@heartny Yes. Pong is the first one I saw. In a tavern, there was a table with a pong game built in to it. It was fun for a few quarters… got old.
Never bought an actual game machine.
I actually made my parents buy me the ET game (at full retail!). I played the hell out of that game. It was a bit of a shock to me to later come to learn that that has been deemed the worst game ever made, and a large underground mountain of unsold cartridges is buried somewhere in the desert. I guess I was easily amused as a kid.
Of course, I’m hanging out at Meh late at night… I’m apparently still easily amused.
@shahnm E.T. wasn’t bad if you actually read the manual. The guy who made it also made Yar’s Revenge, which is considered to be one of the best games on the system.
@shahnm@tinsami1 I remember when they were being closed out cheap at K-Mart ( I think the last ones sold for $49). I already had my Apple ][ then or I would definitely have gone for one
@shahnm@tinsami1 Hey, I had one of those also! I did not have the fancy cassette recorder cable to save my work until later; that meant when you turned it on you had to type in a couple dozen lines of DOS code manually to make it do anything. Could not afford the game cartridges at first either.
@tinsami1 I still have one, and a briefcase full of cartridges. My kids still love to play A-MAZE-ING, Hunt the Wumpus (The TI version is different than the standard version of that game), and Hang Man.
I’d like to go back and play Parsec, but my joysticks don’t really work very well anymore.
@tinsami1 I learned my first coding on a TI99/4A! Granted, it was TI Basic, but in those days, and for a kid, that was cutting edge. I sure miss the old cassette tape storage option.
@Barney Yeah, multi-ball games were the best. There was a video arcade in the shopping center a block from my school, and i dropped tons of quarters there. I could get 9 keys on Pac-Man eventually just from memorizing the patterns to run.
Those skills stick with you. Even today, as long as whatever pinball machine I find is fully functional (no dead bumpers or weak flippers), I can usually win a game in two or three tries (including specials and matches).
Never got a video game system, until i was old enough to save money earned doing chores for people and buy the original pong. I didn’t realize it at the time, but our family was really poor. i do remember one year at christmas my parents apparently had no money, but my dad taped newspapers all over the garage windows and locked the door for weeks. He made us all our presents, including a wooden pinball machine. That was going on 50 years ago; I still have the nice wooden spice rack he made my mom that year out of reclaimed pallet wood.
Digital football game with the red blinking lights that represented the players for the other team and you could only move up or down one space and forward until “tackled”. Still have it somewhere. Played that thing for hours on end!
@Grumman my cousin had one of those and I played it tons. They came back out with them several years ago and I bought my husband one. Wasn’t quite as much fun lol
I wasn’t allowed to own a console as a child until my uncle found an Atari 5200 with a shoebox full of cartridges at a yard sale for a dollar. He gave it to me and my sister, and we played a lot of Mario Bros., Qix, Pengo, Dig Dug, and Vanguard. I was intensely jealous of my cousin’s succession of Sega Genesis, N64, and then GameCube. When I moved into my college dorm, the first thing I did was buy a PS2 at a pawn shop.
@medz Yeah, that’s the one. I still have mine, but not sure if you can hook it to modern TVs. Those were rabbit ear days, and TVs don’t have those 2 little screws on the back any more.
Our family TV was a 12 in B&W on the table downstairs; when changing the channel with the rotary knob, you then had to move the TV all around on the table to get the best reception, and everyone would have to scoot their chairs back and forth to follow it.
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First console was the Atari 2600, from which I went to the Commodore 64. Played lots of Pong with my sister at the store display at Sears though. But the oldest console/computer I played with (long after it was considered obsolete, and found at a garage sale for a few bucks) was the Timex Sinclair 1000.
Not technically consoles, but our first electronic games in the house were Merlin and Simon.
Coleco pong game; I think it was a Telstar but it was black and had 4 variant black and white pong type games. Then I got an Apple ][ plus in 1981 and didn’t get back to consoles until the SNES many years later.
@Helot I can promise you that’s not true here. I never had an Intellivision but I did have the Intellivision football game for the 2600, that was absurdly better than Atari’s own version.
I’m 30 years old. When I was about 5, my first introduction to gaming was playing Super Mario World and Operation Desert Storm on my older cousin’s SNES, laying on the shag carpet in front of their huge (to me, at the time) 27-inch console television. Fast forward a bit and I inherit my other cousin’s Jungle Green Nintendo 64 when he bought his original Xbox new in 2001…that N64 was the first console I could officially call my own. We used to play MarioKart 64 and Donkey Kong 64 for hours on end…hell, I still do! I can still remember going up to Target to buy a third N64 controller in Grape Purple so a friend could play MarioKart with us. I still have that controller and all the games! That was the beginning of a lifelong Nintendo allegiance. I’ve now got every console they’ve released in North America (including the ill-fated Virtual Boy) and even some Japan-only ones, like the Game Boy Light. My addiction hasn’t faltered at all; I’m still enjoying Super Mario Odyssey on my Switch.
@PooltoyWolf Yeah, it was a big deal. The Nintendo 64 controller discretizes the thumb stick position using light gates. If you open it up, you’ll see that each of the two axes goes to a half-wheel with a bunch of holes. The light gate counts the “ons” and “offs” to determine position, and you get 32 discrete positions per axis.
Most other analog thumbstick controllers use potentiometers that run straight to analog-digital converters to be discretized. The original Playstation did this and had, I think, 128 discrete positions per axis.
An old “how-stuff-works” article on the Nintendo 64 controller made a point of mentioning how it was “actually digital,” and several people believed that this distinction needed to be called out in the article on the controller, and that it was not a “true” analog thumbstick.
This ignores, of course, the fact that virtually all analog thumbsticks are immediately discretized on the controller before sending the position to the controller. It also ignores the fact that you can buy drop-in replacements for the N64 thumbstick that use the potentiometer method.
The only “true” analog controllers I can think of are some very old dial controllers, which really did just pass a voltage to the console or computer. Of course, this input would then be immediately discretized on the console side for use in the game.
IIRC, the whole article is way different now, and there’s no trace of the argument in the article talk page anymore.
@Limewater@medz I don’t think those are real words.
/define potentiometer
NOUN
1 an instrument for measuring an electromotive force by balancing it against the potential difference produced by passing a known current through a known variable resistance.
2 a variable resistor with a third adjustable terminal. The potential at the third terminal can be adjusted to give any fraction of the potential across the ends of the resistor.
@medz@mike808 I’m not sure the term “verbize” applies here, as it seems to imply the creation of a new or unrecognized word.
“Discretize” is a word that has been in regular use for many decades. It’s quite possible that there are uses more than a century old in Applied Mathematics texts, but I’m not planning to go digging for them right now.
@Limewater@medz It applies. It is the act of appending a suffix of “ize” to a noun, thus creating a verb form of that noun. In short, “descrete” was verbized into the “discretize” form used here. When that happened does not change that it did. It is not a portmanteau.
Didn’t have an Atari 2600, but had an Atari 400. Loved that thing! My father subscribed to an Atari magazine and would stay up all night typing in the code for the games included in it. Then, he’d store them on cassette tapes that took about 10 minutes to load each time we wanted to play. Oh, those were the days! The music from Mountain King still haunts me to this day…
@billchase2 I actually went to an Atari computer camp at East Stroudsburg State College when I was about 14. I recall using 800XL’s. That camp was crazy expensive for the era but I had the time of my life. Irrelevant side story - I became friends with a kid there named Faust Capobianco. His name always stuck with me as it was so unique. We stayed in touch for a few years before our contact ended. Later in life I discovered Faust’s father started Majestic Athletic and eventually Faust took over as President of the company. Pretty much wishing I stayed friends with him…
Does playing a Nim game on a teletype console (with hard copy print out!) attached to a Xerox Sigma 6 count?
I wrote the game in the 70’s for an assignment in college. The cool part was that the game incorporated heuristics to learn the best strategies - the more you played it, the better it got and the harder it was to beat.
@macromeh My roomy was an operator at the university; he got to play Space Wars and other games on the console of the CDC Cyber 70 Model 73. We had a lot of games that unpriv’d users could play but not on the console so I didn’t consider them.
But I once used up a roll of paper playing Star Trek on a KSR-33 teletype connected to that same Cyber. And the original Fortran Colossal Cave adventure too. Fun times! I was supposed to be doing homework!
@duodec I spent many hours playing (Colossal Cave) Adventure during my internship at Intel. The version was a port to their standalone workstations, which ran a CPM-like OS, ISIS. It was wide-open, so I figured out how to hack my character to be basically invulnerable and wandered the maze, making a map. (I think I may still have a copy of the map somewhere.) Anyway, once I did that, the game was pretty boring, so I never played again.
@macromeh I’m not certain after all these years, and the fact that I’ve had stuff in storage for 25 years that I really should go through, but I once got access to an operator account and both printed out and punched (on IBM Hollerith cards) the Fortran source and the rather large data file for Adventure. Like I’ll ever be able to read those cards in again… who knew that punch cards would become obsolete so quickly?
@OldCatLady Yeah, I had one of those too! It was the first color capable one to hit the market IIRC, but we only had a Black and white tv to hook it to.
technically none, because despite asking for whatever console (sega & sega saturn both ring particular bells) my parents never allowed me to have one. as such i now can’t play any video games because i lack the understanding and dexterity lol. oh well, could be worse! my godmother had an old gameboy with tetris so i did play that on the rare occasion we were at her house, and i do still enjoy tetris.
the closest thing i had to video games were these:
@jerk_nugget and then at some point when we got a gateway pc it came with a suite of games. my favorites were fringer:
and jewel chase:
as an adult there has been one game i was interested in and played the heck out of, an online game called glitch, by tiny speck. i’m still heartbroken it got shut down.
@moondrake I still go back to my Wii too. Metroid Prime is so good! Mario Kart, Super Smash, Super Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, Mario Party 8 (I have 9, but never cared for it), the list goes on and on.
I finally soft-modded mine so I could rip the games I have to a thumb drive I just leave in the system now. I got all my Wii and GC titles pulled off onto a 64GB stick, so, it’s super convenient to play. Not to mention all the classic titles I bought when they started rolling thouse out! The old Super Mario Twins games still get a lot of play too. I don’t play much of the NES games on there since getting an NEC Classic, but the clock speed is off on that for some games, so I still fire up the Wii for some of those.
Honestly, it was such an incredible platform. I should see about getting one cheap now before them become hard to find and expensive so I can replace mine when it finally bites the dust.
Before games that connected to the tv, I had this football game in the early/mid ’70s. It was a box with a light in it. There were sets of translucent cards for offense and defense. Each player would put in their card. They could be shifted left and right for variations. Once in, you’d slide down the opaque top cover and watch the progress of the play. If the progress of the offensive player with the ball hit a defensive player, the play was over. Anyone have any idea what that was?
Nothing goes unknown for long in the 21st century. I pasted my description into Google and found Foto-Electric Football. So we can now all see how faulty my memory is.
Interesting anecdote (probably only interesting to me). I got this for Christmas in 1977 and even way back then, the airline wouldn’t let me take it on the plane , because it had a picture of a gun on it (I was shuttling between divorced parents). My brother (10 years older than me – I thought of him as an “adult”, but he was still in college), adamantly debated person after person until he finally talked to someone on the flight crew, who agreed to hold box during the flight and give it back to me upon landing.
Vectrex! It wasn’t the family’s first, (dad bought us a 2600, I got a Colecovision, my brother got the Vectrex). It was cool and self contained and we set it up in our bedroom like an arcade machine. Wish we still had it, my brother went in the Navy and it was stolen in one of his moves.
Finally, after every single one of my friends had Ataris, Intellivisons, Odysseys, etc., I finally whined long and loud enough to convince my parents to shut me up with a ColecoVision. /shrug
@callow I’ll have been married 33 years in a couple of weeks. A few years ago, I was digging through our entry way closet and found one of these systems.
It was my husband’s from before we got married. I hooked it up. It didn’t work. I said something to him about it.
“Yeah, it quit working.”
So, why did you bring this over here? (He had lived in a guest house at his parents’ home.)
It went out with the next load of electronics to be recycled.
@lisaviolet I live with his soul brother! Last time I hooked it up the controllers were dry rotting but you can still buy new ones. The hardest thing now is probably figuring out how to hook it up to a TV.
The bags of chips are games. My husband worked for Commodore who made the Atari game chips. The chips often failed simply because they were mislabeled, a win for us. Yes, we still have a Commodore 64 too.
@callow@lisaviolet I’m really shocked you guys didn’t try to sell or re-home it. Even not working, they’re worth money, seems a shame to have sent it to an (arguably) early grave. :C
Too much work to try to sell. At least for me. I’d have to research, I’d have to put it up for sale, I’d have to pack it, I’d have to ship it…maybe the recyclers do something with this stuff.
Intellivision. I’m pretty sure my parents bought it for themselves and we didn’t get a second game system for about a decade (and that was a NES after they’d been out a while).
/image Intellivision
Pretty sure this beauty, the Atari Pinball, was my first, and damn did I play the CRAP out of it. If I were to wager a guess, I’d say it was probably 1977, which made me only about 9 at that time…I really like the feature pointed out on the box “Color (on color tv sets)”
Oh Oh OH!! I just remembered… the Winky Dink & You Interactive tv screen! Not actually a game but hey, it was cool! I begged begged begged my parents for it. So I could interact with Winky. Anyone else remember that?
2600? Wow you guys are old. My first console was a Genesis that I got at a yard sale for $20 in 1998. I also got an OG Game Boy from another yard sale around the same time.
My family had an Odyssey (and a pinball machine that we rotated out once a year or so). My first personal system was the 2600 until I got my Commodore 64 and the 2600 was pretty quickly pushed to the back of the closet.
Pong. I think that had a console. Or something.
@heartny Yep, saved up my allowance to buy a Pong game when they first came out somewhere around 1976. It’s still up in the attic some place.
@heartny Yep, good ol’ boring Pong. I’ll have to ask my sister to check my Dad’s attic to see if it’s up there.
@heartny @LaVikinga It’s boring now. Back then, it was da bomb!
@heartny Yes, Pong, on a black and white TV set, the TV died after 3 or 4 months of play.
@heartny Yes. Pong is the first one I saw. In a tavern, there was a table with a pong game built in to it. It was fun for a few quarters… got old.
Never bought an actual game machine.
I actually made my parents buy me the ET game (at full retail!). I played the hell out of that game. It was a bit of a shock to me to later come to learn that that has been deemed the worst game ever made, and a large underground mountain of unsold cartridges is buried somewhere in the desert. I guess I was easily amused as a kid.
Of course, I’m hanging out at Meh late at night… I’m apparently still easily amused.
@shahnm They’re no longer buried.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/881-e-t-cartridges-buried-in-new-mexico-desert-sell-for-107930-15/%3Famp=1
@shahnm E.T. wasn’t bad if you actually read the manual. The guy who made it also made Yar’s Revenge, which is considered to be one of the best games on the system.
Early responders to this poll are old…
@shahnm not too old to stay up for a deal, amiright?
@shahnm
yep we are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey²
Yep, and Odyssey. Bet most of you never heard of it
@Cerridwyn @shahnm I have heard of the Odyssey and its colored TV overlays, but I’m not old, just a huge classic gaming nerd.
@cpierce @shahnm
the odyssey(2) was a bit more sophisticated and eventually had a plug in for cartridges, including one that taught 2bit basic
@Cerridwyn @shahnm the Odyssey was my first console system
@Cerridwyn @cpierce @shahnm and that voice box they released. So special.
@cpierce @shahnm The Magnavox Odyssey² was my first gaming system as well.
/image TI 99/4a
@tinsami1 I had one of those. But that was a computer. At least, that’s what I told my parents to convince them to get me one…
@shahnm @tinsami1 I remember when they were being closed out cheap at K-Mart ( I think the last ones sold for $49). I already had my Apple ][ then or I would definitely have gone for one
@shahnm @tinsami1 Hey, I had one of those also! I did not have the fancy cassette recorder cable to save my work until later; that meant when you turned it on you had to type in a couple dozen lines of DOS code manually to make it do anything. Could not afford the game cartridges at first either.
@tinsami1 I still have one, and a briefcase full of cartridges. My kids still love to play A-MAZE-ING, Hunt the Wumpus (The TI version is different than the standard version of that game), and Hang Man.
I’d like to go back and play Parsec, but my joysticks don’t really work very well anymore.
@tinsami1 I learned my first coding on a TI99/4A! Granted, it was TI Basic, but in those days, and for a kid, that was cutting edge. I sure miss the old cassette tape storage option.
I never played video games; I majored in pinball in college.
@Barney Yeah, multi-ball games were the best. There was a video arcade in the shopping center a block from my school, and i dropped tons of quarters there. I could get 9 keys on Pac-Man eventually just from memorizing the patterns to run.
Eight Ball Deluxe was my game.
Those skills stick with you. Even today, as long as whatever pinball machine I find is fully functional (no dead bumpers or weak flippers), I can usually win a game in two or three tries (including specials and matches).
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?
Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?
WOULDN’T YOU PREFER A GOOD GAME OF CHESS?
Later. Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War
FINE
@hchavers Saw that in the theatre, munching on a tub of greasy popcorn
Never got a video game system, until i was old enough to save money earned doing chores for people and buy the original pong. I didn’t realize it at the time, but our family was really poor. i do remember one year at christmas my parents apparently had no money, but my dad taped newspapers all over the garage windows and locked the door for weeks. He made us all our presents, including a wooden pinball machine. That was going on 50 years ago; I still have the nice wooden spice rack he made my mom that year out of reclaimed pallet wood.
@Steve7654 That Christmas is more memorable than if you had gotten a room full of purchased presents.
Atari 2600. First game I ever played was Asteroids.
@JT954 Ditto. I can still hear the sound effects…
Digital football game with the red blinking lights that represented the players for the other team and you could only move up or down one space and forward until “tackled”. Still have it somewhere. Played that thing for hours on end!
@Grumman my cousin had one of those and I played it tons. They came back out with them several years ago and I bought my husband one. Wasn’t quite as much fun lol
I wasn’t allowed to own a console as a child until my uncle found an Atari 5200 with a shoebox full of cartridges at a yard sale for a dollar. He gave it to me and my sister, and we played a lot of Mario Bros., Qix, Pengo, Dig Dug, and Vanguard. I was intensely jealous of my cousin’s succession of Sega Genesis, N64, and then GameCube. When I moved into my college dorm, the first thing I did was buy a PS2 at a pawn shop.
@YannaUsagi I’m surprised you didn’t buy a GameCube!
@PooltoyWolf Well, GameCube didn’t have this interesting-sounding thing called Final Fantasy X on it.
@YannaUsagi Touché. I’ll just be over here playing Luigi’s Mansion and Super Mario Sunshine
Yar’s Revenge is my jam
/giphy yars revenge
That gif is not my jam
@tonylegrone Yar.
@tonylegrone There are so many cool details about that game. It’s worth reading about its development.
@Limewater going to look this up asap. I saw the E.T. Documentary. It was great.
@tonylegrone If your library has “Racing the Beam,” it’s a great book with a chapter dedicated to “Yar’s Revenge.”
@tonylegrone I just realized it’s “Yars’ Revenge”, not “Yar’s”.
Brother and I had this bitch hooked up to a tiny black and white tv in our room. Soon after, our pops got a NES.
@medz Yeah, that’s the one. I still have mine, but not sure if you can hook it to modern TVs. Those were rabbit ear days, and TVs don’t have those 2 little screws on the back any more.
Our family TV was a 12 in B&W on the table downstairs; when changing the channel with the rotary knob, you then had to move the TV all around on the table to get the best reception, and everyone would have to scoot their chairs back and forth to follow it.
If you ever get to Dallas (or live there), and you like nostalgic video games, you should check out the National Video Game Museum, in Frisco.
Good news: Everyone in this thread can relive their childhood through the magic of the Internet Archive:
The Console Living Room
You can play most of the non-Nintendo consoles mentioned in this thread directly in your browser (on any device).
Afterwards, considering giving a donation to the Internet Archive (tax deductible for those in the US).
First console was the Atari 2600, from which I went to the Commodore 64. Played lots of Pong with my sister at the store display at Sears though. But the oldest console/computer I played with (long after it was considered obsolete, and found at a garage sale for a few bucks) was the Timex Sinclair 1000.
Not technically consoles, but our first electronic games in the house were Merlin and Simon.
@ciabelle The TS1000 was the first computer I played with, followed by lots of TRS-80 variants.
I had forgotten about Merlin!
@ciabelle
Coleco pong game; I think it was a Telstar but it was black and had 4 variant black and white pong type games. Then I got an Apple ][ plus in 1981 and didn’t get back to consoles until the SNES many years later.
This and the annoying Twitter/FB version that’s making the rounds all leave Intellivision off.
I get the impression the folks writing these polls had to use Wikipedia to figure out what came out before the PlayStation.
@Helot I can promise you that’s not true here. I never had an Intellivision but I did have the Intellivision football game for the 2600, that was absurdly better than Atari’s own version.
@dave At least you included the 2600, which was the most glaring omission on social media. Glad to have that confirmed in early poll results.
@Helot Man, that box art really brings back the memories.
I’m 30 years old. When I was about 5, my first introduction to gaming was playing Super Mario World and Operation Desert Storm on my older cousin’s SNES, laying on the shag carpet in front of their huge (to me, at the time) 27-inch console television. Fast forward a bit and I inherit my other cousin’s Jungle Green Nintendo 64 when he bought his original Xbox new in 2001…that N64 was the first console I could officially call my own. We used to play MarioKart 64 and Donkey Kong 64 for hours on end…hell, I still do! I can still remember going up to Target to buy a third N64 controller in Grape Purple so a friend could play MarioKart with us. I still have that controller and all the games! That was the beginning of a lifelong Nintendo allegiance. I’ve now got every console they’ve released in North America (including the ill-fated Virtual Boy) and even some Japan-only ones, like the Game Boy Light. My addiction hasn’t faltered at all; I’m still enjoying Super Mario Odyssey on my Switch.
@PooltoyWolf The only Wikipedia edit war I ever got in was over whether or not the Nintendo 64 had an analog thumbstick.
@Limewater I’m surprised you found someone to argue that. Lol
@PooltoyWolf Yeah, it was a big deal. The Nintendo 64 controller discretizes the thumb stick position using light gates. If you open it up, you’ll see that each of the two axes goes to a half-wheel with a bunch of holes. The light gate counts the “ons” and “offs” to determine position, and you get 32 discrete positions per axis.
Most other analog thumbstick controllers use potentiometers that run straight to analog-digital converters to be discretized. The original Playstation did this and had, I think, 128 discrete positions per axis.
An old “how-stuff-works” article on the Nintendo 64 controller made a point of mentioning how it was “actually digital,” and several people believed that this distinction needed to be called out in the article on the controller, and that it was not a “true” analog thumbstick.
This ignores, of course, the fact that virtually all analog thumbsticks are immediately discretized on the controller before sending the position to the controller. It also ignores the fact that you can buy drop-in replacements for the N64 thumbstick that use the potentiometer method.
The only “true” analog controllers I can think of are some very old dial controllers, which really did just pass a voltage to the console or computer. Of course, this input would then be immediately discretized on the console side for use in the game.
IIRC, the whole article is way different now, and there’s no trace of the argument in the article talk page anymore.
@Limewater
/define discretized
No exact matches found for the specified word.
@Limewater @medz I don’t think those are real words.
/define potentiometer
NOUN
@medz Past-tense of “discretize.”
/define discretize
VERB
@Limewater @medz
It is the verbized version of the word ‘discrete’.
@medz @mike808 I’m not sure the term “verbize” applies here, as it seems to imply the creation of a new or unrecognized word.
“Discretize” is a word that has been in regular use for many decades. It’s quite possible that there are uses more than a century old in Applied Mathematics texts, but I’m not planning to go digging for them right now.
@Limewater @medz It applies. It is the act of appending a suffix of “ize” to a noun, thus creating a verb form of that noun. In short, “descrete” was verbized into the “discretize” form used here. When that happened does not change that it did. It is not a portmanteau.
Didn’t have an Atari 2600, but had an Atari 400. Loved that thing! My father subscribed to an Atari magazine and would stay up all night typing in the code for the games included in it. Then, he’d store them on cassette tapes that took about 10 minutes to load each time we wanted to play. Oh, those were the days! The music from Mountain King still haunts me to this day…
@billchase2 I actually went to an Atari computer camp at East Stroudsburg State College when I was about 14. I recall using 800XL’s. That camp was crazy expensive for the era but I had the time of my life. Irrelevant side story - I became friends with a kid there named Faust Capobianco. His name always stuck with me as it was so unique. We stayed in touch for a few years before our contact ended. Later in life I discovered Faust’s father started Majestic Athletic and eventually Faust took over as President of the company. Pretty much wishing I stayed friends with him…
Does playing a Nim game on a teletype console (with hard copy print out!) attached to a Xerox Sigma 6 count?
I wrote the game in the 70’s for an assignment in college. The cool part was that the game incorporated heuristics to learn the best strategies - the more you played it, the better it got and the harder it was to beat.
@macromeh My roomy was an operator at the university; he got to play Space Wars and other games on the console of the CDC Cyber 70 Model 73. We had a lot of games that unpriv’d users could play but not on the console so I didn’t consider them.
But I once used up a roll of paper playing Star Trek on a KSR-33 teletype connected to that same Cyber. And the original Fortran Colossal Cave adventure too. Fun times! I was supposed to be doing homework!
@duodec I spent many hours playing (Colossal Cave) Adventure during my internship at Intel. The version was a port to their standalone workstations, which ran a CPM-like OS, ISIS. It was wide-open, so I figured out how to hack my character to be basically invulnerable and wandered the maze, making a map. (I think I may still have a copy of the map somewhere.) Anyway, once I did that, the game was pretty boring, so I never played again.
@macromeh I’m not certain after all these years, and the fact that I’ve had stuff in storage for 25 years that I really should go through, but I once got access to an operator account and both printed out and punched (on IBM Hollerith cards) the Fortran source and the rather large data file for Adventure. Like I’ll ever be able to read those cards in again… who knew that punch cards would become obsolete so quickly?
I had a Merlin, too! But the first real console we had was ColecoVision!
/image colecovision
Though my family owned an Atari (and I will be forever haunted by the shout “Don’t crank on the joystick!!”) my first console was a Socrates.
So very very educational. …I loved it.
Commodore VIC-20.
@OldCatLady Yeah, I had one of those too! It was the first color capable one to hit the market IIRC, but we only had a Black and white tv to hook it to.
@OldCatLady Same here. My “only” game console until I was gifted a Sega Genesis 10 years later.
Pong!
If handheld systems count, I first had the OG gray brick Game Boy.
Man, today’s deal would’ve been great for that a few decades ago.
It wasn’t mine but it was the first… and its missing from the poll yet mentioned a lot in here… so here are some pics.
Magnavox Odyssey
overlays:
accessories:
Mattel Intellivision bitches!
Mattel Intellivision. Dungeons & Dragons was my favorite cartridge. I still have it.
technically none, because despite asking for whatever console (sega & sega saturn both ring particular bells) my parents never allowed me to have one. as such i now can’t play any video games because i lack the understanding and dexterity lol. oh well, could be worse!
my godmother had an old gameboy with tetris so i did play that on the rare occasion we were at her house, and i do still enjoy tetris.
the closest thing i had to video games were these:
@jerk_nugget and then at some point when we got a gateway pc it came with a suite of games. my favorites were fringer:
and jewel chase:
as an adult there has been one game i was interested in and played the heck out of, an online game called glitch, by tiny speck. i’m still heartbroken it got shut down.
@jerk_nugget I had completely forgottten, but I had that Beauty and the Beast game too!
@arielleslie as i recall i don’t think i ever really knew what i was doing, which made it very challenging but still fun XD
@jerk_nugget Was there dancing? I think maybe there was dancing.
@arielleslie i think so! like dancing back and forth across the screen…but sometimes having to hide from the beast? or…something?
@jerk_nugget Lumiere definitely came into play somehow.
Pong. I even had the extra controllers and the gun. 4 games with two difficulties each. And we liked it!
I’m not googling this to back up my potentially faulty memory… Anybody remember the Fairchild Channel F system?
So I did Google it after the fact. It was that system, and this is an interesting read: https://www.fastcompany.com/3040889/the-untold-story-of-the-invention-of-the-game-cartridge
@djslack I don’t “remember” the Channel F. I’m a few years too young. But yes, it does have some very interesting and important history.
Wii. Still got it, play it every once in a while. I’ve always done most of my egames on computers and tablets.
@moondrake I still go back to my Wii too. Metroid Prime is so good! Mario Kart, Super Smash, Super Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, Mario Party 8 (I have 9, but never cared for it), the list goes on and on.
I finally soft-modded mine so I could rip the games I have to a thumb drive I just leave in the system now. I got all my Wii and GC titles pulled off onto a 64GB stick, so, it’s super convenient to play. Not to mention all the classic titles I bought when they started rolling thouse out! The old Super Mario Twins games still get a lot of play too. I don’t play much of the NES games on there since getting an NEC Classic, but the clock speed is off on that for some games, so I still fire up the Wii for some of those.
Honestly, it was such an incredible platform. I should see about getting one cheap now before them become hard to find and expensive so I can replace mine when it finally bites the dust.
@moondrake The Wii is the newest system I own, and I own a lot of consoles, by most people’s standards.
Before games that connected to the tv, I had this football game in the early/mid ’70s. It was a box with a light in it. There were sets of translucent cards for offense and defense. Each player would put in their card. They could be shifted left and right for variations. Once in, you’d slide down the opaque top cover and watch the progress of the play. If the progress of the offensive player with the ball hit a defensive player, the play was over. Anyone have any idea what that was?
Nothing goes unknown for long in the 21st century. I pasted my description into Google and found Foto-Electric Football. So we can now all see how faulty my memory is.
https://boardgamegeek.com/video/24799/foto-electric-football/cadaco-foto-electric-football-demo-hall-fame-editi
Magnavox Odyssey here, too.
@jsh139 that is an Odyssey² the updated Odyssey
it went to a mind blowing 160×200 resolution
Colecovision
@dagirlgenius I was wondering when someone would mention Colecovision! 1982 and it had Donkey Kong!
https://g.co/kgs/gzDXUA
@boc right on. We had Donkey Kong, smurfs, and zaxxon
Coleco Telstar Ranger.
Interesting anecdote (probably only interesting to me). I got this for Christmas in 1977 and even way back then, the airline wouldn’t let me take it on the plane , because it had a picture of a gun on it (I was shuttling between divorced parents). My brother (10 years older than me – I thought of him as an “adult”, but he was still in college), adamantly debated person after person until he finally talked to someone on the flight crew, who agreed to hold box during the flight and give it back to me upon landing.
Vectrex! It wasn’t the family’s first, (dad bought us a 2600, I got a Colecovision, my brother got the Vectrex). It was cool and self contained and we set it up in our bedroom like an arcade machine. Wish we still had it, my brother went in the Navy and it was stolen in one of his moves.
@enville I have wanted a Vectrex for a long time. They’ve always been rather pricey even when I first learned about them twenty years ago.
Finally, after every single one of my friends had Ataris, Intellivisons, Odysseys, etc., I finally whined long and loud enough to convince my parents to shut me up with a ColecoVision. /shrug
@DennisG2014 At least you still had your Elvis records in the meantime.
@therealjrn 2/10, you can do better.
Intellivision baby!
In my day, video games were called “go outside”
My brother technically owned the NES, but it was the first console in our house. The first console that was exclusively mine was my Sega Genesis.
TIL I was a computer nerd in school. Probably why I never was able to get any dates.
Magnavox Oddysey all the way.
I played Pong on it. There was a plastic cling sheet to put on the screen to make it look more like tennis.
There was another cling sheet to play baseball.
That’s about all I remember of it.
Pong! That was if. I had to look it up. It was just called “Pong.”
When I try to explain that to my kids…
@drury34 Same here… pong. And I was already married when it came out. Otherwise, it was Candy land or monopoly.
Atari 7800, Christmas 1987.
Unless you count my grandparents’ pinball machine. They bought a Gottlieb Buccaneer when they found out Mom was pregnant with me.
@dannybeans Ditto, except I’m pretty sure it was Christmas '86
Intellivision! 1982 or '83.
However, the first video game I ever played was Pong at an arcade in Gatlinburg, TN in the '73-'74 timeframe.
First owned was Atari 2600, which we still have. Pong was the first played.
@callow I’ll have been married 33 years in a couple of weeks. A few years ago, I was digging through our entry way closet and found one of these systems.
It was my husband’s from before we got married. I hooked it up. It didn’t work. I said something to him about it.
“Yeah, it quit working.”
So, why did you bring this over here? (He had lived in a guest house at his parents’ home.)
It went out with the next load of electronics to be recycled.
@lisaviolet I live with his soul brother! Last time I hooked it up the controllers were dry rotting but you can still buy new ones. The hardest thing now is probably figuring out how to hook it up to a TV.
The bags of chips are games. My husband worked for Commodore who made the Atari game chips. The chips often failed simply because they were mislabeled, a win for us. Yes, we still have a Commodore 64 too.
@callow That was the only piece of electronics he had.
I had loads of stuff, he had that console and I didn’t know about it for decades. He’d forgotten all about it.
@callow @lisaviolet I’m really shocked you guys didn’t try to sell or re-home it. Even not working, they’re worth money, seems a shame to have sent it to an (arguably) early grave. :C
@callow @PooltoyWolf We don’t. I either give it away or send to recycle.
Too much work to try to sell. At least for me. I’d have to research, I’d have to put it up for sale, I’d have to pack it, I’d have to ship it…maybe the recyclers do something with this stuff.
@callow @lisaviolet I sure hope so, because that’s a waste of a classic console otherwise! Those aren’t made anymore…once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Pong.
Pong
Commodore 64!
Intellivision. I’m pretty sure my parents bought it for themselves and we didn’t get a second game system for about a decade (and that was a NES after they’d been out a while).
/image Intellivision
Pretty sure this beauty, the Atari Pinball, was my first, and damn did I play the CRAP out of it. If I were to wager a guess, I’d say it was probably 1977, which made me only about 9 at that time…I really like the feature pointed out on the box “Color (on color tv sets)”
Atari VCS (2600). I guess we did have a pong clone first, but is that really a console?
My current favorite:
Does ‘Pong’ count? No? Then I had the original ‘OG’ Atari. BEFORE the 2600.
God, I’m old…
Oh Oh OH!! I just remembered… the Winky Dink & You Interactive tv screen! Not actually a game but hey, it was cool! I begged begged begged my parents for it. So I could interact with Winky. Anyone else remember that?
2600? Wow you guys are old. My first console was a Genesis that I got at a yard sale for $20 in 1998. I also got an OG Game Boy from another yard sale around the same time.
I wasted an entire summer playing Astrosmash and Atlantis on Intellivision.
We had, and probably still have a Pong console. Then it was the Atari 2600.
The Family Computer (aka the original NES in Japan)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System
@kshayabusa Did you actually have a Famicom, or was it an NES? Your comment is ambiguous.
@kshayabusa @Limewater I read it as them having a Famicom.
My family had an Odyssey (and a pinball machine that we rotated out once a year or so). My first personal system was the 2600 until I got my Commodore 64 and the 2600 was pretty quickly pushed to the back of the closet.
Atari 5200 and 1980’s PCs
Pong. totally counts.
Pong, around 1975. Talk about old…
We had pong. And I remember playing mule on a trs-80.