Games From Your Childhood

[Guybrush]

So what games did you play as a kid?

Before we had anything else, we had Commodore 64. Most of the games were impossibly hard, but these are some I remember a little more fondly.

Skool Daze

Very cool game! You attend school. You have to do some tasks while also making sure you get to classes and stay out of trouble so you dont get expelled.

But I played Trapdoor, based on a slightly obscure British kids show, even more. You play Berk who lives in the basement of a castle and has to make his master meals. Sometimes, that involves having to open the Trapdoor and let out the monsters that live down there.

I love this game's weird and creepy atmosphere. I still do!

Another relatively forgiving game was Popeye, an adventure game of sorts where you have to collect kisses from Olive Oil and avoid various hazards. Weird, but kinda cool.

What did you play? 🙂

[Lexi Darling]

Before I got into console gaming, I also cut my teeth on PC games. I got my first computer in December 1993, a Windows 3.1 machine. And the biggest game of that era of my childhood was probably Chip's Challenge.

Many a night sneaking out of my bedroom to the computer room to play it until I got tired or my parents noticed.

[Psy-Fi]

My childhood was in the era before video games. We played various board games and various sports. Video games started to emerge when I began my teenage years in the mid 70's. This one was the first I ever saw and played...

Pong - Video Game Console/TV Game Commercial 1976

[Guybrush]

Wow. Proper old-school there, @Psy-Fi 🙂

Before I got into console gaming, I also cut my teeth on PC games. I got my first computer in December 1993, a Windows 3.1 machine. And the biggest game of that era of my childhood was probably Chip's Challenge.

Many a night sneaking out of my bedroom to the computer room to play it until I got tired or my parents noticed.

Oh man 😅 I don't think I played that one, but it sure has the look of a dreary early computer game! But hey, aesthetics isn't everything 🙂

The Nintendo and Sega Mega drive were okay, but Amiga 500 was the bee's knees in the early 90s.

We played Monkey Island 1 and 2.. I think the second game had like 12 disks or so. The hours spent playing those two games are etched on my very being.

However! Two other favorites:

It Came from the Desert II - Antheads

I'd sometimes sleep over at my buddy's and he liked to sleep long. On mornings, I'd sneak into the computer room and timidly play this by myself as it had a fairly creepy atmosphere.

Basically you have to investigate a case of giant ants and not only that, but people are turning into ants. Antheads!!

Great game.


Moonstone

Discounting the Monkey Islands, this is my favourite game for the Amiga 500 🙂 it's a sorta open world game where you play a knight visiting monster lairs and fighting monsters. There's also multiplayer and druids, dragons and gambling and stuff. So cool!

[innerspaceboy]

I was really into MS-DOS 5.0 games in my youth. The most memorable of these were WOLF 3D, Spear of Destiny, Pinball Dreams/Pinball Fantasies, Test Drive 2: The Dual, The Incredible Machine (a fun Rube Goldberg puzzler), Hocus Pocus, Cauldron 2: The Pumpkin Strikes Back (ported from the C64), Aldo's Adventure, Jazz Jackrabbit (a Sonic clone), Carmen Sandiego, Crystal Caves, and most importantly, the entire Commander Keen series.

Keen was easily my favorite arcade platformer on the PC. Still fun to revisit today!

[Psy-Fi]

Wow. Proper old-school there, @Psy-Fi 🙂

Oh man 😅 I don't think I played that one, but it sure has the look of a dreary early computer game! But hey, aesthetics isn't everything 🙂

It was about as simple as it gets but surprisingly difficult to master even with the simplicity of it.

I thought it might've been the first video game released for home use but I found a commercial for another one which precedes it by four years...

Magnavox Odyssey Commercial (1972)

[Hope]

I didn't play a lot of games growing up but I do remember playing the hell out of a handheld racing game similar to this one. Later on I would fall in love with Tetris.

[innerspaceboy]

Tiger Electronic Handheld Pinball was my favorite.



And The Internet Archive has a stockpile of a library of playable in-browser emulated LCD classics.

Check them out here: https://archive.org/details/handheldhistory

[GD]

Freddi Fish for 90's Windows computers is an early (if not the earliest) gaming memory for me and a source of major nostalgia.

This is the one I remember, except in Norwegian:

Through adult eyes it's obvious they were going for a fun and colorful feel, but I remember thinking some of the screens were actually kinda creepy, or at least a little mysterious, what with the dark deep sea hues and all. Definitely sparked an affinity for point-and-click's that has more or less persisted until today, though

[Guybrush]

I though I'd mention a couple more interesting Amiga 500 games that we played.

Hunter is a game I've realized, in retrospect, was pretty darn unusual. It was an open world 3D game in which you could shoot, blow things up, ride various things like boats, bicycles, tanks or even a windsurfing board. It was like GTA, only much shittier of course, but pretty good for its time. We had fun with it.

And I doubt this next one is remembered too fondly by many, but we played a lot of James Pond II: Robocod. The theme is quite catchy!

[innerspaceboy]

@GD I think Freddi the Fish was by the team that produced Putt Putt Saves the Zoo. I had that as well.

[GD]

@GD I think Freddi the Fish was by the team that produced Putt Putt Saves the Zoo. I had that as well.

Yeah, I think I've heard it mentioned alongside the Freddi' games a few times. Never came to my attention during my childhood, but then again the Putt Putt games might never have been imported here unlike FF. Certainly don't recall what Putt-putt was called over here if they did

[Lexi Darling]

I played the first Freddi Fish, I loved it as a kid. I still remember a lot of stuff about it, like the sea urchins you put in the bucket, and some of the minigames.

I also played Putt Putt Saves the Zoo and Putt Putt Goes to the Moon. I remember thinking it was so cool that you could change Putt Putt's color by giving him a paint job.

[degrassi.knoll]

In elementary school my friends and I really liked the books Stellaluna, The Little House on the Prairie, and The Pony Pal Club, so at recess we would play, respectively, games we termed "Bats," "Pilgrims," and "Horses."

In middle school, when we began demonstrating more exclusive behaviors, we created games that were cliquish in their playability - notably, "Shoe Shoe," "Charlie's Angels," and "Murder."


"Murder" was also popular among my siblings and cousins, and often entailed being "on the run" from our ex-husbands.

A game I played by myself was called "Alien Abduction" in which I would gather my baby brother in my arms and pretend I was going to make a sacrificial offering to my Extraterrestrial Masters until my older sisters got too freaked out and ratted to Grandma.

[DJChameleon]

OMFG this thread is so fun to go through.

My early pc gaming days were definitely the games that we played at school on those Mac computers that every school was being supplied at the time. So it was mostly games that were on floppy disk.

Keen the commander was definitely a favorite of mines.

Oregon Trail

Mathblaster I think was another one.

There was a Carmen Sandiego game.

Mavis Beacon typing game.

Treasure Mountain

I logged so many hours on Treasure Mountain. I couldn't even remember the name of the game though. I had to google search to find the name. All I remembered was that you couldn't see the character's face because between his high collared shirt and his hat cover his face that was it.

Number Cruncher was another one as well. I won't post a video of it since I already posted so many from the other ones.