My father is a computer programmer. I first got into gaming around age six or seven, when he started bringing home a variety of pc games his co-workers “shared” with him, even though he has never had the slightest interest in videogames. They were mostly clones of arcade games like Mario and Pong.
I know it’s a bit of a cheat, but I really want to start with the first game that I picked for myself, at 9 years old, as a combined end of the schoolyear and birthday gift : Warlords
This was the start of my love for turn-based strategy and tactics games. Even almost 30 years later, I still think of the map of Illuria with its 80 cities (). I can remember the city, close to the Orcs of Kor starting location, that produced wolf-riders a turn faster than usual, the joy of flying around the map with a hero stack full of dragons and other flying units, the despair of having my best hero slain by a demon while exploring a ruin. I can’t find a screenshot of it, but the image of heads in pikes that followed your decision to refuse the surrender of your rivals really impressed me.
I played a lot of Warlords 2 and even more of Warlords 3 DLR - both better games in every aspect - but I will always look back fondly on the first game.
As for the first game I bought for myself, it was actually a bundle of Sierra games :
Rise of the Dragon: I never really got into this game. I think an early puzzle stumped me so I put it aside. When I came back to it, one of the floppies was corrupted so I couldn’t install it. I eventually played it through a few years ago during an abandonware phase and found it ok, but I’ve never been a great fan of adventure games. The mixing-in of the sidescrolling action parts was an interesting touch though.
King’s Quest 5: This game, along with the Québec-dubbed version of The Simpsons, is what helped me become bilingual, eventually leading me to my career in the translation field. My grasp of English was limited and my parents quickly tired of being pestered to translate every other sentence, so they bought me a French-English dictionary. Over a few months, that allowed me to play the game mostly on my own, with only the occasional help needed.
Many puzzles were garbage and I only finished it years later with the help of a walkthrough, but I loved the mix of various fantasy environments and the game had a huge effect on my language skills.
Red Baron: This is THE game of my childhood. Just the manual was amazing. I say manual, but it was a history of the Great War and of the birth of aviation as well as a treatise on the physics of flight all in one. I threw out most of my game boxes and manuals years ago, but my beat-up Red Baron manual is one of the very few things I kept. I must have read it through dozens of time on my long school bus rides. Reading about Immelmann, von Richtofen, Guynemer, Bishop and all the other aces and the flying alongside or against them was a magical feeling. The whole character-progression system was amazing : getting medals and promotions, getting shot down and rotting in a p.o.w. camp, moving to different squadrons and eventually getting to customize your own plane. I still remember how proud I was when I reached 82 victories with one of my pilots.
I went on to play many flight sims during the following years, including Red Baron 3D and SWOTL, but the more technically detailed the genre got, the more I drifted away. The last game of this kind that I really loved was Crimson Skies.