My Earliest Games

This month, Blogs of the Round Table wants to know: what are our earliest formative experiences in gaming?

I have those.

One of the earliest games I remember playing was an educational grammar game made for the TI-99 home computer. With a little digging on YouTube, I found the game, and was instantly taken back.

Seeing this video, I was astonished to realize:

1. This game was actually made before I was even born
2. I must have been pretty young to be able to play this when I did and as well as I did.

Maybe my age at the time explains why I had a little trouble still with concepts like “adverb.” I think now, however, about the many adults in the world who still have trouble with the concept of “adverb.” If only they had the TI-99!

Another thing the TI-99 got me to do was program a few of my own little games, using TI Basic and piecing together the code from various enthusiast home computer magazines. Looking at this I can confirm that I must have been coding my own simple games at an age younger than 10. The TI-99 was not merely one of my formative game playing experiences. It was a formative game development experience.

Other important hardware items in my life have been the Commodore 64 (which I still have), the Atari 7800 (which the family sadly did not keep), and, just a little later, the good old NES.

I have strong memories of the first time I saw Super Mario Brothers at work. My great-aunt was the one who bought the Nintendo when it was new. She shares some of the blame for my life-long addiction to gaming.

I clearly still remember the thought I had when I saw her play Mario for the first time. Mario walks off to the right side of the screen. And he keeps going. WOW! There’s more world over there! Every game I’d seen previously only took place on a single screen at a time – games like Joust and Ms. Pac-Man that, while wonderful, were constrained. Then Super Mario appeared, and for the first time that day, the possibilities of gaming seemed to be endless.

I look back at the dates when these pieces of technology appeared, and I realize how young I was. I’m lucky to have clear memories of these formative experiences. I’m also extremely lucky that my family was mostly supportive and encouraging of my gaming obsession. I guess learning programming and parts of speech while I was playing might have had something to do with it.