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…
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
@SQHistorian Good ole Leisure Suit Larry.
Still remember “buying” a pirated copy on two white 5.25” inch floppies from a local computer *store* 😂
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!
Full Throttle!
It’s funny to read comments bashing King’s Quest 3, because freak show over here (me) got into adventure games because of KQ3.
Before my psychotic parents got rid of it for being occultic, and replaced it with Space Quest 1 (not a bad exchange, I must say) I loved KQ3. I never got far in it, but it was just this open world for me to explore. The fact that wizard guy could just poof in at any time just captivated my imagination and made it feel like someone other than my character was out in the world doing things. It made the world feel much bigger than it was and it captivated my sense of wonder.
King’s Quest III: “occultic.” Here, have a game that starts out with a bloodbath aboard a spaceship instead. Good priorities. 😂
Same parents that let me play Manhunter: San Francisco. We’re clearly dealing with parents of the year, here.
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.
Technically Leisure Suit Larry was the first adventure game I played when I was 3, but I was just walking back and forth in front of the bar because I didn’t know what a text parser was. I think the game that actually got me into the genre was Myst, as divisive as it may be. I loved playing it with my family and exploring that world.
Planet Fall by infocom. I worked backwards to Zork. The mystery was so enticing to me!
@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.
King’s Quest 4 was the first game I remember playing. I was 3 years old. On a meta-level, Adventure or Dungeons and Dragons.
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).
It must have been either a copy of Skipper & Skeeto 4 or Voodoo Kid that we had gotten with the old Compaq my mother bought through work. Later I played Pink Panther: Passport to Peril that we had borrowed from the library.
That said, I didn’t become aware of Adventure as a genre until I was 13 and the adult at my after-school computer club put The Curse of Monkey Island on a projector and we all played it together. That was my gateway drug, as soon after I played around with a front-end for DOSBOX to play the first two Monkey Islands and Sam & Max at a LAN party.
Having missed out on the golden age of adventure games helped create the drive that is currently fuelling my preservation efforts at The Royal Danish Library.
Secret of Monkey Island on a Tandy 1000 SL
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
