[Quiet Man Cometh]

As the title says, what were the games you remember playing as a kid? Anything that sticks?

The big ones for me that I recall were Mother Goose Land, Dungeon Master, and Warcraft 2.

Mother Goose was basically a go-fetch game for kids. I learned gaming efficiency very early on with this as each time I played through I would decide how to pick up and drop off the required nursery rhyme items with as little walking time as possible.

Dungeon Master actually scared me, but my big brother and my dad played it an I wanted to play it, too. I wasn't very good at it. I could only really kill things after my dad showed me how to close doors on them (before that I would pause the game and get him to do the fights because the monsters scared me), and hurt myself routinely by walking in to walls. The game is not dummy proof. It did start off the whole RPG train of my life (Barbarian, Ultima, Menzoberranzan, Dafferfall, Baldur's Gate...) It's still what I think back to when I encounter shriekers or rust monsters.

Warcraft 2 is probably the first game I played "hard core" (minus Mother Goose). I actually got pretty good at it (for an 11 year old or so) and got within one level of finishing before discovering cheat codes (On Screen!). I can never hear "For the horde!" without imagine it in the little generic orc voice. I think the soundtrack in ingrained into my head, as well.

[Lucid:]

My first instinct is to go straight to "Pokemon Yellow is my defining childhood game!" but I was recently reminded of a lot of PC games I had as a very young child that I really should mention.

On Black Friday, the Humble store had a bunch of games on sale that I hadn't seen for a very long time: Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish. As a child, I played Putt-Putt Joins the Parade and Freddi Fish: The Case of the Missing Conch over and over and over. I also played Mr. Potato Head Saves Veggie Valley repeatedly, but that wasn't part of the Humble sale. I was really tempted, but I just couldn't bring myself to spend $2 on Freddi Fish. xD

When I was about 2-3, I played Reader Rabbit (not sure which version). The game came with 30ish short books of increasing difficulty that you could read along with (or while you weren't playing) the computer game. I wholly credit this game for teaching me to read by 3 years old.

I also really enjoyed JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain even though I always got stuck if it made me do the astronomy part. I don't think I understood what I was supposed to actually do to get past that part, so I ended up playing the beginning of the game a ton and never actually finishing it.

[Lawtan]

I remember Mystery Mountain...and Warcraft 2...

Hmm...I remember quite a few ones i would get out of the bargain bin or from my father...I would go into Best Buy and look at the units and the description:

Pitfall
SimLife
Earthsiege II
War Games
Huggie's Sleepover (A puzzle game where a monster is preparing a sleepover party for the other monsters while a thief is after an artifact)
Zoombinis: The Logical Journey
Diablo II (Watched Dad play Diablo as a tyke)
Battlefield Vietnam/2142
Neverwinter Nights
Age of Mythology
Guild War (Original)
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War
Call of Duty (the first few...lost interest by Modern Warfare 2.)
The Incredible Machine 2
Impossible Creatures
Terminator: Rise of the Machines
Alien vs. Predator 2
Rollercoaster Tycoon
World in Conflict

[Coda]

I remember playing a LOT of games when I was a kid, and tons of those stick in memory. I remember playing a bunch of text adventures (mostly Adventureland, but also Adventure in Time and others) and even trying to write one of my own (until I hit a bug in the programming language I was using). I remember playing Agent USA and Where in America's Past is Carmen Sandiego and Stickybear Spellgrabber. I remember playing Number Munchers -- LOTS of Number Munchers. I played Mario Bros (the ORIGINAL Mario Bros, not Super Mario Bros) and Burgertime and Ms. Pac-Man and Defender II and Choplifter and Marble Madness and Boulder Dash and Jungle Hunt and Spy Hunter and Frogger and Pitfall II and Dig Dug and Joust. I played Battle Chess and Tetris and Pipe Dreams and Loopz and Shanghai and Lemmings. I played Battlezone and Silent Service and Tomahawk and F-21 Retaliator. I played King's Quest III and Space Quest and Police Quest. (Yeah, I probably shouldn't have been playing that last one as a kid.) For some reason I played Hardball! but that's about the only sports game I paid much attention to. I played SimCity and Lemonade Stand (and found a bug in that).

I could start descending into a list of games most of you would have never heard of -- Pengo, Bouncing Kamungas, Seven Cities of Gold, Tass Times in Tone Town, Zany Golf, Mean 18, BC's Quest for Tires, Diamond Mine (my mom played that a TON), Pentapus, Outpost, Repton, Lunch Time (an unauthorized Pac-Man clone starring Pac-Man Jr), Dogfight II, Air Cars (a Light Cycle clone), Bats in the Belfry, Handy Dandy, Bellhop, Gumball. Some of them I remember playing but they had generic names so I don't know what they were called. (One of them I know I played a LOT of, and even remember that the first level had a safe spot at the right edge of the screen. Another one, I just managed to luck out in looking up the name of Outworld.) Some games I played were so obscure there's no trace of them left on the Internet -- it's entirely possible I may have some of the only extant copies in my closet.

I had an Intellivision II before I ever had an NES, but while I have clear memories of playing it a lot I don't remember what games I had for it aside from poker and tennis, and looking through a list of games released for it doesn't actually help me. (I know I had the AD&D game for it, but my parents made me throw it away before I could play it.) I wanted to play Tron: Deadly Discs but I could never find a copy before my mom forced me to sell the Intellivision before she'd let me get an NES.

And I WROTE my own games, too. Most of them were pretty awful. XD But I was a little kid, so it was all about having fun making them. (And frankly, this nostalgia of thinking about all of these old games is making me want to make something right now.)

If I go later into my youth I start getting into more games that modern audiences would be familiar with... but by then I wasn't really a little kid anymore. Aside from the rare opportunity to play on friends' and family's game systems, I was 10 before I played my first Super Mario game.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

With the exception of the Calicovision (Ladybug!) we didn't have consoles so I mostly had computer. I remember Reader Rabbit, Kings Quest, Space Quest, and a lot of time spent on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? My cousin had an old arcade "Asteroids" and I used to play that when I got the chance, which was rare. I love that when they remade it for N64, the ships still had no brakes.

[Coda]

To poke at just how long ago that was, it's Colecovision. :P

The ships didn't have brakes in the remake not because the original version couldn't have them, but because it was an intentional design decision: real-world rockets don't have brakes either and have to counter-thrust to slow down.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Ah. Cool, and yeah, I guessed at the spelling. I think it was breaking down even when we had it. Never did work very well.

Did anyone else in this Universe have a Game Gear?

EDIT: I forgot. Not a game, but somewhere in the recesses of my parent's computer when I was little was this thing that I think was called "Atari Demo." It was just this ball bouncing back and forth on the screen with "Atari" on it, bouncing to Axel F. It was the best thing.

[Coda]

Ah, the great demoscene of the 1980s. Pushing computers to do things that nobody thought they could actually do -- that they COULDN'T do if you tried to do it in the obvious way.

I'm sad that I missed it, honestly.

[Den]

I have quite a few games I remember playing as a kid, but the one that sticks out the most in my mind, because of something that happened* with my extended family, the sibling, and me, is Myst. I loved dinking around and exploring and trying to solve the puzzles and work out the story. I want to try and find a version I can play that my computer would cooperate with.


*The thing that happened is that the family was visiting my Aunt and Uncle out in Colorado one summer, and my two oldest cousins were playing Myst, and since the sibling and I played that game at home, we asked if we could play, and it turned into everyone gathering around one of the cousins and pointing things out... Then we got to this one part that the cousin and his brother had spent months on, just mapping it out, and the sibling and I figured out the right way to go within about ten minutes.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

That's where the name of my main DnD character came from. ;)

I remember my dad buying that game for me, and it coming in a box with only the disc and an empty notebook. Never did get very far. I did better with Riven when I was older. I'm picking up one of the Myst remakes on Steam for the current sale. We'll see how I fair this time.

[Gallagher]

I've always been a huge fan of Pokemon, Digimon, and ESPECIALLY Monster Rancher. I played a lot of the Putt-Putt games, too.

The ones I remember playing the absolute most besides the mons, though, are these:




I've actually been really, really wanting a good copy of Quest For Camelot: Dragon Games. Absolutely a wonderful little set of games, and I cannot for the life of me find any copies that aren't used disks. Not a surprising fact, but definitely a disappointing one.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Up until I was 6 years old or so, I didn't know what a video game was, and then one fateful night my favorite uncle came over with a very large bag containing in it an NES and a SNES, along with... basically every major RPG made to that point on those systems. All of which I was way too young to understand or be able to play even remotely competently, but that did not stop me. In no particular order, from recollection there was

Dragon Warrior 1,2,3,4 (back when they were called Dragon Warrior)
Final Fantasy 1,2,3 (yes yes we all know what the numbers actually are)
Ultima 3,4,5 (6 year old me did not understand the concept of NOT breaking every single virtue, alas)
Castlevania 2,3,4 (I never did like these games...)
Secret of Mana (Did this age well? It's one of the few I've never replayed as an adult)
Super Mario RPG (before I ever even knew who Mario was)
Chrono Trigger (what even needs to be said?)

And probably a large number of off-brand titles I can't remember. You could say I was spoiled for choice. I think my preference for RPGs over any other genre is a well-defined psychological study. :P

[littl3chocobo]

more, does anyone /still/ have their gamegear XD on that note i can gleefully say yes hahahaha


basically every mario for nes, supernes, pc, and nonsport/psinting handheld ever translated to english barring of course re-releases and hotel mario(who even had that game??) XD i think i learned to love computers on the back of mario typing when i was still an illiterate brat hahahaha

nah but i played soooo many super nes games as a kid that they kind of muddle together though a lot of mario games stick out for me, the first three mario bros games, the mario worlds games donkey kong and jr, yoshi's island, mario bros for game&watch, paperboy, all pacman games up to the second pacman world game(even arrangement which was weird) the first friday the thirteenth game, a 3d halfpipe game i cannot recall the name of, excitebike, the nameco museum collection, the original marioparty, sonic one and two, bubblebobble, marble maddness, super starwars, an arcade game where you solved a labrynth and there was two-player and you could be like an elf or a fighter and there was diagnal shooting through wall corners......hell, there were a lot of games i played that i don't know the name of x_______x;;;;


suffice to say i did not watch much tv but i spent a lot of time near one XD i had access to a loooot of game consoles as a kid between friends and babysitters and being spoiled as fuck on technology and i ate up most everything i came across that was not sports related up until middle-school


there was one game that i loved when i was like 12 that i have not seen since the nineties but it was a side-scrolling platformer that came packaged with one of those '99 games' packs for pc, i swear the char was drgoo but i cannot find him on the internet, he collected medicine to stop a sickness and he was a little green blob. i loved the fuck out of that game but the name slips me, sadly i found the sims shortly after and lost the disk it came on when i upgraded from a 95' to a 98' XD

[Coda]

Originally Posted by Suzerain of Sheol

Secret of Mana (Did this age well? It's one of the few I've never replayed as an adult)

It aged reasonably well. The party member AI is more noticeably dumb when you're older and getting stuck on the terrain's collision map is no more fun now than it was then, but the music is still FANTASTIC by modern standards and the graphics still have the same charm they always did. The plot shows a bit of weakness if you look at it with the critical eye of an experienced writer, but it's not enough to hurt enjoyment of the game if you just allow it to be simple and a little bit cliche.


Choco, I think that arcade game might be Gauntlet?

[Salone]

The games I grew up on as a small child were few and far between. I had a Genesis and not much else for a while. I had Sonic Spinball, The Pagemaster game (Freaking haaaaaard), Sonic 2, and...Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master.

I don't even know where Shinobi III came from. I didn't get a lot of games, and I was a very wimpy kid, something with fighting is not something I would have asked to buy. It just...showed up. But oh man, I loved playing it. It was the most 80's/early 90's ninja game of all time. Not to mention the title theme was, well... it was the greatest musical number on a Genesis game of all time.

After standing for 13 hours in line to audition for a movie (I didn't get the part), mom bought me a gameboy and Pokemon Red. And oh my god. Pokemon. Poookeeeeeeemoooooon.

From there I descended in to the Command & Conquer series, which I still play to this day 15 years later because it's a fun and varied series, although it's mostly Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge now.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Didn't get a Genesis until I was about 12. It came with "The Lion King." My early gaming achievement was being able to play through the whole thing on one life, though it all hinged on not dying to the rolling boulder in the "Be Prepared" level. I think that's the name. Lava level with bats.

I had it on my Game Gear, too, and yes, Choco, I still have mine. ;).

The first game I ever finished (minus Mother Goose Land) was also on Genesis. It was Cool Spot. You know the red dot on 7-Up cans? He had his own game. You had shades, you launched 7-Up missiles, and when you finished the game all the cool spots got together and did the waves to "Wipe Out."