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[darthlupi]

The topic is pretty damn entertaining!  I really enjoy reading about people's firsts, and some of these were fun to look at and play.  I liked Cows in Space especially.  Why wouldn't there be trucks flying at you in space?

My first attempt was in Qbasic, and I had a nearly completed graphical nethack style swords and sorcery game called HellStalker.  Gone, lost.  Hard drive crash and no backup.  Terrible feeling that.  Well, the game wasn't so great REALLY.  I did a pretty HORRIBLE job coding it. I had to clear the stacks and write out to file what was happening in the game every screen because my graphics engine was shite.

The first game I ever completed was Mage Craft.  I still have a fond place in my heart for that game.  Something of a cousin to what I was trying to do in HellStalker.

Mage Craft

It's fun if you like first gameness.  Very very rough around the edges.

[nayon]

Mine was Space, a trippy shootemup/platformer/adventure/racer on Klik&play. I was 11 years old. That was the high point of my career.

[Melly]

When I was REALLY young, like 4 years old, I pried apart a 5-1/4 inch floppy disk and drew a game concept in pen on the surface of the disk. Needless to say this didn't work, but surprisingly the disk still allowed me to read and write data to it!

You remind me why kids can be awesome.

My first games were Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games "programmed" in Hyperstudio, this early Apple equivalent to Powerpoint, around 4th or 5th grade.

OH man, there were *dozens* of those at my grade school. Hypercard was awesome.

Wasn't the first Myst made entirely in Hypercard?

Also, my first mostly-completed game is still the only one in my signature, Minus. the first serious attempt at a game was a Game Maker shmup with colored squares. I made some things with it that for me nowadays are trivial but back then made me feel like a programming genius.

[Squiggly_P]

First completed game I made was a simple text-based maze game where you had to find the key and then find the exit.  Did it in BASIC on the TRS80.  The first graphics-based game I 'finished' was a TMNT fan-game using ascii characters on the TRS80 Color 2.  The turtles were Green blocks with a 'head' block that had the headband color of the turtle.  The attacks were just another ascii line that came out of the block for one frame.  The enemies were just black and red blocks that would randomly appear and go after you.  If you didn't kill them fast enough, eventually there would be too many to kill and they'd kick your ass.

Playing it was like staring into a strobe-light, cause I was just clearing the screen and moving the blocks around every frame.

I don't miss the 80's at all.

[PDF]

My first game was a short puzzle game about a knight trying to escape from a castle which was under the control of a evil vizier who had zombified all other knights. By the end of the game, you had become a hero in the eyes of the still-human townsfolk, who you commanded to storm the castle, single-handedly defeating the vizier using the long-dead king's blade. I never publicly released it (due to its stupidity), and as such it was lost among the sands of time. The game itself took about 15 minutes to finish.

[Kekskiller]

an endless shmup

[angrygeometry]

do a whole load of unfinished RPG Maker 2000 games count?

if not, i made a platformer similar to Bollen, where you had to move a ball around a level collecting keys to progress. it was really awful.

[X3N]

I think it was a text adventure where you spawned in front of a pizza parlour with amnesia. It had a couple tricky (keyboard-input) related puzzles, and a surreal vibe.