Games that defined your childhood!

[KnightWarrior]

Pac-Man
Donkey Kong
Super Mario Bros. in 91
Astromash
Loco-Motion
Tron

[JDB]

Standout title are:
--------------------
Sonic 3 & Fuckles
Super Mario World
NiGHTS

[MIZPHIT]

[JDB]

Just like a real arcade: no people.

[MIZPHIT]

Just like a real arcade: no people.

lol

[sheath]

That's a great video, thanks for sharing. I wish there were games from '86-'92 in there but that is about it.

[Cornholio857]

Console specific games would take too long for me to list, so I'll just list Arcade games.

• After Burner 2
• Area 51
• Crazy Taxi
• Cruisin' USA/World
• Daytona USA
• House of the Dead 1/2
• Killer Instinct
• Mortal Kombat (1, 2 and UMK3)
• NBA Jam
• Outrun
• Outrunners
• Revolution X
• Sega Super GT
• Shinobi
• Super Hang-On
• Space Harrier
• Star Wars Trilogy Arcade
• Terminator 2 Arcade
• Time Crisis
• TMNT Arcade
• Virtua Cop
• Virtua Fighter 1/2
• Virtua Racing

...all I can think of for now.

[xelement5x]

NES would be SMB and Tiny Toons.
GameBoy was definitely Tetris, loads of Tetris with some Super Mario Land.
C64 was a mishmash of floppies I can't even remember, a lot of it was hacking around in the BASIC though.

But my real gaming nirvana wasn't until I bought my Genesis as a kid.
Hours and hours and hours of Sonic 2 while listening to Dr. Demento tapes as a kid. It's like a hallmark of my childhood. There was also a lot of Jurassic Park and when it came out Sonic 3 as well. There was an attempt to play Phantasy Star III at one point but it ended badly.
Then I bought a Sega CD from a friend's brother and played a lot of Sewer Shark, Jurassic Park CD and Rebel Assault, and eventually at one point I kind of dropped off gaming for awhile.

A friend of mine lent me Lunar: The Silver Star for Sega CD and I never went back, I was a hooked. There was also some Monkey Island on the PC, but I played as much of the Sega CD that I could. Eventually I bought PlayStation from a dude at my school that was probably stolen so I could play FF7. It opened up the world for me, since this was at the same time when RPGs were finally becoming a bit more mainstream in the US. Xenogears, Parasite Eve, and a bunch of other Squaresoft titles firmly cemented me in the anime/RPG camp and carried me through high school.

[Baloo]

OP mentioned Lego Island, damn that brings me back! Also loved the Carmen Sandiego games, Kid Pix, and Oregon Trail. Makes me wish I still was a kid! I had a whole lot of fun playing PC games, and today it seems like there just aren't games like that for kids anymore...or maybe there are and I just don't notice them, but I swear libraries still have the same software for kids that they had 10 years ago!

As for console games, Mortal Kombat II and Sonic 1 bring back great memories, as the Genesis got a whole lot of play in the house. I did a whole thing about that in my Stories from the Book of Genesis article: http://www.sega-16.com/2011/03/stori...enesis-vol-35/

And on NES, definitely Duck Hunt. Playing rounds upon rounds of it to see how far you could get until it got so hard you had to literally push the zapper up to the TV screen!

[j_factor]

Hours and hours and hours of Sonic 2 while listening to Dr. Demento tapes as a kid

You can play my Sega
If you really beg-a
You can play my Sega
'Til I turn it off

[Dirt Ball Gamer]

Well I grew up with Atari and then went all out on the NES (Contra, Zelda 1, Mega Man 1-3, and Mike Tyson's Punch Out really stand out in my mind as well as the crazy track n feild game with the pad you could run on). I spent a good amount of time at the local arcades too, spending most of my allowance usually.

When the Genny dropped sonic 1 became my favorite game to play at home. Then when Sonic 2 dropped my brother and I were obsessed with it, the whole super sonic thing blew my mind and the Death Egg and metal sonic were just awesome. I remember getting into fist fights with my brother over games of NBA jam on the genesis.

But the day that stands out in my mind the most is a day I visited KB toys in the mall and in the bargain bin I fished out a new 6 button ascii pad, Zombies ate My Neighbors, Rocket Knight Adventures, and Alien 3. I remember being super excited on the car ride home and reading the manuals for the games. When I got home I called up some buds to spend the night over at my house and we stayed up all night watching robocop, eating pizza n rootbeer, and playing videogames.

I think at that moment I became a dedicated gamer. Zombies Ate my Neighbors became an obsession of mine and I played it from start to finish a lot of times over the next couple years. Then after that the playstation arrived and I was absorbed into the world of 3D games like a lot of other people my age.


Edit: Shoot, forgot to mention all the crazy DOS and commodore games we used to have on the old computer.

[NeoZeedeater]

I somehow managed to play a ton of different games as a kid and so I don't define my gaming childhood by only a small number of them. I'm going to list games I played from 1988 and earlier (that was the year I became a teenager).

I was blown away by the arcade games that exposed me to the medium, the earliest I can think of being Galaxian.





I became of huge fan of the character-based games like Donkey Kong, Q*bert, Frogger, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Pitfall, Montezuma's Revenge, etc.. I would try drawing the characters but I wasn't very good at it.







Dragon's Lair was my first gaming disappointment. It was the game being hyped on the playground, it was a pricey 50 cents to play, and looked leagues beyond everything else (although suspiciously so). But when I went to play it, it felt like I had no control. It did eventually become a fan even if it's more for style over substance.


Early years were spent playing home games on others' systems (Atari systems, Intellivision, Colecovision, TRS-80, Game & Watch, etc.).

[NeoZeedeater]

For my 8th? birthday a family friend gave me my first game machine, a VIC-20. And my dad picked out my first cartridge, a cool little maze chase game called Serpentine.


And the best game I got for Christmas that year was Omega Race.


Astroblitz


Two-player battles stand out as some of best gaming memories -

Against neighbours, it was about Combat and Epyx's "Games" series.



Against my cousin, it was Archon, World Karate Championship, and Fantasy Zone: The Maze.



Against my dad, it was International Soccer and Leader Board Golf.


Against my uncle, it was Karate Champ and 4th and Inches.



Against strangers, it was Mario Bros. and Rampage. People got pissed off for not playing cooperatively.


The Karate Champ battles were at Chuck E. Cheese, the Nintendo-owned one mentioned in the book Game Over. The Punch-Out!! games really stood out for me as did Excitebike and the light gun games like Hogan's Alley and Duck Hunt (I think this was before the NES was out domestically).



Playing gun games at home in the mid-late '80s was awesome. I had missed out on earlier home gun games given how young I was in the '70s so I thought it was a new phenomenon.



Aztec Challenge, Impossible Mission, Bruce Lee and Space Taxi (and piracy) were the games that made me want a C64.




Skool Daze made me appreciate open-ended design.


Artworx and pixel tits taught me how to play poker.

[NeoZeedeater]

Super Arabian for the FC was the first time I played a Japanese import. The idea of different games from around the world made me wonder what I else I could be missing out there.


Lazy Jones was awesome because it was like a history of action video games in one package, and pretty groundbreaking for music as well.

I gained more appreciation for game design by tediously typing in lines of BASIC code from VIC-20 books and also from games that included level editors. The ones I delved into most were Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory and Penguin Land.



Besides Penguin Land, in my pre-Tetris game experience with the puzzle genre, Logic Levels was one of my most played.


Sega's "super scaler" arcade games like Space Harrier and OutRun were amazing. And on a less high-tech racing note, I thought R.C. Pro-Am was rad.



Text-based games fascinated me. The first I recall playing is Hunt the Wumpus, the first I owned was Pyramid by Aardvark Software (which sucked but I didn't know any better yet) , and the first high quality adventure game I had was The Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy.



The game that really impressed me as far as graphic adventures go was Maniac Mansion.


I loved action-adventure games as well. There were the big name Nintendo ones like Zelda and Metroid that everyone played. And there were other impressive ones like Fist II with its hybrid fighting/non-linear exploration gameplay, The Last Ninja, Blaster Master, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Zillion, Golvellius etc..





By the end of 1988, to me the pinnacles of home jump 'n run gaming were the SMB games for the mascot side, Contra for platform/shooters, Shinobi for the action-platformer side (or whatever I called them back then).




Turn-based RPGs and strategy games weren't played as much as other genres as a kid. I was first exposed to an early Ultima on the Apple II but it was too complex at the time. The first RPG that was manageable to me was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The Treasure of Tarmin. I also really enjoyed exploring in Seven Cities of Gold. And as I became a bit older, Phantasy Star blew me away. I had never finished a 20+ hour game before and it was epic.





That was long and I'm sure I forgot some equally important stuff but I didn't want to just
list a bunch of games by themselves.

[GameX]

OP mentioned Lego Island, damn that brings me back!

It seriously took a while until I finally beat that game, Lego Island! XD
Well, on my first game (when I was 7), I "managed" to get red bricks everywhere, except when freeing the Bricker. Then eventually, that dear computer on Windows 98 crashed, so I lost my data...

It really took a long time until I reinstall it... I had Windows XP. Replayed to it, got red bricks quickly, but when I was nearly done... the computer crashed again! XD

Until now, I installed Windows 2000 so that I could freely install it by myself. I finally beaten the game, in like 2 days. :P
Man, I really wanted to beat the game, y'know, just to finally finish the game that I never managed to finish at 100% ? XD