I was introduced to text adventures in the fourth or fifth grade(the 1996-97 and 1997-98 school years) and played them off 3-1/2" floppies in a school computer lab with a mix of pre-iMac Macintoshes, DOS IBMs, and one Win 3.11 machine… can’t remember if I played on the Macs or the DOS machines.
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Sometimes I forget that all you adults were children too at some point.
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Worse than that: we sometimes forget too.
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Sometimes we forget we’re old, and then it’s a rude shock when we remember.
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Yes, when that happens to me (which is all the time), I dive back into code, a game, or an imaginary world. It’s a shame we have to take work breaks to earn a living like a credible adult.
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Not “sometimes” for me. I’m always surprised at how old I am. Every single time I look in the mirror it’s a surprise. I can’t explain why I never truly believed it would happen to me despite all evidence to the contrary.
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When I first played Advent, this was my network connection:
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That is so retro-cool, it circles all the way around to futuristic.
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My first modem was a 300 baud VicModem for my Commodore Vic-20. I still have it, although I haven’t tested it in decades.
I never had one of the fancy audio coupler types seen in WarGames.
1992, plus or minus a year. I discovered ADVENT by browsing through the online games available on my dad’s CompuServe account. By the power of having the mind of a seven-year-old, I solved the dragon puzzle without even realizing it was intended as a puzzle.
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On the getting old part, I’m reminded that the music of the 90s is as old today as the oldies were in the 90s and Pokemon is older today than Space Invaders was when Pokemon first came out, and the Gamecube is older now than the NES was when the gamecube came out… Though, to give an example closer to home in these parts, Galatea is older today than Zork I was when Galatea came out… and both are IF titles I first played circa 15-20 years after their initial release and have yet to complete.
Dammit, I just turned 38 last week, I shouldn’t feel this old!
Though, perhaps someone could help me identify a game from my earliest dabblings with text adventures. Again, I would have played it in the late 90s, so it’s an older title… What I remember is I believe it was a murder mystery set in a museum, there was a chalk outline of the victim in one of the first few rooms, there where blue and brown doors I never figured out how to unlock as well as a gray desk drawer and a safe with a two number combination, two ways to die included taking one too many rides on the rack in the exhibit of medieval torture devices and falling from the roof if you spent too long up there as it’s storming. I don’t think it was an Infocom game as I think I’ve played the intro of every Infocom game and none of them seemed familiar, but I could be mistaken.
The Vic-20 was my first computer. We has the mini-cassette drive for it but not the modem. Then we got a Commodore 128 before switching to a Windows 3.1 system in 1993.
I definitely played an IF game in 1993 when we got Prodigy then AOL but I can’t remember if I played any before that. I definitely didn’t own one for my Commodores but may have played something at a friend’s house, likely on an Apple IIe
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2014 for me. howling dogs was the game that blew open the door.
I guess I technically read some Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, but those feel disconnected. They didn’t lead me to text games.
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My absolute first IF was playing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the family PC in my cousin’s house while we were staying there on holiday - I must have been about 9 so can’t imagine I got very far, but I was already a big fan of the radio show (I had it on cassette) so it left a big impression on me.
But I only got into IF in a serious way after playing Digital: A Love Story and Fallen London in probably about 2011
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SRAM: an Amstrad CPC french IF (1986).
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I think that was my second game, not long after ADVENT, and it was my first introduction to Douglas Adams. I think I made it to the Heart of Gold but not without locking myself out by failing to complete the main puzzle on the Vogon ship. I didn’t finish the game until a decade later and not without relying on a lot of hints.
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I’m certain I tried to play Zork and it kicked me in the teeth.
Some time in the late 1980s I played Plundered Hearts and that changed everything. Still one if my favorites.
I have a distinct memory of being on some kind of chat or message board - maybe America Online? - and reading other’s posts about the perspective of playing as a female and how, um, “unique” it was.
Cheers!
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Rather than repeat my origin story, I’ll link to it in a topic from 2022 where people talked about their first IF experiences. Your first IF experience: a wholesome, welcoming thread - #34 by severedhand
-Wade
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I grew up loving point-and-click adventure games. Somewhere around the millennium, when I was 14 or 15, I got access to school computers with an internet connection. Among the first things I downloaded from some website legally purchased were a bunch of Infocom games, because I’ve always been curious about them. It took a few years for my English skills to catch up sufficiently, but I really started getting into IF and its scene during the late 2000s, when the comp winners were games like Vespers, Floatpoint, Lost Pig and Violet.
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2014 as an upper bound based on file system archaeology with 2010 as a lower bound based on Party Foul being one of the games I remember playing early on. So, nice for fitting a poll category neatly I suppose 