How long have you been playing computer RPGs?

I was mislead by the poll, because it puts Fallout in the 2000s. I remembered to have played Fallout before BG, but thought I was wrong because of the poll options, so I choose Baldur's Gate. But I just looked in Wikipedia and saw that Fallout was in 1997 and BG in 1998. So my memory was right that I started with Fallout before BG came out. This is a Bug in the Poll.

I think I also made a mistake in my initial response to this thread by listing a text game as my first crpg. My actual first crpg was Ultima III: Exodus, which I think I started playing in late August or early September of 1983.

I think my first game ever was "Zork" on the Commodore +4. That was a weird little machine, my grandfather got one from his work somehow, gave it to me since he had no clue what to do with it, and that started a lifelong love of gaming, fantasy, and CRPGs in general. I remember programming lines of code in Basic from computer magazines when I finally got a Commodore 128 and waiting to see a sprite bounce around the screen for my troubles.

I played adventure in 1976, way before Atari (was on DEC PDP-8)

Ok, since some of you are talking about first game in contrast to first RPG, my first computer game was "moon landing" on a programmable HP pocket calculator in 1976.

I primarily started with Curse of the Azure Bonds & Bards Tale III in 1988-1989 on ye olde C64. I dabbled a bit with Pool of Radiance earlier too but not knowing what I was doing one night, I accidentally formatted the boot disk! (it was a pirated version) and thus I ended up going back to it a little later in the 90s.

Combined with the aforementioned two games was the discovery of gamebooks (notably Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf) after which I was plainly hooked.
I completed my last SSI GoldBox game (Pools of Darkness) at the end of my high school years in 1996. Ultima (still haven't finished Ascension), Might & Magic (Just II to go), Dark Sun, Baldur's Gate... many more great games followed after that.

I've slowed down in recent times in my consumption of cRPGs for a variety of reasons; time is one factor, another is simply that the quality of releases doesn't really excite me as much as it did back then. But the passion for play still remains.

It's amazing how many of us owned a C64. I wish Commodore would have kept making computers.

crpgnut said:

It's amazing how many of us owned a C64. I wish Commodore would have kept making computers.

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My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 with tape drive. I realized pretty quickly how limited that was, and my parents were generous enough to buy me a C64 (and disk drive) around 2 years later, for my birthday. My sister told me I was getting it because she was so excited for me. I didn't let on when I opened it, which wasn't hard because I was so geninuely pumped. Still my favorite computer of all time.

To get me started, a work friend of my dad's lent me a bunch of disks that he owned and I copied them all. Jumpman, Space Taxi…and what probably was my first read RPG, Ultima IV. All sorts of stuff. At one point he was moving, and I persuaded him (via my dad) to lend me everything else he had, and my dad bought me enough blank disks to hold it all. Figuring out the controls for games was part of the fun (games like Wizard's Crown basically had one command for each key of the keyboard). I still remember some of the memory addresses you had to type at the prompt to get to games, like 32768.

When the C64 started to go away, I used to go on these kinda scavenger hunts around Portland to find places that still sold software for it. There was this place called Hacker Shack (later renamed Hacker Cat) I found that I got weird games like Mindwheel from.

No computer I've ever owned since, or will ever own, will have the same sense of discovery and excitement that my C64 did.

crpgnut said:

It's amazing how many of us owned a C64. I wish Commodore would have kept making computers.

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Atari seems pretty popular too, but the C64 owns the record. (Oh, or do you mean it's amazing so many of us were already born? )

They did continue for a while, but not so well. When Jack Tramiel left Commodore and went over to salvage Atari, and when the Atari ST products were revealed, it was really tempting to get one. I have no idea if they were any good, seems they were appreciated in music production IIRC. The Amiga were appealing too, but damn, those 'Guru Meditation' fatal messages.. does that ring a (sinister) bell to anyone? And it was a nightmare to program.

crpgnut said:

It's amazing how many of us owned a C64. I wish Commodore would have kept making computers.

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Actually while I mentioned I started with early 90s RPGs, I actually also started with a C64. Just didnt play any RPGs on it. If Commodure kept making computers though I wouldn't be so sure if they were that different from any other modern computer.

I loved my Commodore. Not sure I could really handle those load times now, though. Well, I probably would be ok so long as I had a good book nearby.

I remember playing (and loving) Dark Sun when I was younger, but Fallout 1 is what made me more of a diehard RPG gamer. Weird seeing that in the 2000's considering Fallout and Baldur's Gate came out like one year apart from each other.

Probably blasphemy to say around here, but I played Baldur's Gate back in the day too, and to this day have started it dozens of different times, just have never really got into it. Never wanted to jump into part 2 without playing 1 and importing my character, so it's a series I have yet to conquest.

I never had a Commodore, but I spent quite a bit of time playing on my cousin's whenever I'd visit. I remember games like Castle Wolfenstein, Spy vs Spy, Bruce Lee, Zork, etc. Also, what was the text game like Zork but in a space setting?

rossrjensen said:

Probably blasphemy to say around here, but I played Baldur's Gate back in the day too, and to this day have started it dozens of different times, just have never really got into it. Never wanted to jump into part 2 without playing 1 and importing my character, so it's a series I have yet to conquest.

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I never got into BG1 either, and never actually made it to the titular city (which does take a while). BG2, on the other hand, is one of my favorite games ever. You're missing out with your self-imposed rule.

JDR13 said:

I never had a Commodore, but I spent quite a bit of time playing on my cousin's whenever I'd visit. I remember games like Castle Wolfenstein, Spy vs Spy, Bruce Lee, Zork, etc. Also, what was the text game like Zork but in a space setting?

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You're probably thinking of Planetfall.

bkrueger said:

Ok, since some of you are talking about first game in contrast to first RPG, my first computer game was "moon landing" on a programmable HP pocket calculator in 1976.

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Ah, if first game, space wars in 1973 on a PDP-11

I have no idea what my first videogame was. Some arcade machine, of course. Asteroids maybe. Space Invaders. Pac-Man. One of the classics. The Fred Meyers grocery store my parents went to all the time when I was a kid had Omega Race, so I played a lot of that (and later had it on my Vic-20)

If we're talking at home, that would be some game my friend with an Atari 2600 had. No idea what. In middle school, I played a lot of Montezuma's Revenge on the computers they had there.

JFarrell71 said:

I have no idea what my first videogame was. Some arcade machine, of course. Asteroids maybe. Space Invaders. Pac-Man. One of the classics.

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Same here - the first ever video game I played was Space Invaders. When I was young and we were on a family holiday in another town, we went past a store that was crammed with arcade machines. Almost all of them were Space Invaders. It must have just come out, and it was a bit of a sensation. I spent a lot of my parents coins that day.

JFarrell71 said:

I have no idea what my first videogame was. Some arcade machine, of course. Asteroids maybe. Space Invaders. Pac-Man. One of the classics. The Fred Meyers grocery store my parents went to all the time when I was a kid had Omega Race, so I played a lot of that (and later had it on my Vic-20)

If we're talking at home, that would be some game my friend with an Atari 2600 had. No idea what. In middle school, I played a lot of Montezuma's Revenge on the computers they had there.

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My very first video game was a pong game, a basic console that could only offer 2 or 3 variations of the game (the type built with analogue electronics only, even today's ovens are more complex than that). I was a little kid and I caught my parents playing at this game, one night I went down when I was supposed to be fast asleep in bed
I didn't know they had bought the game console, and I'm not sure how long they had been playing like that. Restrospectively that must have been a funny scene

Arcade games were mean, always in need of a coin

Pitfall, Asteroids, and Combat were my first games on the Atari 2600 in the 80's. After that I bought the first Nintendo console for $200 at the time that was a lot of cash.

Shame arcade centers have declined in the US. Most I played at closed down.