Share tales from your gaming youth

[spvtnik1]

So, children say (and do) the damndest things, right? I was using computers from a very early age, I think as early as I had learned how to talk. I remember one occasion where my parents enrolled me in to sort of a day school for young children to learn on computers. I remember the CGA program told me "These turtles are going to race!" So I press the button to start the race. I immediately threw a wild tantrum when all the turtles reach the finish line at the same time. In my mind I thought "That's NOT a race!" Who's the winner? Who's the loser?" I'm pretty sure my 4 year old self was not able to articulate my un-met expectations of an MS DOS based turtle racing simulation for children.

I have my father to thank for my early exposure to PC gaming. I'm not exactly sure why he got in to it, but both my mother and my father really enjoyed the old point and click adventures. My mom liked the Sierra games and he dug the LucusArts ones. He was also a diehard Tetris fan. But my father still remembers my abhorrent reaction to this scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

View: https://youtu.be/xrGkdz_OK4k?t=364


It's already creepy in the tombs, but the shrill when Indy opens the casket scared me senseless.

So, anyone else got any crazy stories about games they can remember from their youngest years?

 

[I Will Haunt You]

I remember playing Super Breakout on the Atari 2600 and I just had to change the sound effects to the one that sounded like someone tap dancing (closest similar sound I could think of). Everyone else hated it, but I always wanted that specific sound set for that game because I loved it.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk2TaZPwnps

 

[Colif]

I can remember 2 of us doing this trick on Galaga and leaving top score as 000000 which people assumed was 0 but was actually much higher and they couldn't beat by just getting a few points. Alas shop owner turned off machines at night and it forgot.

 

[mkultrafanboy]

I remember playing Monopoly on Hasbro Westwood Online back around 98 i think. Every Friday there would be a tournament. I used a cheat, i think if you press Control + - or +, it would give you extra or less moves than the dice, and I got caught and banned forever. Either way, Command and Conquer online was huge at that time. Westwood Online was an amazing thing. AIM too, but that's a different topic

 

[Gvaedyn]

I really wish G-Police would get released on Steam.

 

[Frindis]

I lived in the basement for myself and had a lot of gaming sessions with my childhood buddies over the years. One particular weekend was quite fun because we were trying out Duke Nukem 3D through Coax Cable and I was kicking some serious ass. At most, there were 3 people against me, but they did not stand a chance. I literally felt like some gaming god and I had a big grin on my face every time I heard them shouting in the other room.

 

[Dan]

The only thing that really stands out in my memory when a bunch of friends were around my house and we all crowded around the computer taking turns playing Outlaws. I recently played the game again, and it is still a great game.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifbB_nM05lE

 

[Frindis]

@Dan Clint Bajakian did an outstanding job composing the music scores for the game. My favorite weapon was the double shotty.

 

[Trell!]

I spent an age when younger playing Turrican 2, Rainbow Islands and Frontier: Elite II. The weirdest thing I remember was copy protection back then - Frontier iirc made you refer to the manual, which was a big old thing, and search for a certain page, a certain paragraph, a certain word, and a letter from said word to start the game!

 

[Mazer]

The weirdest thing I remember was copy protection back then - Frontier iirc made you refer to the manual, which was a big old thing, and search for a certain page, a certain paragraph, a certain word, and a letter from said word to start the game!

Copy protections used to be so crazy. I used to love finding the old image-matching pinwheels from old PC games at pawn shops, stuff where you have to replicate the image shown and enter the code it gives you:

The worst for me was trying to play Liesure Suit Larry at far too young an age and struggling with the age-check questions it posed. Not only was I too young to get most of the references, but it was very US-centric so you got questions like:

The East Coast is
a. home of the Mets.
b. a country.
c. where people talk funny.
d. adjacent to Texas.

I'd struggle with that even now if not for google. Seven year old me didn't stand a chance of seeing those pixeltits.

 

[Volley]

9PM to 5AM games of Total Annihilation (1997, Cavedog Entertainment) LAN play, the four of us, 2v2 skirmish, and just like the premise of the story itself, no clear victor by the wee hours of the morning.

 

[Zloth]

I spent an age when younger playing Turrican 2, Rainbow Islands and Frontier: Elite II. The weirdest thing I remember was copy protection back then - Frontier iirc made you refer to the manual, which was a big old thing, and search for a certain page, a certain paragraph, a certain word, and a letter from said word to start the game!

And they never told you if the half-paragraph that started the page was supposed to count as the first paragraph or not!

The East Coast is
a. home of the Mets.
b. a country.
c. where people talk funny.
d. adjacent to Texas.

A and C are both correct. D is debatable when the player is within Texas.

 

[indigit5l]

Earliest tale is that I used to love when my two older brothers would play something like a Ninja Gaiden or a Zelda game on the NES and I'd be right there looking to play also, maybe get coached or support from them when it was my turn. Oh how I vividly remember them passing the controller to me finally and then getting up and leaving the room, lol. Schmucks.

 

[Rensje]

Okay, story time. Back in 2002, I was 14 years old and in my second year of grammar school. My brother and I used to play a lot of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction together, always racing to see who could get the best unique items and the most powerful rune words. We actually had a binder at home containing printed lists of all the item sets and all the unique items in the game, and used to keep track of which items we had collected.

Anyway, over the summer it was my birthday, and this amazing-looking game called Dungeon Siege had come out just a few months earlier. This was before I had access to the internet, so I knew little about the game other than that it looked like a fully realised 3D hack-'n-slash RPG and that it was made by Chris Taylor, of Total Annihilation fame. I only knew who he was because I loved TA. and I knew that I wanted this game. I asked my parents for it as a birthday present, and they agreed.

And so I started playing. It did not take me long to realise that this game wasn't quite like Diablo at all. Sure, it had character classes and randomised equipment, but the single-player campaign played more like a real-time tactics version of a Diablo-like. I didn't hate it, but it was not really the game I signed up for, either.

At one point, feeling a little bummed about my choice of birthday gift, I randomly clicked the multiplayer button in the game's menu. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I figured out that the game's multiplayer portion was limited to one character per player and offered another map that you could play on: The Utraean Peninsula. This map wasn't a straight shot from A to B, like the campaign. It played more like an open world.

I looked over at my brother and saw a twinkle in his eye. We put our allowances together, grabbed our coats and bee-lined to the nearest electronics store to pick up a second copy of the game.

Back home, we jumped straight into what would be the digital adventure of our young lives. He played the hulking fighter, I was the cunning archer. We started our journey in Elddim, a small town at the heart of the peninsula. We talked to the guard captain about a nearby quest and then we just.. started walking.

The peninsula was vast. Some locations, like the Great Northern Forest, were so incredibly large that you could get lost in them for hours. There was no map, so you had to rely on landmarks like mountains, towers and rivers to navigate. Sometimes we would stumble into an area far too difficult for us to tackle. Sometimes we would find a secret passage hidden in an underground crypt, revealing an entire new area that wasn't on any map.

Our imaginations ran wild. It felt like the possibilities of this enormous land mass were endless. We didn't have internet, see. No wikis, no GameFAQs, no guides or maps or anything. At one point we walked into what we assumed was another cool dungeon. It was the Pit of Despair, designed to make you hopelessly lost. Oh, we were lost alright. It took us hours to find our way out.

And then there was the fast travel system. You didn't have town portal scrolls or some spell you could use. You had to use the Helios Utrae Basilicus (HUB, har har). The Basicilus was like this floating platform in the sky, connected to different towns and locations of interest by way of 'displacers'. You would stand on a platform and twist a statue to make it move. You had to both be on it or the other player would simply be left behind.

The real magic of all this was that there weren't any loading screens. There were no instances. Everything was streaming in real time. It was incredible tech for the time and it helped sell me on the game's fantasy completely.

Look, I could wax poetic about this all day. Point is that I've never had such an amazing experience playing through a game together with someone as I did that summer, when me and my brother trekked across the Utraean Peninsula for the first time. I will bet you any money the experience still holds up today, if you can get past the game's visuals. If you've never played Dungeon Siege before, give the multiplayer map a go. The world design is second to none.

I will leave you guys with a retro review on the game I found on YouTube, just to give you an idea of what it looks like. The atmosphere of the game is still so good! No action RPG has forests as dense as this game does.

 

[AlyxTrace]

playing starcraft against my brother when we were very young (ages about 4 or 5 ish hard to remember) me beating him by spammig early game units and him getting so mad that i just heard him scream from the other room followed by footsteps as he ran across to my room opened the door, broke my keyboard called me a poopie head and ran back out.

we never played starcraft again, though we did do red alert 2 much later

EDIT: i'd like to add that although i like to pretend this was all part of my plan (to kill him with cheap units) i had absolutly no freaking clue what i was doing at the time

 

[indigit5l]

playing starcraft against my brother when we were very young (ages about 4 or 5 ish hard to remember)

Now I'm trying to imagine playing StarCraft at 4 or 5, if it had been available. I knew chess, so.. maybe.

 

[I Will Haunt You]

Now I'm trying to imagine playing StarCraft at 4 or 5, if it had been available. I knew chess, so.. maybe.

Stop with the old man jokes. I highly resemble them.

 

[AlyxTrace]

Now I'm trying to imagine playing StarCraft at 4 or 5, if it had been available. I knew chess, so.. maybe.

1ST PC game i ever had, i grew up in malaysia and our korean techy at the time set up the pc's

 

[Frindis]

The 12yo old me playing Indiana Jones: The Fate of Atlantis and getting stuck at the entrance of a pyramid. I had to rotate different stone discs in the right order to open the door. I had noooooo idea what to do, but thankfully I was reading a magazine back then which had a hint line. The squeaky me explained the best I could the problem and after a good minute or two, I got the recipe for the right combination. I turned the circles and voilá, the door opened! I felt the pretty proud calling and fixing the problem

 

[I Will Haunt You]

The 12yo old me playing Indiana Jones: The Fate of Atlantis

12yo me was playing Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Atari 2600. That had a few brain crunchers and, appropriately enough, kickstarted my brain into how to problem solve in a video game perspective.

 

[Zloth]

12yo me was excited about the new Advanced D&D coming out. I remember me and my friends didn't understand the rewards for monsters. 1000 + 12/hp for a 9 headed hydra? We thought it meant we each got 1000xp and 12 more hit points for each of our characters. Sure made it a lot easier to survive as a wizard.

Wait, computer stuff?? Nope, no Atari yet. Maybe next Christmas. Want to play The Creature that Ate Sheboygan?

 

[I Will Haunt You]

1000 + 12/hp for a 9 headed hydra? We thought it meant we each got 1000xp and 12 more hit points for each of our characters. Sure made it a lot easier to survive as a wizard.

Ha! Now there a great anecdote to start of my day. Love it.

 

[BornAgainPCGamer]

I was maybe 5 or 6 years old and i got a Super Nintendo for Christmas, it came with Street Fighter 2. I'd played it in the arcades and seen all the adds for it coming up to Christmas but the thought of having it to play at home on my own TV was fantastic. I was not disappointed. I played it through it non stop and enjoyed it even more with friends.

I end up only owning 4 games in total for my SNES. SF2, Robocop 3, Alien 3, Super Mario World. I loved them all and have many a fond memory of playing them on my own and with friends and cousins.

I also loved my weekly trip to the Video Store were i was allowed to rent out a game for the weeked. I used to take ages to pick one, as i didnt want to be stuck with a dud.

Then came my next console, the Sega Mega Drive 2. I had that baby for an extremely long time or so ìt seemed to me at the time. Played some truly great games on that console and it gave me some cracking childhood memories. Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Desert Strike, Shinobi, Stryder, Sonic 2, Toe-jam and Earl, Road Rash, WWF Royal Rumble, Greatest Heavyweights, Skitching, Ecco The Dolphin. Just to name a few.

I didnt get my own PC until i was around 13 or so. It blew my mind though. I got Thief TDP and SWAT 3 free with it. I had never played or seen anything like these games. I had my friends over ASAP to show them proudly how good PC games were. Each and everyone was impressed and we spent hours taking turns playing it every chance we got. So many fond memories from gaming and my early gaming life.

Thanks for posting the question, as it has helped jog a lot of them back for me.

 

[Johnway]

Loads of memories during my Amiga days. Probably way too many to discuss. Being absolute jerks on the amiga version of Final Fight that had friendly attacks turned on. playing 2 player on a load of games like second samurai, Lotus turbo challenge 2. Oh and i can't forget the 4 play game of heroquest legacy of sorasil are some of the few i remember fondly.

But my youngest memory is on the amstrad was some sort of hang man game. When you messed up there was a high pitched whining noise and the persons face would turn blue. it scared the life out of me and i never ever played that game again. The same with shadow of the beast 2. that intro sequence was scary stuff but we feared it more when we weren't sure if the game was going to work as it would crap out 30% of the time.

 

[OsaX Nymloth]

Story from when I was a tiny wee primary school boy. Ancient history, I know.

I didn't had a PC at the time, but the neighbours had! And they had a daughter, 1-2 years older than me. So I befriended her and.... used a lot of opportunities to play on her PC that had a Pentium and Voodoo graphic card - which was insane at the time. We would play together games like Rayman 2, Carmageddon (kek), Turok and few others.
Without knowing a word in English. Even menu's were navigated blindly not to mention none of us had any idea how to save a game, so we always started from the beginning.