That I bought with my own money, and not allowance money either?
That’s really tough. I’m not sure. It might not until I started buying PC games after college, and in that case it would have been as late as 1999, so maybe Heretic II or Thief or something along those lines.
If allowance money is allowed it would go back much further, at least to Shadow of the Beast or something like that.
My formative childhood games were a combination of parent-purchased and pirated.
Not only was Trillum’s Amazon written by Crichton, he later repurposed the plot for his novel (and subsequent film) Congo. He was interested in computers in general but also practically as a new medium for producing and consuming fiction.
My entry for “most obscure first computer game”:
“Project A” for the MSX system, starring a young (and completely unknown to me at that time) Jackie Chan. Apparently based on a movie or something.
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In the summer of 1983 my family moved several states away from where I had been born, and I was prett unhappy about it. That said, the first two friends I made (one a kid on the block, another through a family my family met through a mutual acquaintance) both liked table top gaming. That was a bold new world for a kid who loved arcades, his Atari 2600, and monster movies. It was months later - possibly some time in earlyish 1984 - through the second kid that I was visiting someone else’s house when I saw what was essentially D&D on a computer. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Needless to say I went galaxy brain level explosion at that.
It was all I could talk about to my parents. They sat me down one day and said that while they would love to get me a computer, they were very expensive. I replied that I understood that and wasn’t hoping for one, but I couldn’t help talk about computers/the game even still. I said “maybe one day, but I’m not holding my breath for it and I won’t be disappointed when I don’t get one”. I think they were impressed with how I was soldiering on. And at some point, dad started saving. I didn’t expect, nor get, a computer in 1984. But in Christmas of 1985, after we had returned from our yearly trek to the Hinterland for the holidays, “Santa” (I knew he wasn’t real then) surprised my brother and I with some additional presents waiting for us at home. We opened them and I enjoyed it and thought I was all done when mom pointed me to a nondescript bag in the corner.
In it was Wizardry. I can still remember sitting there staring at it and feeling just overwhelmed. I looked up and mom had the greatest look on her face. Dad just said “might want to go check the dining room”, and there was my very first computer: an Apple IIc.
Best Christmas ever man.
Not the first game I bought with my own money, but one I did buy once I had a Pc (I had a mac before).
Could have been such a great game, if it wasn’t such a buggy mess. It did everything right but the core game play.
To all my fellow Olds:
Loving the nostalgia in this thread…
Except for Privateer 2, which can die in a fire.
I don’t remember the first C-64 game I bought. I do remember that The Pawn was my first ST game and Gold of the Americas and SimCity were my first Amiga games.
It sure looks like Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord sold an awful lot of computers back in the day.
Huh, not familiar with that particular Jackie Chan movie… Might need to rectify that.
I was still in elementary school back then and didn’t speak much english so it took a group of us friends to figure out this game and we ended up having lots of fun with it.
One of these two I think
Probably my biggest regret gaming wise is that I didn’t play mule back then. I did play plenty of Seven Cities of Gold though, and modem wars later on when it was released.
It was the first Jackie Chan movie I ever watched. It’s a good one. I especially love the scene where he falls from one floor to the next to the next. Watching the bloopers at the end of the movie on that part I was cringing though. When it went wrong, it looked pretty painful.
He was young then. So he still had yet to break every bone in his body the first time.
I’m having a very hard time remembering my first game purchase. Frontier Elite 2? Falcon 3.0? something along those lines. I have been a consummate software pirate for years until steam, games-as-service and having grown-up money made buying preferable to stealing.
That is so awesome!
We had a neighbor family that had an Apple IIe, and we used to play Wolfenstein and Olympic Decathlon on it like crazy. Makes me cringe how we used to hammer on those keys to run the 1500 meter dash, lmao! I was so jealous at the time.
Great story.
Except it had an awesome cast, along with WC3 and WC4. Which has allowed me to endlessly annoy my wife by constantly saying things like “Oh yeah him, he was in Wing Commander.”