What is the first video game you remember playing?

Pong. Wow thinking of playing (and paying) for tabletop Pong blows my mind now.

Loved Asteroids and then Space Invaders. That's where my min wage earnings at the Ice Cream store went.

 

Circus. Pitfall.

 

Haunted House

 

Me and my cousin playing Super Mario Bros on his Nintendo.

My parents ignored every request of my childhood to buy me my own Nintendo so the only other video games I played were DOS games.

 

Galaga. Still the greatest
early video game of them all.

 

Hockey box.

Edit: Or Box Hockey, w/e

 

Not my first, but the TMNT machine at the local 7-11 ate a lot of my quarters. I even beat the game a few times, which was one of the few arcade games I ever managed that with.

Don't remember exactly what the first game I played was, but it had to have been something on the Atari 2600. Pac-Man, or maybe Pitfall or River Raid.

 

Even before my parents bought an NES so we could play Tetris, my grandparents had a ColecoVision complete with joystick/number pad controllers. I don't remember exactly which game was first, but I have clear memories of playing Pitfall, Q*Bert, and Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle.

 

Haha @Corky Ramirez up on 94th St.'s post just above this got me thinking "Does Mattel Football count?" and then BAM! Football II is still the absolute shit. I could play that game for hours right now (I have two of them somewhere--the one from my childhood and the one I got when they were reissued early in the 2000s).

As for quote unquote traditional video games, I'd guess PacMan at Pizza Hut/the movie arcade, followed by Kaboom & Pitfall on my best friend's 2600. We ended up getting Intellivision for the much better graphics (of course, those awful overlays pretty much negated whatever advantage the graphics provided), which was like digging the sorta cool hip band that never broke big. Sure, Atari was shit, but it had the rights to most of the big video games (Donkey Kong excepted) and that's all anyone really cared about from 8-10 years old. I loved how blatantly Intellivision ripped off the big games of the day. Pac-Man was Lock 'N Chase. Space Armada was Space Invaders (I mean, it REALLY was Space Invaders). Astrosmash was Asteroids.

Our Intellivision went on the fritz fairly quickly and I stopped playing it when that video game lull arrived in the mid-'80s. A couple years later, Nintendo is all the rage and I want one. My Mom says "You don't need a new video game system, you already have Intellivision." Sorry Mom that's not how it works (I of course would say the exact same thing to my daughter now). I kept pestering her and said I'd buy it with my own paper route money. She finally relented and that system had a far longer shelf life...I remember my future wife and I killing time by playing the Nintendo during a blizzard our last year of college.

 

Missile Command on my Atari 2600.