Too bad.
LOL. Yeah, I had some “obtained” copies of things back then too. I suppose youthful transgressions can be forgiven, though. 
-Mike
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I recently got into IF pretty heavily, and 80% of this forum played their first IF game before I was born!
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Some people really dragged their heels about getting born. Me, I couldn’t wait!
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Me, I found the way out eventually, but it was not well-clued at all!
Twisty passages and non-standard direction commands…
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Silly goose. You just needed to type “exit”.
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I know which adventure game I played first, but I’m uncertain of exactly when it was. Probably around 1984? I was a member of “ABC-klubben”, which was a computer club for users of the Luxor ABC computers. At least when I was a member, its main focus was on the ABC 80.
Every now and then they would mail you a cassette tape with a selection of games and utilities from the library of programs. One such game was a text adventure called “Uppsjö”. It wasn’t particularly advanced, probably not even by the standards of its era. But at least the source code can still be found online and is surprisingly readable because it was saved as text, not byte code. (I’m not sure why it offered both possibilities, depending on if you used the “SAVE” or “LIST” command to save your program.)
I guess the most confusing part of it is the scoring, since it accessed the built-in clock by "PEEK"ing at some memory addresses to see for how long you had been playing.
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I actually don’t remember which was the first text adventure I played, but it was very likely Stranded by Superior Software. For the most part, Superior lived up to their name with the runaway hit Repton and the astonishing arcade-adventure Exile among their top titles. (When I say astonishing, I mean it. With the exception of Elite, I don’t think better use has ever been made of 32K. Exile is an incredible game.) That said, when it came to interactive fiction, Superior never really found their feet and Stranded is a rather dull game which doesn’t compare with what Superior’s main competitor, Acornsoft, was doing at the time. Nevertheless, it was definitely the first text adventure that I completed.
The other contenders for my first IF game are Classic Adventure, Melbourne House’s port of Adventure, a pirated copy of which was given to me by a friend of my parents, The Kingdom of Klein by Epic Adventures, which I’ve reviewed on IFDB, and Scott Adams’ The Count. The latter was the one that ignited my passion for the medium which has continued to this day.
All of these games were released for the Acorn Electron in 1984. Another game which was very important to me was the type-in game Return of the Diamond which was published in a book called Games and other Programs for the Acorn Electron. This game formed the basis of every text adventure I attempted to write in the 1980s. I remember the feeling of triumph when I managed to adapt its two-word parser to accept four words, and the exultation I felt when I successfully replicated the Scott Adams split-screen display. Unfortunately I never finished single game, and “Hotel Ghastly”, “Once, on a Blue Moon” and “Some Spies Have All The Luck” never saw the light of day.
I was an ambitious teenager nevertheless, and the plan was always to release the games under my own label, Bubbling Mud Software, (a reference to my New Zealand heritage - I have always been fascinated by geothermal activity). I even designed a logo, but that was as far as I got.
Part of the attraction of writing IF was of course the creative writing, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hanker after writing arcade games too. Sadly I was never able to get my head around machine code, so I was stuck with the limitations of BASIC. Unlike arcade games, text adventures didn’t need to be fast, so that was another reason to stick with text. I do other things besides writing text games, such as making experimental animated films, but there is nothing quite as satisfying as the combination of creative writing, programming and inventing puzzles that parser-based IF provides. It’s a pity that the audience for such games isn’t larger, but for those who do enjoy my work, I have no plans to give it up any time soon.
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The Hobbit in around 1982 on a zx spectrum. It came with a copy of the book which got me into three things, computers/programming, Tolkien and of course IF. Not bad for a text/graphical adventure game.
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I played Pirate Adventure by Scott Adams around 1985, so that technically would be my first adventure game. Now, whether you want to class that as IF or more of an original “old school” text adventure I will leave up to you. 
EDIT: Having (now) read other responses I will amend this simply to… First IF game I played was Pirate Adventure by Scott Adams circa 1985. 
Adam
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Yeah this can apply somewhat to me too, except I couldn’t even fathom how to move character sprites around in Basic. I tried learning from the mags, games books, other people’s games etc but it just never sank in. Whereas I almost immediately realised that I could create a sort of conversational “AI” by adapting the example code of Input A$… That took next to no time and I was happily telling my Plus 4 whether I’d had a good or bad day and getting some reassuring reply within hours of reading that first example. I’m sure I’m not alone in that experience!
That initial playing around with Input A$ led to my creating text description games similar to what I thought Pirate Adventure was. Bearing in mind I was about 7 or 8, so this was all very on the fly.
Adam
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I remember sitting by the Apple II on the third floor of Seattle Public Library. A man was playing Zork, and I remember this clearly because the description of the thief introduced me to the meaning of the phrase “over my dead body”. He offered to let me have a go, saved, and let me navigate the white house.
I was hooked.
My parents bought a Commodore 128 when they were brand new (solely because of FontMaster 128, which was the first home micro program that could handle English as well as Modern and New Testament Greek in the same document), and bought a bunch of grey-box Infocom games (yes, including Bureaucracy).
I used to play with SCRIPT ON to take the printouts to school and read during lunch, trying to solve puzzles I had missed. Partly this was because the computer was in my dad’s study, and I couldn’t use it when he was working on his language textbook manuscript.
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I think it was Pirate Adventure that introduced me to “flotsam and jetsam.”
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Same here. Pirate’s Cove as the cartridge on the Commodore was called, introduced me to those terms and also ‘flat’ as a noun other than short for ‘flat tire’.
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The Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls on an Amstrad CPC 6128, in about 1989/1990. It took up both sides of a 3" disc. An original, albeit borrowed, copy!
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About 40 years ago, my friends introduced me to Zork. We were playing D&D, ASCII dungeon crawlers, we even tried larping once. After college I gave it all up. Came back to role playing about six years ago. Rediscovered IF in the last year or two. Now I really want to make my own IF game.
What a fun thread to bump.
I played the commercial release of Zork I when it was new, or thereabouts. Even though I was a precocious reader, at seven I was not well-positioned to be beating adventure games. Things began to click a few years later. The dam broke in 1985 or 1986, I think, when I was able to complete Enchanter, Witness, and Wishbringer. I’m pretty sure it was '85/'86 because I beat Wishbringer when it was relatively new, and it was not the first game that I beat. Deadline, Suspended, and the Zork trilogy would come later. Years later, in fact. I think Sorcerer was next.
In '82 (E: more like 83-84 probably), everybody’s big brother had a pirated copy of Zork I, though I did see a couple of CBM-published copies as well. I lived in a c64 town. In my social circle, PCs and Apples were too expensive. I wouldn’t see either up close for years.
Arrival of the NZT/Status Line was a major event. I read it cover-to-cover immediately upon delivery.
There were other things floating around–I think I saw at least one port of ADVENT. Without any sense of historical context, we all saw it as inferior to Zork. I recall some truly bad graphical adventures–did anyone play Grunds in Space? Googling it is rather unproductive. I played at least one Magnetic Scrolls game. It was ok, but since there were more Infocom games than I could hope to buy, I had no real reason to experiment. I did play The Hobbit, since I was a massive Tolkien fan. I bought the Spider-Man Questprobe game for similar reasons, but it was hard to step down to its parser. I spent very little time on it.
At the time, I thought I wanted to be a game designer, but by 15 I was hopelessly fascinated with literature and writing. They proved to be jealous lovers. The thought that an arts-only background might lead to productive (and perhaps less-explored) lines of inquiry would not come for many years.
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I also played Zork right around 1980. My father brought it home and I was instantly hooked and I never looked back. Finishing it took years, I think, and a lot of help. I remember messing with that maze with tears in my eyes.
My second game was one I can’t remember the name of. It had very basic line drawings and was about rescuing a princess, and I remember hating the line drawings and wishing it was just text. Dad got me a few more Infocom games, but none of them particularly stuck with me.
I had a long hiatus in high school and college where I didn’t have a computer, but I picked IF right up again in the early 90s once I had one, and @CaptainSensible 's Snacky Pete’s Text Adventure Archive was my favorite thing in the world. Coming back to IF really caused some problems with finishing my degree, and I still lose track of time and deadlines when I’m playing a good game!
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I’m guessing I played Colossal Cave first in a fifth-grade summer computer course offered by my school (counting backwards must have made it 1982?) They taught us a teeny bit of Basic, and I remember the classroom contained as many Apple IIe computers jammed together side by side as they could fit around the walls.
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To this day I have a vivid mental picture of a dark grate with a coin glistening at the bottom and using a stick with some chewing gum stuck to the end to fish it out.
The legendary Scott Adam’s Mystery Funhouse was a shared obsession my friend and I had back in 1981 on his Radio Shack TRS-80. Before the age of walkthroughs, we sat and pondered and schemed and experimented for months. We never completed it at that time. Only much later was I able to finish it off on my own.
Interestingly, we both credit that game for inspiring us and kickstarting our careers in the computer game industry. We both joined Electronic Arts in 1988, and then went on to separate careers in the field.
Thank you Scott Adams for basically shaping my entire life from that moment forward!!!
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