Well it took me borrowing one video game to learn that lesson. "No, you must've borrowed it to someone else" when I asked.
First game I bought for my own pocket money, which at time, in Poland, was a lot for a kid as it was full price title, Baldur's Gate 1 in nice box with manual and a map, and dubbed gloriously with then-radio/TV stars, hell, the narrator voice was better than original. Needless to say I was pretty salty.
Anecdote: When I was a kid in the ’90s in Germany, I once went to a mega store to buy a NES game on discount. My final choice was between Defender of the Crown and, if I remember correctly, Wizards & Warriors 3, and I picked Defender based on the box art. Bad choice. In all my childhood years, I was never able to figure out how to play this game well.
Outside of the hours and hours of fun it provided (which everyone can relate to their first gaming system), I can blame it for introducing one thing: Piracy.
Buying games never crossed my mind. You copied them from friends, and that was normal and accepted. My parents didn't understand that it was, technically, stealing. They actively promoted it. I had 5 or 6 friends who also had C64s, and I don't remember anyone buying any games...ever. One of my friend's fathers had thousands of games, in dozens of "disk boxes", with every title printed out in a 2 inch binder so you could locate it.
Pretty bad, in hindsight. And yet, the software industry survived. Who knew?
I've never actually played (long story, but essentially my gaming tastes have been permanently stuck in 1998), so I was referring to the broader lesson in life. Glad to know the lessons continue to apply specifically and generally.
When I was a kid, my mother would take me and my brother to Blockbuster every Friday. We could each rent a game. Every time we'd go, we'd beg her to let us rent whatever the newest console was at the time (mostly Playstation, though we rented GameBoy Color a few times, too).
She'd give in occasionally. After we had finally come to own a PS1 and N64, my brother and I had a paper route and would buy cheap used games instead of renting.
It was a pretty good system because I wasn't good enough at games to easily complete the first episode of DOOM so my parents never needed to buy it for me. Indeed, perhaps 80% of my gaming experiences as a kid were off of cover disks and shareware with very few games bought.
The same thing happens to me with video games on a regular basis. Younger me simply had much lower expectations and poorer taste, back when a NES controller (with all of four buttons and a D-Pad) sufficed.
I remember my first game I had, it was a Star Trek game. I used to come home from elementary school excited to play it. I was horrible at it. But it was just fun to play, at that time having a game system was like owning a ferrari.
When I was a kid, buying a new game was nearly impossible; If I was lucky, I'd get one for a birthday present or a Christmas gift. Occasionally a cool friend would lend me a copy of something. For a very short time, I lived about a mile away from a video game rental store and I'd sometimes be able to convince an adult I was responsible enough to return the game and spend my own money renting a game over a weekend.
As a result of this, I'd spend many, many hours on the same game. I'd "beat" the game, but I'd also have this sort of mental model of challenges or 'perfect' gameplay that I'd try to achieve. It might be a score. It might be a time. It might be collecting all of a thing. It might be getting to a particular location that appeared to be 'off limits.' It was basically 'achievements' before there were achievement systems, but they were generally a lot harder and all the rewards for doing it where self-generated and internal. (I also spent a lot of time thinking about whether a thing was possible, and if it wasn't, why not.) This also allowed me to spend a lot of time on games that weren't very good and find some good within them.
This post reminded me of this, because Wing Commander (the original) was one of those games I played over and over again. (I can't really recall what my goals were for the game, but I remember it being particularly difficult to achieve them.)
I don't really do this with games anymore. Even in the case where I don't have the next game chosen and already in my line-up, it's easy to buy a game online and have it downloaded and playable within an hour. There aren't any surprises: readily available game reviews tell me basically exactly what to expect. On a game I particularly enjoy, I might spend some more time on it by gathering the achievements, but achievements really pale in comparison (in terms of both difficulty and reward) to what I remember of doing this myself in my youth.
It's like the difference between reading a novel and really understanding a novel at a deep level. I think I'd like to get back to those deeper dives; but with more money than time (versus more time than money that I used to have), so many excellent games available, and all kinds of other distractions, I'm not really sure how or where to begin. I'm also not sure it's just me, or if games in general have lost a sort of magic they used to have.
When i was like 10, every time my parents were grocery shopping i'd walk into the (attached) video rental store and ask for specific copies of a couple games that were hard to get. To date myself, this was likely NES era.
To me a good game is an experience to immerse myself in, and for some reason I have never managed to do so on portable devices such as mobile phones.
I played my first videogames on an Atari 2600. I remember Defender, Space Invaders, Night Driver, Pac Man, Adventure and River Raid. Then Super Mario Bros, Zelda, Battle City, and a multitude of titles on those '1000 games' Japanese cartridges with physical switches on NES and later SNES, many of these in [black and white][1]!
The SNES was my last console. My parents gave me a 386 PC-XT where I played a [version of Space War][2], Sopwith, Rogue, Falcon 1.0, Double Dragon 2, Sim City 2000 and Doom. On later computers I played Daggerfall, XCOM, TIE Fighter, System Shock, Thief, Subspace, Grand Theft Auto, Jagged Alliance, Far Cry 2.
Presently I'm enjoying Elite: Dangerous and Metal Gear Solid V on a Macbook Pro.
I remember! Baldur's Gate was a first "legit" game I bought for my pocket money that wasn't just "a game attached to a magazine".
And the localization was epic. It would be basically equivalent to all movie/TV star localization on the west. I still like the translated narrator better than the original.
Had one as a kid too. It was my intro to video games so I've got fond memories of it. It's funny I had a lot of fun with the games but didn't realize until years later that a lot of the games we had were just clones of more popular games.
For another data point, as kids in Greece we made fun of our friend who first switched to a PC, (we had Atari STs). Even after he got a Sound Blaster and a VGA card we still had better games like Kick Off and Dungeon Master. But one day he invited us to his house and showed as Wolfenstein. I distinctly remember the feeling. It was over!
I can still remember my first exposure to video games.
It was during my dad's (second) wedding. My grandfather told me he had something to show me. He brought me into the bar at the reception hall, and sat me down in front of a Space Invaders machine with a stack of quarters. The rest is history.
Just thinking about this now, I'm re-experiencing the darkened environment of video arcade, with weird electronic noises from every direction. I had a few quarters in my pocket, and I was trying to decide which machine to spend them on. The movies War Games and Tron may be iconic, but their portrayals of video arcades really didn't match my own experiences.
Paid $75 (in 1987 money!) for The Legend of Zelda for the NES at a Toys "R" Us in Colma, CA. Sold all my Series 1 Voltron (with the toxic paint) at a garage sale to finance it. Still the most I've ever spent for a game, and it was worth every penny.
When I think about how expensive games appear to be nowadays, I think back to 8-year-old me and the sacrifices I made.
I’ve run into a few people in my life who weren’t allowed to play any video games as kids. When they finally played one for the first time, they wouldn’t let go. It was wild. One guy basically lived in my dorm room for 2 weeks playing Metroid Prime on the GameCube, his first game ever. I thought I was just letting him play my game for 5 minutes, but no, he beat the whole thing and I never ended up playing again, because I didn’t want to start over once he had finished.
Remember when you could 'rent' games? I remember renting games all the time and then copying the discs so I could play them after I returned them when I couldn't afford a certain game.
My dad got my family our first PC for Christmas in 1990. Back then I didn’t know anything about PC gaming, and when my dad took me and my brother out to pick out games, our decisions were driven mostly by the box art.
The first game I ever bought was Sim City, which I thought had some really intriguing box art. And my brother bought King’s Quest V. Such a great introduction to PC gaming for a couple young kids.
And I remember when Lemmings came out, it had really distinctive box art. I had no idea what it was about, but I remember it caught my eye and I wanted it from the first time I saw the box. It turned out to be completely different than I was expecting, but also incredibly fun and satisfying.
Never judge a book by its cover, but choosing PC games by their box art worked surprisingly well!
First game I bought for my own pocket money, which at time, in Poland, was a lot for a kid as it was full price title, Baldur's Gate 1 in nice box with manual and a map, and dubbed gloriously with then-radio/TV stars, hell, the narrator voice was better than original. Needless to say I was pretty salty.
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