Talking Point What Was Your First Video Gaming Experience?

I was born in 2000 but my earliest gaming experiences were with the PS1.

It would have to be playing the Atari 2600/VCS around 1980. The first console my parents bought when I was in my fourth year of existing. Combat was the pack-in game so I imagine that's what I played first.

I was born in 1996. I don't remember when i first experienced video games since i was very little at that time, but i can recall experiencing N64, PS1, Xbox, Dreamcast, GameCube, SNES, GBA, and a Famicom clone (since i am from Venezuela) in the 2000s, due to my family exchanging consoles frequently. When i started collecting games with my dad, we eventually obtained a 2600, Jaguar, TurboGrafx, Virtual Boy, ColecoVision, Intellivision, and other consoles along the way.

Mine would be playing Astro Fighter in the arcades some time in the mid '80s.

It's a fairly unique take on the Space Invaders formula where each wave of enemies has a different design and movement pattern, there's also a fuel gauge that only refills if you kill the boss at the end of the waves. Then it loops back around to the start.

Comm 64 was my first. Alphabet Maze, I think was the name of the game.

My first console was a Coleco Telstar Arcade. I don't recall if my family got it used or what but I do remember the trigger on the gun stopped working. In order to shoot, I had to pull the hammer back and release. I think I was 4 at the time, so 1979.

I've been down the gaming rabbit hole ever since.

Guess I land right in the middle- I started with the NES and a bootleg cart containing a ton of pre-1986 titles (including many that were otherwise stuck in Japan!), but this was in the early '90s, like 1992-93.

The NES stayed popular for a long time: well into the late '90s, at least in my family/friend circles.

Proper, I think it was getting a Master System for Christmas one year and likely playing Alex Kidd on it first. But I do recall seeing some other games on Apple computers at school, Shufflepuck Cafe is one that sticks in my mind, a handful of other games on the DOS systems of the time that I can't clearly recall, and maybe even a couple of C64 games too, like I remember seeing if not playing International Karate and such. Something like that. I also played random Game & Watch stuff and some of those stereoscopic Tomytronic 3D things before I ever got my Master System too, but I don't tend to consider those as really the same thing. And, I guess I possibly saw maybe a Pac-Man arcade or something like that before getting my Master System as well, but I don't think I actually ever played on any arcades until a bit later. So, yeah, I'd go with the Master System as the first time I properly got into video games.

Gen X here, so my first experience goes back to early arcade games like Space Invaders and Asteroids. Eventually knew someone with the 2600 and that got me hooked. I think I had the most games on the 2600 out of all my console systems until I got to the PS2; besides the PC. I didn't own most of the consoles between the 2600 and NES, but I had friends that owned most of them. Then you get to the C64 and that changed everything. It showed just how versatile a computer could be compared to a console since it could use a floppy drive. Games like Ultima were vast and Summer Games from Epyx that could incorporate both I & II to play a wider set of events blew away what was possible with a console.

I got the GameBoy for Christmas in 89 or 90. I voted 90s. Bundled with Tetris. TMNT Fall of the foot clan was my additional game.

Hmm. I suppose it depends- do we count games like Humongous entertainment PC games like Freddi Fish 3 and/or Pajama sam 3 as "Video games"? What about edutainment games on PC? Do they count? Suppose you could slide in Journeyman Project 3 as one of my first videogame experiences too, seems close enough to a real video game to me.
There is another game that was made years before I was born but could count- Super Mario Bros 3 and/or this one Sesame street NES game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJvWSRAtgHA (Which i remember creeping me out for some reason, maybe it was the games mostly having a dark background or the NES coming on so rarely that all these visuals dancing across the screen came off as magic to me), whenever my household got the NES loaned to us working. That's often the first game i jump to when i think of "First video game experiences", even if i wasn't around for when it originally came out. Perhaps i played them before the aformentioned Humongous entertainment games entered our household via a General mills cereal CD promotion? (Oh, maybe it was that DW the picky eater interactive story book, or that Toy story interactive storybook, or heck, you could even put in the GBA version of super mario bros 3 because that was the first non edutainment game i recall actually putting in effort in to beat.)
So yeah, you can take your pick on where gaming started for me, I suppose.

Right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKyyKVUm5DA

The one I count is a Joust arcade cabinet at Royal Video, Breckfield Road North, L5. Must have been 1982–1984.

Gun Fight by Taito/Midway in the spring or summer of 1976. I remember playing it in a amusement park that is only open during spring and summertime, and the game released in late 1975 so that must be it.

It didn't blow me away (played it mostly because it featured cowboys - I was 8), I was more interested in one armed bandits and pinball at the time (wasn't until 1980/81 and Donkey Kong I got really hooked on video games).

C64 in the early 90s.
Than Super Nintendo and Gameboy.

A Chocobon(TM) TV Pong machine, a couple of years before my dad imported a 48k from the UK and...well, no way I was ever gonna have a normal life after that, right?

PS: It was a knock-off from this Nintendo unit.

DS, specifically the Lite model, as a very young child. Can't remember how old I was exactly. Do remember that I had something 3 different ones at different time, one got broken, another was given to my little sister. I think between my entire family, we must have had something like 15-19 of them all-in-all. Mostly played LEGO games, I loved the Lord of the Rings one.

First gaming experience was a Pong clone machine that my parents had bought in the late ‘70s. Can’t remember the name of it but the controls looked like a Pritt Stick with the top being two stable to control the action. It had a few pong variation games such as tennis and a doubles thing where you had two paddles on each side of the screen. It also had a barely functioning light gun that you’d use to shoot a pixel that bumped about the screen like the DVD screensaver.

First personal console was the GameBoy that I got for Christmas when I was 10 the year it launched. It’s still working and in perfect condition to this day!

I was born in 1986. Sometime before I can remember my brother got an NES. Pretty much my earliest memories are playing Super Mario with him. This would have been 89/90. He showed me the secret mushroom, where to go down the pipes, which blocks had power ups. Eventually I could get all the way through. My imagination filled in details in the scenery that weren’t really there. It was all very vivid for me. Another game we played a lot was Kid Niki, a game which not many people seem to remember. It was brutally hard but the graphics and imagery, with these weird colorful ninjas and stuff really stayed with me. In that game I always felt like I was having a great run if I made it to the little house by the river. That’s like halfway through level one FYI! That’s how hard that game was, but I played it over and over.

My parents had an intellivision and an Atari XES (though we just called it the Atari). We got a megadrive when I was very young so not sure which I played first. I was born in 86 so I am guessing megadrive came later

I remember playing H.E.R.O on C64 and Hunchback loved those games still play them today on C64 mini I also remember getting Wizball for free in a bundle and for whatever reason didn’t play it but when I did I was hooked

Commodore 64 with Snake. I don't know what year but it was before 86. Been playing games on PC ever since. There was some console here and there but they can't hold my interest with a gamepad. Keyboard and mouse is my bread and butter. Gamepad is great in some games like 3rd person cause it feels tighter to me with the looking around and platforming.

My first console was the Voltmace Database bought from the Empire Stores catalogue. It came with Air Sea Battle, Earth Invasion (Space Invaders knockoff), and Maze.

Sonic on the Sega Genesis. I was barely old enough to hold a controller, but we actually have a recording of me singing along with the two-note Sega start-up music. I think I might have been around 2 years old.

I was born in 79 and my first gaming experience was playing NES at my friend's house in about 86. I got my own NES a couple of years later.

It was the Arcades around '84 thereabouts, and it was either Donkey Kong or Pac-Man that I played first, but I believe it was the latter.

One time my father played a single round of Space Invaders with me on my Commodore Vic 20 in 1982.

I vividly remember Space Invaders was a cartridge that plugged in the back of the Vic 20 and not a cassette tape as my father would have never of had the patience to sit through a 5 minute loading screen in order to spend quality fun time with his son on Christmas day.

Yeah Space Invaders was the first ever game I ever played....I enjoyed some of the modern remakes on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

My father is still alive and I haven't talked to him in ten years.

@UK_Kev
I've never seen a Voltmace Database console before or even heard of it.

My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 and first console was a Atari 2600

@MSX
It was a UK only console based on an Asian console. Voltmace usually made joysticks and other peripherals for computers. They then bought the manufacturing tools to make the Voltmace Database console. Earth Invasion is the best Space Invaders game I've played. It looked better than the Atari VCS version and had options like remote controlled missiles and with or without barriers. There was another Space Invaders clone on the system that was very basic. Earth Invasion replaced it.

December 1989, Christmas, we got a NES. Life changing.

Pretty sure my first ever gaming experience was Commander Keen 4 on MS-DOS. My god kid me was just amazed by what you could do on a computer.

The earliest gaming I can remember was arcades in the late 80s, so it was either Aliens, TMNT or the Simpsons when on holiday on the US in 1988, though it could be PAC-man on a arcade table (with a horizontal screen). On the other hand it could have been on NES or Master System in a shop display.

Born in 84, my earliest gaming memories are playing on my dad's C64, Wizball I remember playing a lot

My first experience with videogames started in the 80s when I was a kid, first in Arcades, then playing C64 games from a friend of mine and with a Game&Watch (Climber!)... then the NES landed at my home just in time for Christmas '87 with Super Mario Bros. and Kid Icarus

Hard call. I have vague memories of playing my parents' VCS in the late 80's when I was just turning 3, but my first true system was the NES just after I turned 3.
I vaguely remember, we had a choice between the SMS or NES and we chose the NES.
Played a lot of Super Mario Bros. with my dad, and Cool Spot with everyone.
What's funny is, I have a huge soft spot for the SMS nowadays.

Atari's 1978 arcade coin-op Fire Truck

I was very young, but it was a 2-player game on a black and white screen. One person sat down in front and their wheel controlled the steering of the fire truck. Another person stood behind the seated player and controlled the back of the truck, the "ladder" part. It was soooo cool!

SNES and Kirby Super Star in 1996 take that honor.