So why are we doing this, anyway? How did we get here? Why did we get sucked in? GGA asks, "What was your first videogame experience?"

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for me it was playing the atari game "raiders of the lost ark",....it was kinda annoying because it was one of the old style atari games where when the "bad" characters ran into indiana jones it would make a weird noise and slow indiana jones for a second. but i just remember getting so frustrated at this, and hating that game. not long after i found my true calling in the game "burger time" ....

-Cory Arcangel. Artist.

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many many moons ago, sometime in the mid 80's, on friends' Apple computer. Monitor was black, with green type, we were playing hangman...We were still relatively 'fresh off the boat', so I was in awe of the computer...Was hooked until parents dragged us to go home...

-Eveline Cureteu. Fashion Designer.

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First real obsessive banging the machine was with Street Fighter 2, watching with rapt attention as the local stoner (our guru) talked me thru the special stances taken to get that perfect with a Ryu or Ken type (see champion and/or cheater). This was lost on me because I was certainly the E. Honda / Dhalsim type (see foreigner in a foreign land), and proceeded to lose for the four odd years that my local convience store carried the original edition. I did buy pot from our guru (thus providing his money for quarters) for a year before realizing the true power of his special stance was keeping his challengers at almost arms length away from the controls, making yoga flames overly hard. I had some success later with Blanka (see misunderstood loner), and moved on to my current life perhaps a little confident.

-Daedelus. Musician.

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when i was like 6 years old, my parents bought their first computer. it was one of the first "portable" computers that ibm built; it was definitely not a notebook though. iit had to weigh 20 pounds and was larger than my current pc. the only reason i was interested in it, was for its gaming possibilities. the only game i had was lode runner... i played it for hours on that 6 inch, two-tone, brown and yellow monitor. and it was a blast. i love how you could create your own levels... even as a kid i could figure it all out.

-Ryan O'Donnell. Filmmaker.

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Oh maaaan I was so young! My brain was not fully developed yet. Mebbe 5 or 6 years old? My brother and I used to play Mario brothers and Tennis all day long. Back then, we were infatuated with picking our noses… so I remember our Nintendo controllers were smeared with boogers.

-Sona Terai. Management Consultant.

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I think mine first experience was at a Star Trek convention (Yes, I went to a few). There was a PDP-11 there (with a TTY terminal and plotter). They had a Star Trek game programmed into it. You would write down your commands (fire phasers at grid 14,28 : shields up) and they would enter them into the TTY terminal. Then the plotter would print a new map of everything (it was a simple grid-based game) and tell you what had happened. I found the mechanical workings of the plotter to be far more interesting than the game at the time.

-Will Wright. Game Designer.

Comments :

Posted by: jframe at July 24, 2005 10:48 AM

Posted by: strongfinger at April 4, 2006 11:26 AM

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