- because a new type of video game would be very impressive back in the ’80s and early ’90s, simply because, like me with that first Asteroids coin-op, there was no precedent against which to measure it. Only in MAME does one truly realize that all of the games were extra-tweaked, Vegas-style, to suck as many quarters as possible.

 

("Extra-tweaked" sounds so funny to me, for some unknown phonetic reason, that even though it doesn't explain much, I couldn't pass it up when it offered itself to me like a madonna/whore with its letter-tines spread in wild, lexierotic abandon.)

 

I've told those stories before, but they're still fun. I'll never forget that nice guy who let me play Asteroids more. And these were 1980 quarters, mind you! They're each the equivalent of $47.50 these days! (Okay, maybe not quite.)

 

Yes, I am capable of replying with a post of reasonable length. You just don't know it yet.

 

 

("lexierotic"?)

[gtmtnbiker]

The first arcade game that I can remember playing was Asteroids. I used to go to the local deli store or pizza parlor with a friend and play it. I also had a paper route so I would usually collect from a couple of houses ($1.25 or $1.50 per week) and put all of the money into the game.

 

I might have played some other games before Asteroids but I don't remember. Maybe it was Tank or Space Invaders? I do remember playing those but I couldn't tell you if they were my first games.

[Dynosaur]

Definitely Pong

[Tempest]

Can't be 100% sure, but the earliest one I remember playing was Mr. Do.

 

Tempest

[Chris++]

I couldn't believe how difficult the original Mr. Do was, when I first got MAME. Compared to the home versions, like the excellent C64 port, those coin-op bad guys speed up QUICKLY! I was wiped out almost immediately.