I might be a bit older than you. My first gaming system was an Atari 2600 but I was also too young to actually earn my own money so all of the games that I ended up with were either birthday or Christmas gifts or borrowed from friends.
By the time the NES came out I was already working a part-time job, so I was able to make my own purchases and even though it was a very long time ago, I still remember the very first game I ever bought. It wasn't a great game, but then again, it was a very long time ago. I still remember the large amount of time that I put into deciding which game I was going to buy and I don't remember how much it was but I would imagine that it was around 20-25 US dollars.
The choice I made in the end was Kung Fu
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This was during the very early stages of the Nintendo and all boxes had a similar art style. I don't know if 3rd party games were required to do this as well or if 3rd party games even existed at the time. Regardless, all boxes had a similar art style and since there was no internet at the time or even very many magazines dedicated to gaming yet, you had to depend on the box and screen shots on it in order to make your choice.
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Looking back it is pretty remarkable to me that I found this game entertaining at all because it was so simplistic. We had very different standards back then though since prior to the NES all of our games consisted of a bunch of boxes floating around that barely resembled humans or anything really.
You jumped, punched, and kicked and except for that one wizard boss where you had to crouch and punch him in order to hurt him at all, there wasn't really much reason to ever do anything other than kick.
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anything other than a crouched punch would just result in him vanishing and taking no damage
The pink simplistic enemies wouldn't actually strike you, they would just hug you and drain your health. It was pretty silly when I think back on it. There was only 5 stages and once you had them figured out that was basically the entire game. The only thing to do from that point was to go for a high score and this was during a time where high scores were kind of being phased out in gaming in a general sense.
I was a pretty stubborn gamer back in those days and I would imagine I defeated the game on the very first day. It's not like there were a ton of controls to master on the NES after all. There were only 2 buttons. Some people have become insanely good at this game and the speedrun world record for completing the entire game at the moment is just over 3 and half minutes.
So that was the very first game I ever purchased and even though it just seems dumb these days, I absolutely loved it at the time
What was your first game purchase?