Here, I’ll start. When I was 8 years old, my parents went to a dinner party and plonked me down in front of the host’s computer so I’d stay out of their way. The game they booted up to keep me occupied was Space Quest II. Little did they know what impact that would have on me…
Secret of Monkey Island on a Tandy 1000 SL
The Secret of Monkey Island is the first one I can remember playing. I also remember watching my dad play Police Quest 3 as a kid.
@SQHistorian Adventure for the 2600. Probably the worst port, but a compromise for the hardware.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was a bit older.
The first adventure game I bought and played was an Infocom interactive fiction … I think it was Stationfall. Before I had briefly played Magnetic Scrolls’ Fish! at someone else’s computer. Fell in love with text adventures and started collecting them, I have a few of the Infocom folios as well (sadly not the Starcross saucer). The first graphic adventure I remember playing was King’s Quest IV.
These games, along with later games like Monkey Island, had a huge influence on me, I learned programming to write adventure games myself but spent more time writing adventure game engines (both text and graphic ones) than actual games, and today I’m a software engineer (not in the game business).
I got to play Zork in 4th grade on the single C64 in the classroom. Was obsessed with that computer. I beat Zork with a couple classmates and help from the hints book. The teacher gave me a physical Zorkmid coin that came with the boxed game, I still have it somewhere. Zork got me so hooked on computers that it was all I wanted to do.
I had a hard home life, my dad was an abusive addict. I lived in fear of his seemingly random behavior, one day he would be overjoyed and another miserable about everything. The computer was predictable, if it didn’t work right, it was because I did something wrong. The teacher saw how much that computer meant to me. He taught me what he knew about BASIC programming, he gave me the manual. I’d sit in my room and read it cover to cover, trying to understand everything without having a machine to try it on.
One day near the end of the year, the teacher pulled me aside and told me that the school was getting rid of some computers, and that I could have one. I think they were getting Apple II’s, so he put aside a VIC-20 for me. I had to get my mom to drive me to school on a weekend and the teacher met us there. In hindsight, I don’t think he had permission or anything.
Sorry for kind of getting off the topic
Does “Adventure”, Atari, 1980 count?
It absolutely does! The OG adventure game!
Well, a graphical port of the OG adventure game. The guy who made Adventure would go on to use the same engine to create Rocky’s Boots and Robot Odyssey.
My favorite too!
Those old Infocom games basically taught me how to type. All the Zorks, Hitchhikers, and there was a Lovecraftian one maybe called Lurking Horror.
King Quest II in Atari ST
Sam & Max: Hit the Road!
To this day, it’s one of my favorite games of all time. I haven’t played it in a while, so thank you for making me remember! I’m definitely going to go for a new playthrough when things settle down here.
Sam & Max taught me more clever multisyllabic words than school ever did.
I remember my childhood in Brighton, When dear old dad would bounce me on his knee, He’d say “son there is nothing as exiting, As exposing beasts to inhumanity!”
Oh my god I just remembered Sam and Max had cd audio. I used to listen to that song off the cd loads!
Ha ha same here!
Oregon Trail.
…
I’ll show myself out.
You have died of dysentery…
I loved that this was required at my gradeschool computer lab class. Good memories!
kings quest 2
Leisure Suit Larry 1. Still remember that one like it was yesterday. Someday I even use that password in some way.
After that many more adventures with Larry followed. As well as all Police Quests. A couple of Kings Quest and a couple of Space Quests.
@SQHistorian Good ole Leisure Suit Larry.
Still remember “buying” a pirated copy on two white 5.25” inch floppies from a local computer *store* 😂
The first time i ever saw an adventure game, i was too young to really comprehend what it really was, i saw my brother playing Zak McKracken, and it seemed “grown up and boring” to me, but what made me realise the magic of what adventure games are, was watching my cousin play monkey island on the amiga, and i remember he was playing the part where you use a rubber chicken with a pulley in the midle to go to hook island… he had to go back and forth on the wire a few times because the sound it made had me in stitches.
First AG i really played (i think) was Kings Quest 3, but at the timez me having mediocre english, and being more used to my NES, which didn’t require me to type in english and just had four directions and 2 buttons, i only dabbled a little bit, but the parser put me off…
Then i was bit by a radioactive shadowgate and deja vu on the NES, (which are first person point and click games that actually kinda work on the console system,) and it finally awoke my true adventure gamer powers, and have loved them ever since.
That’s going back a ways… I think the first one for me was King’s Quest 1, actually. “KILL SNAKE WITH SWORD” was far beyond what I could type in the amount of time I had to type it, but the idea of moving around a screen interacting with the world to solve problems was utterly intoxicating.
The second one was Leisure Suit Larry, which I probably should not have been allowed to play but I was the only one who knew that at the time. Perhaps fortunately I never got very far in it, but the boss key made me laugh hard enough to make it worth it.
It wasn’t until somewhat later that I encountered the Space Quest series, which I really got into. I actually completed some of them!
