Quite literally the first computer game I ever played
As I mentioned in this post, the first three computer games I ever played, and then within the span of about eighteen months (and I can’t have been 7 years old at the end of that span, mind you) were: Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, Mixed-Up Mother Goose (both by Sierra On-Line), and Ultima 6.
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It’s funny how this game has coloured my thinking as an adult. Dragonlet #1 loves to watch her Winnie the Pooh Sing Along Songs DVD most mornings, and I cannot help but look at Tigger and think of him as the bad guy, or at least the antagonist of the series. Have a look at the third picture, in particular, to see why; you needed to avoid Tigger like the plague in this game.
The game, implemented with the ancient TrollVM engine, didn’t feature animated sequences as one might have expected to see in other Sierra games of the day (including Mother Goose, mind you). The Hundred Acre Wood was realized as a series of inter-connected static scenery screens, in some of which could be found various items that the characters populating the forest had lost. Whoever you were when you played the game (it was never made clear), your task was to return the lost items to their rightful owners, one at a time.
Which is where Tigger came in. As you moved through the wood, you would occasionally be “bounced” by Tigger (certain areas of the forest, especially the north-eastern part, seemed more prone to Tigger attacks). If that happened, you a) lost your item, b) had to throw out the list of other item locations you’d hopefully been keeping, and c) figure out where in the forest you had ended up; you were randomly relocated.
Apparently, the original designer of the game — Al Lowe — didn’t have a problem releasing the game as a download on his humour site. So if any of you are curious, you can find it there. It runs pretty well in DOSbox (well, iDOS…so..DOSpad), but will apparently also work in ScummVM.
First games I remember playing on my old 8086 PC were Police Quest I, Centipede, and hack v. 1.03 (pre-nethack hack).
I think by the end of elementary school I must have played and beaten all of the original Sierra AGI adventure games. Geesh those were good games.
The Apple ][ was my first computer and I bought my first two games from the same Computerland in the San Fernando Valley. Both came in ziplock bags. One was from Sirius and was called “Beer Run”. The other was from California Pacific… guess what it was called?
I feel old, since I was already in high school by the time Ultima 6 showed up.
Some of the earliest games I remember playing on the old Atari 800 were text games like Zork and Adventure, some arcade clones like DigDug and the like, and some oddball games I’ve never seen anywhere else.
Mr. Robot was a sort of platformer puzzle game that had you walking round this factory environment collecting little energy dots in the floor.
Cohen’s Towers had a Scott Joplin soundtrack, another kind of platform game delivering inter-office packages up and down floors via a weird conveyor-elevator system.
And of course the classic space shooter: Star Raiders.
I just found Captain Comic, another game I enjoyed early on in life; it was a shareware title, so finding a hosted ZIP was easy enough. Now if I can just find Mixed-Up Mother Goose, I can relive the entirety of my first gaming years…on my iPhone.
Which, coincidentally, has way more horsepower than my first computer (a 33 MHz 386). Heck, it has way more processing and graphics “oomph” than my second (66 MHz 486), third (Macintosh Performa 5200 CD; 75 MHz PowerPC 603), and fourth (450 MHz Pentium 3, 32 MB nVidia TNT2) computers too.