My first gaming memories

It's hard to imagine gaming not really being a part of our daily lives but believe it or not there was a day when you didn't even think about gaming because it was either pretty lame, exceptionally expensive, or got boring pretty quickly because there wasn't much variety.

My first gaming memories come from when I was very young and even though the stuff we were playing was really basic... I mean extremely basic when you consider what is possible today, we still loved it because we didn't know any better. To envision what is possible today on a PS4 or Xbox would just completely blow everyone's minds back in the 80's (or even before then.)

Anyway, these are my first memories of gaming in a general sense

At the arcade: Donkey Kong

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When this was released the machines eventually ended up everywhere. It was one of the first arcade games that made people in the video game industry realize that this sort of thing could actually be extremely profitable. The game seemed simple enough, but the apparent random patterns of how the barrels roll made it a bit tough to judge on what to do next. The sound was fantastic and the world had never seen anything like it before.

I don't know how many quarters I sunk into this machine, probably as many as my parents would let me have at the time. I'm sure there was plenty of crying and throwing a little kid fit when they wouldn't let me have any more of them.

Home gaming

I don't know how it happened, but we actually had one of the Pong consoles. I was very young and I should probably ask my parents one day where we got, how much it was, and why we got it. My parents were not into gaming at all but they did have 4 kids. I would imagine that they got it to shut us up for a while.

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Looking back on the fundamentals behind Pong, I can't really believe that we stayed interested for as long as we did because it's just a square moving back and forth with two paddles on either side. It's just so dumb to be honest with you, but we played it for hours and anytime a friend would come over they were very interested in playing it as well.

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I want to say it was a few years later but I'm not sure about this because my memories of being 4-5 years old are pretty cloudy at best. We, like almost every other family in the United States ended up with an Atari 2600 and Combat came with the system. Combat was a pretty crazy game because there were so many different game modes, i want to say there was near 100 of them - so we stayed pretty busy with this one for a very long time.

at Pizza Hut

In the 80's, it seemed as though every single one of them had one of these strange arcade tables... Well ok, they were not strange so much as they were awesome because two people could play at opposite ends of the table and it would actually flip the screen depending on whose turn it was - which was pretty mind-blowing at the time.

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As far as I remember these game tables were always Ms Pac-Man or Galaga and since we didn't exactly have a ton of choices back then, either one would do. My family went to Pizza Hut around twice a month and I'm pretty sure I looked forward to the game table more than I did the pizza itself.

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How about you? What are your earliest gaming memories? I'd be most interested to hear from people who are younger than me because if you weren't born in the 70's or 80's I would be willing to bet that your stories are going to be significantly different than my own. If you were born in the 90's there is a good chance that arcades didn't even exist anymore.