What Was Your First Console?
A boy (or girl or boy/girl) always remembers his (or her or his/her) first console. For me it was the Atari Video Computer System (eventually known as the 2600). I got it for Christmas in 1979 at the tender age of twelve and I though it was just about the greatest thing I had ever laid eyes on. I thrilled to the "realistic" combat of, well.. Combat! I battled a dragon that looked more like a duck in Adventure and of course tried against all odds to get E.T. back home. I eventually moved on to other consoles, but the 2600 will always be my first love since it introduced me to the genre that would eventually become my career.
So how about you, what was your first console and when did you get it?
Fruit Brute
Posted to on 9 May 2008
· Comments (47)
Other stuff like this: atari 2600, console, first, question
i'm young, NES Day it came out! woot woot!
My first console I remember getting was Sega Genesis and it was Christmas in the early 90's. We already had NES and Intellivision, but Genesis was the first one I remember.
That picture is flippin' adorable, btw.
Got the NES with Mario, Duck Hunt and that running pad game. Wow, that seems like forever ago.
NES with Mario and Duckhunt when I was four.
Wow, you were a suspiciously pretty little kid. XD
My mother was always firmly against videogames so I always had to go to a friend's house to play their NES. I didn't own a console until I was in high school and I could buy a SNES with my own money.This was late in its life cycle. It was the bundle that came with Donkey Kong Country and I bought it so I could play Final Fantasy III.
For me it was also an Atari 2600, I don't remember how it got into my house, my big brother had somethign to do. Of course, it wasn't called Atari 2600, in Argentina, it was called Dynacom. I was... 7 or 8 at the time, i remember playing a Smurfs game.
I always remember my family having an Apple II, but I'll never forget the Christmas we got an NES. My parents had the bright idea of making it a family gift so my siblings and I all had to "share." Being low on a totem pole of 5 kids, finding time with that gray box was hard at first. Unlike everybody else that got an NES, we got the NES control deck (meaning, no SMB/DH pack-in) with Russin' Attack, Tiger Heli, and my first love...Contra.
While Tiger Heli is one of the worst games in my mind (it probably isn't really that bad, but I played enough of it to last my many lifetimes), the original Contra has carried an impact over the years for me personally. I'll still boot up the game now and then for inspiration. As an animator, I marvel at the game's achievements in the face of so many technical limitations. As a designer, I examine the exquisitely composed level layouts. As a producer, I dissect game mechanics and boss designs to see exactly how they rely on each other. But no matter the reason why turn it on, I always end up reverting back into a five year old version of myself playing it for the first time.
For me it was an NES. I got it in 1989. I played my older sister's Atari before then.
That picture is so cute.
NES on Christmas '91 with Super Mario Bros. 3. I caught my parents opening the present, playing it for most of the night and then rewrapping it.
Sega Master System, my mom worked at Sega at the time, doing businessy stuff. She continued to work for them up until the end of Saturn, my walls were coated with promotional posters and random cardboard cut out things and such! My favorite was a NiGHTS into dreams Mobile which was over my bed for years.
NES sometimes in the late 80's. I remember my brother opening and not know what it was. hahah.
Sega Master system back in 1987. Yes when I was like 8 years old. My parents wanted to buy me a computer but computers were too expensive, they considered an atari xe but those seemed more expensive.
So they got a sega master system. Video games in a cheaper but cool format.
My dad was a gamer so I grew up with an Atari 2600 though for as long as I could remember the start button was broken on the one working controller we had. That meant the only game we could play were the ones that you didn't have to press start to get off the title screen. That limited us to Donkey Kong(in which the jump button eventually broke) and Frogger.
When I was 12, I finally. Finally got a Nintendo 64, with Cruisin' USA because I played that game all the time in the bowling alley. It was a sweet day. That, and seriously. It took 6 years for me to play video games, when all my friends had NES and SNES.
When I was 12, I finally. Finally got a Nintendo 64, with Cruisin' USA because I played that game all the time in the bowling alley. It was a sweet day. That, and seriously. It took 6 years for me to play video games, when all my friends had NES and SNES.
First console was a NES. Got it for Christmas when I was 5. I remember being enthralled with it when, after moving to California the previous summer, I saw it at a new friend's house. I even remember that the game was Kid Icarus. The whole 'making the TV do stuff' just blew me away.
It says something that one of my clear, vivid memories of my early childhood was my dad and I playing Super Mario Bros. that morning. I played the hell out of that game, usually waking up at 5 in the morning before school to get in an hour on it.
We never had the money for a system as a gift so I had to wait until I could buy an SNES with my own money. It wasn't when it first came out, but it was still being bundled with Super Mario World.
Good times, good times.
Hmm. Does the ZX Spectrum count?
Oh the joy of actual TAPES loading to the sound of many many bleeps and beeps
After that, the NES and ZELDA - yey!
After that, Sega Mega-drive
After that, Sega Mega-CD (loved it)
After that, Sega Saturn
After that, PS
After that, N64
After that, Dreamcast
After that, Gameboy Advance
After that, PS2
After that, Gameboy Advance SP
After that, Xbox
After that, Gamecube
After that, PSP
After that, NDS
After that, 360
After that, PS3
After that, Wii
Phew!!
Another Sega Master System here. The original one too. Not the second smaller one.
I don't remember how old I was, but I'm sure it was somewhere in the late 80's.
Sadly after that one I would be without console untill the Saturn/PSX era. Meaning I missed out of the RPG golden era of the Megadrive and the SNES. :(
awe, lol cute pic fruit lol. I got my 1st console back in 1990 it was a Nintendo and it totally rocked. lol
My first was also the Atari 2600, even though it's older than I am, I think it works better, lol. My parents had it already when I was born. It introduced me to video games like Combat and Centipede, and also to cross dressers (Ms. Pac-Man).
I got my atari 2600 also in 1979. i remember being jealous of the kids who had colecovision
I got my atari 2600 also in 1979. i remember being jealous of the kids who had colecovision
My fist console was a SNES Bundled with Link to the Past. (The best Zelda of all time IMO)
I got MY first console in December '91 when i was 5, it was the SNES... we already had a NES, Atari i think... but they were both my brother's... the first that was mine mine mine XD was the snes and it came with Super Mario world and Mario all stars...
When I was a kid, my dad got a Magnavox Odyssey 2. It was - OK.
Then, nothing for years. It wasn't until I moved out of home, got married, months before my first child was born that I played through the PC version of "Final Fantasy VII".
After playing that game, I went out and bought my first Playstation, a copy of FF7, and played it again. Then I had to go back and buy all of the old consoles to figure out what the heck people have been talking about for all these years!
My first was either a Sega Genesis or the Brick gameboy. My brother brought them home at the same time and, consequently, made a nerd out of me. My games at that time were Sonic the Hedgehog and Metroid II. I had no idea what I was doing in Metroid II, but I loved Sonic and he ended up becoming my childhood hero for a long time (I still have my Sonic comics somewhere!)
Intellivision FTW! All my 'cool' friends had the Atari - but I never had one. LOVED the Intellivision.
the atari 2600 was my first one also, and i got 5 or 6 games for it at the same time.. really cool back then
We got one of the first "Pong" games...
Technically, my grandma had an Atari 2600 when I was really young, but we didn't get to play it terribly often.
When my parents got divorced, my mom went on a crazy SPREE and bought my brother and I a NES with Mario 3, and we had that for yeeeeeears, until the PSX came out. By then we had over a hundred games... and my brother foolishly traded the entire thing for a SNES with two games, which I later foolishly traded for a Playstation around the time Dino Crisis came out.
Awwwwe that pix is TEH cuteness!!!
I know we had an Atari (but by the time I was old enough to play games, or REMEMBER playing games - it didn't work anymore). I know we got an NES at some point, again I don't remember actually getting it - tho I have memories of hooking it up (possibly for the first time?) in the living room and playing Ice Climber - I'm sure we got the system with just Mario. We never had DuckHunt. Our first games were Ice Climber, Slalom, Wild Gunman and Balloon Fight - other than Super Mario Bros. Our cousins had the original NES system with the Mario/Duck Hunt, and original Mario Bros which I remember playing before we ever got ours. But I don't remember the actual event of getting the NES.
I do remember, and I guess this counts, getting the SNES. It was our Summer present - as we had no plans to go anywhere, or do any theme parks, so they got us an SNES instead. I remember playing Super Mario World for days on end.
And then my first system on my own - was the Sega Saturn - because I fell in love with Virtua Figthter. I convinced my parents to pay for half of it if I could save up for the other half (this was when it was $400). Basically my dad happened to offer me a job babysitting my little sister for a month (down at his house), and would pay me $200 total to do it, so I basically got my Saturn before I babysat, so it occupied my time over there.
Good times....
Haha, for me, it was the Atari 2600. The only game I remember playing was this really cheesy boxing game that had a top view of the fighters and the fighters were basically stick figures. But before that, I did had a pong "console"...if that even counts. It was certainly large enough to be a console.
I'm not sure what came first, the Coleco Arcade or the VideoBrain (look that one up if you want some obscure video game history - Lemonade Stand FTW!). It must have been somewhere around '78. I'd assume the Coleco came first and then we got the VideoBrain because it was "more educational".
lots of 2600 people here - my first console was a colecovision, believe it or not. you know, the one with the infamous smurf game (which i had)?
funny story, actually. coleco, you'll remember, was responsible for the mass production of the cabbage patch kids. well, burgeoning little gay boy that i was, i wanted one. of course, this was when everyone in the world wanted one. but i wouldn't be satisfied with just any cabbage patch doll - i wanted a girl with red hair and green eyes. yup. sucker for the gingers even then.
well, my parents discovered that coleco was having some sort of promotion whereby if you bought their crappy game system, the colecovision, they'd send a random cabbage patch doll in addition. it was actually, if you think about it, a pretty good idea to move product (i think this was after the system had been discontinued). only problem was, as i said, it was random. well, they figured any doll was better than no doll, so they went ahead and ordered the colecovision.
what doll do you suppose i got? a girl with red hair and green eyes. but i also got a colecovision, which had donkey kong as a pack-in. needless to say, the colecovision started me on a kick that the cabbage patch doll couldn't match.
Pc then, Pc forever!
I was save with Dune 2 for the Pc, the first game with a double click feature.
Atari 800, probably about ’85, the NES was just hitting big. My uncle gave it to us. He had a few Ataris and this one was extra I guess. He also gave us a slew of games. Most of which were utter nonsense. I never figured out how to take off in “jumbo jet pilot” or what the point of “squish ‘em” was. But “Joust”, “Star Raiders 2”, and “Journey to the Planets” we played on end. My little brother even locked the whole family out of the house once so he could get more Joust time. The games didn’t really have music other than an intro tune so we would make our own on my mom’s Casio-esque keyboard. That was player 2’s prerogative in 1 player games.
My dad invited a homeless man over for dinner once and he saw us playing and wanted to play Pac-Man. Luckily we had it but the joystick didn’t feel right to him. It wasn’t like how he remembered in the arcade and he wanted a surface to leverage. So for the next hour my brother and I set out to assemble him a reasonable facsimile of an arcade tabletop for the controller out of plywood scraps and old shelves. He was pumped and man did he rule at Pac-Man. He knew the patterns and had his timing down pat. He tried to explain to my brother and I that there were safe zones where the ghosts would never get us. We watched in awe but could never recreate the wizardry.
My uncle also gave us old analogue computing magazines with games. Not on disk but in code, printed. I got my first programming experience typing Atari Basic code in line by line. It took several hours of hunting and pecking and debugging my mistakes. And after all that there was no way to save, we didn’t have the floppy drive. My cousin was using it for college or something.
My mom didn’t game much but when she did she gamed with much zeal and broke our classic joystick and our replacement so finally we got a trackball. I still have my Atari 800 tackball and all. Still works fine aside from the keyboard missing a few letters. I got a new classic joystick for it and a sega controller as well. Every once in a while my cousins try to get it back from me claiming that I was just “borrowing” it. But I luvz it too much to let it go.
PS: I also later became addicted to Dune 2 on my compy 386 which I also still have but thats another story.
I'm feeling a touch old with the 16 bit first time gamers...
My first was Intellivision; My grandfather bought it for my cousin and I to play when we were visiting and spent the next 20 some odd years of his life trying to get me to stop playing those "damned video games". He eventually refused to take me to the Post Exchange (PX) on the nearby military base to purchase the Sega Genesis tax free, saving that $40 for a second game.
not counting the commodore 64, my parents railed against getting a video game system in the house for ages.
as the story goes, my mother was planning to buy an SNES for my younger brother despite my constant pleas for a gaming console. my grandmother told her that "wouldn't be fair, as it's all (me)he's wanted for years." the following month, she died fighting off cancer. the next christmas we got the SNES, for the two of us, because it was what Grandma had wanted. I got Zelda, he got Mario Kart and for our birthdays soon after, he got TMNT4, and I got Final Fantasy II. (we're winter birthdays.)
despite being sick, she still looked out for all us little ones, and having 6 kids of her own, that owed to a lot of grandkids. 11 grandkids, spread out all over the northeast and midwest is a lot to keep track of, I dunno how she did it.
I'm an embarrasingly late bloomer with this one, I always had computers and played on friends consoles. The first one I bought for myself was a PSTwo last year - it has since been joined by a DS Lite and there is a looming threat of sudden outbreaks of Wii in my future :).
The first I remember playing was one of my brothers Pong and the Commodore 64. My first though was an NES and Super Mario Brothers.
The first one I ever owned was an SNES that I got for my birthday back when I was maybe 7. Before that my parents had an old NES and a Gameboy
My parents had the original Odyssey and I remember them playing it before my dad died in '75, and we had a few different pongs after that, but my own first console was the Odyssey 2, around 1980. The only reason I even got it was because the keyboard made my mom think it was a real computer. And considering how lame it was compared to the Atari, I spent an incredible amount of time at it, but in those days consoles were what you did when you didn't have money to go to the arcade.
As much as an Atari nerd as I am, I never owned an Atari product until about 1998 when I first started trying to test the games I had written for the 2600 (using emulators and dasm.) I just bought my second Atari 2600 earlier this year, to get one with a composite video mod so I could plug it into a monitor.
this is really dating me....but
the Atari 2600 was the first console my brothers and i had.
I was really good at Breakout.
Years later, much to the dismay of my Parents, we saved our allowance and bought the NES. Talk about months of my childhood/teen years without sunlight...ha
Your picture seams so familiar to me. I'm sure everyone has some picture just like it.
My first console was a 2600 as well. I played Laser Blast (by David Crane) for so many hours that I actually threw up before I got to the !!!!!! score. I'm not sure why I decided to share that as my first comment ever...
ColecoVision!
Mine was a Sega (not a genesis, the one that came before that), though to be fair I did have a PC in my room before that, a little Apple II complete with 2 (that's right 2!) games: Lemonade Stand and Hard Hat Mack