Ask the Game Trust: The First Game You Bought
2/5/2009 4:57 PM | 19 Comments | Page 4 of 7
Do you still own the game? The Apple and the game disc are long-gone. I doubt, even if I had kept them, they would still work. Luckily for me,
Zork was a classic, sort of like my first rock concert, the Ramones. I guess I just have good taste.
Would you buy it again (at the original price)? Nah, it's free on the Internet these days. Still, I miss the era of text adventures. It's hard to say if they represented some sort of golden age of games that we should hold in great regard, or just an interesting transition into the greater promise of the medium. Maybe it's both.
Steve Steinberg: DOOM (PC)
Why did you choose that particular game? My brother has always been into tech stuff. He was writing for computer magazines back in the early '90s, and I used to go over his place and check out what was new. Most of it didn't really impress me. Heck, why bother using a word-processing program when I already had an IBM Selectric? Anyway, one day I went to see him and he was playing
Wolfenstein 3D. The first-person perspective blew me away. And the fact that it was all occult-and Hitlered-out made it even cooler. Not long afterward, the first
DOOM came out.
How much did it cost? It came out on a free -- or really cheap, I don't remember -- shareware disk. You could play the first level for free, but if you wanted to play the whole game, you had to pay something like $39 or $49. I was so excited about playing the game that I actually went out and bought my first real computer to do it. I think it ran me $1,800. Unfortunately, it only came with 4 MB of RAM and the game needed 8 MB. So, I had to plunk down another $400 to upgrade my machine to a whopping 12 MB of RAM. All told, I paid around $2,250 to play
DOOM.
Did it live up to your expectations? It really lived up to my expectations. I used to have
DOOM dreams in which I was running around, getting attacked by stuff and seeing all my health info at the bottom of the dream. There haven't been many games that have wound up as the stuff of recurring dreams.
Do you still own the game? I still have the game -- mainly because the box is really cool and old-school.
Would you buy it again (at the original price)? I don't know if I'd drop $2,000-plus to play the thing again, but $49 doesn't seem outlandish.
Dan "Shoe" Hsu: River Raid (Intellivision)
When did you buy it? I really can't remember, but I'm sure I was in junior high school at the time.
Why did you choose that particular game? Way back then, before the Internet, before gaming magazines, I was on my own to determine whether a game was worth buying or not, and
River Raid's bad-ass box art sold me. I saw commercials for the game (it looked decent enough), but the packaging's depiction of a sleek fighter jet tearing though a canyon, missiles aimed at enemy choppers -- man, I was in little-boy "Top Gun" heaven. I had to have the game.
