[sysryn]

I had a subscription on a PC games magazine a year before I even got my PC, and when my parents decided to buy me one, I bought Broken Sword 1 3 months before I even got my computer.

I read the booklet inside the box a hundred times before I got the chance to play the game. And then after 3 months I got my PC and finally started playing BS

[XerxesLetifer]

Originally Posted by skeeter_93

When I was about 6 or 7, my dad got me a winnie the pooh adventure type game (you had to find objects and give them back to the right people) for our Commodore 64.

Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood for the C64 was the first computer game I ever remember playing! I don't remember how old I was (probably 6 or 7), but I remember playing it with my dad and I kept looking at the map included in the box and wanted to move diagonally, while my dad tried to explain to me yet again that we could only move up, down, right, or left (north, south, east, west). I also remember my neighbor had one of the King's Quest games on his parents' computer, but about that time Nintendo was becoming really big, so computer games got put aside for a while.

After we finally got our first PC, I played Sam and Max and Day of the Tentacle, but got drawn into First Person Shooters after purchasing a shareware copy of Wolfenstein 3D. My parents bought Return to Zork when it came out (having played the text based Zork games previously), but I didn't like the first person view it used, and the use of actors appearing on-screen didn't appeal to me. Once again, I drifted away from adventure games.

I looked forward to Starship Titanic, but it turned out to be a disappointment. Around the time I got into reading HP Lovecraft, the game Necronomicon came out, and was another disappointment. I think these two games are partly to blame for my hesitation in buying adventure games with a first person perspective.

It wasn't until about a year ago when I bought a discounted copy of The Longest Journey that I really got into the adventure genre with any sort of heavy commitment. There were a few false starts, but now I'm here.

(sorry for the long post, I tend to ramble on when I get enthusiastic about something)

[aries323]

I don't quite remember how I got into adventure games. But I do know that I bought a game several years ago, called Zork: Nemesis or possibly Urban Runner or maybe a game called Knight's Templar.

And that was before I even knew about the adventure games genre

[adrianp]

broken sword 2 on a demo-disk from some magazine... long time ago

[stepurhan]

Colossal Cave. Text adventure where you wander into a cave to find treasure. Very similar to Zork 1 with a similar approach to the logic of things sitting in a cave waiting for you to happen along (when I was young we didnt' have plots. )

First point and click was Maniac Mansion on the Commodore 64 which I got to celebrate going to university. Took me years (and many other games in-between) to finish it. My mind blanked at the last puzzle.

[Jelena]

My sister introduced me to adventure games when we were both in our 30s. She had Atlantis, The Lost Tales and we played parts of it together and I got really excited. I never managed to install that game on any of my computers though.
My sister had also mentioned Myst and I eventually got URU, Ages of Myst and I absolutely loved it and got stuck in adventure gaming!

[Trunkyo]

I also played Adventure (Colossal Cave) way back in 1985 on my uncle's Apple II! Transylvania, Mummy's Curse, Critical Mass, and Death in the Caribbean had really cheesy graphics but were still sort of fun, if not frustrating. My cousin and I would put our heads together and figure out puzzles while shouting command suggestions to my sister to type in, since neither of us could type very fast back then!

Some of these I've replayed in the last few years thanks to the Apple II emulator.

[Panthera]

My mom didn't get a computer before it was something almost everybody had. I think I was nine. She got me some children's games for it, and one of the ones I remember we played and I really liked was a game called something like "the magic strawberry", which was very adventure-like. Unfortunately it didn't work properly, and we could never get past the wood shop (or box shop or something like that)

I was never allowed to play "violent" games, so I didn't get into other genres. I tried Sims at a friend, and liked that.
One day we were at the library I found "the longest journey", that was exactly the game I was looking for, demanding brain power instead of reflexes and such. I took it home, and tried to install it, never coming past disk three.
After that I mostly played sim games and tried a few other genres - rpg and shooting games, but ended up being scared every time I had to fight.

A few years back I found TLJ at my bf's house, borrowed it home, and finally played it. I loved the game, it was one of the best stories I'd come across. I signed up to this page, and looked for more games like it, playing among others Syberia and Still Life..

[TheZodiacSpeaking]

Seems like a lot of people got their start with Full Throttle. The weird thing is when I ask people about that game no one ever remembers it. I guess I'm never asking the right people.
I wasn't allowed to have any consoles when I was young (no clue why). So I missed all the Nintendos and Segas and everything that came before that, but my dad worked as a computer technician at an oil company so we had a computer long before anyone else I knew had one and I played a lot of games on it, even though most of them were educational. My dad was one of those parents. If you weren't learning something every second of the day you were wasting your time. So mainly I played Reader Rabbit and Math Muncher (or some stupid thing), but when his friend would buy me actual games for Christmas or birthdays my father was sort of obligated to let me play them. He lightened up after a while and we even eventually played some games together.
He himself always had some interest in games, if only because of his friend. He would go over to his house to see what the latest thing was, but then didn't want me playing them. The oddest thing was he didn't really have a problem with violence or anything, just with things not being educational. When his friend gave me Doom and Quake I was allowed to play those; I just had to endure the lectures about finding something "constructive" to do.

[Nautilus]

I start playing and programming adventure games thanks to two MicroSistemas magazine articles published in Brazil when I was 13 y.o..

Micro Sistemas (Aug/1983)
"O mundo fantástico dos Adventures" (The fantastic world of adventures)

Micro Sistemas (Aug/1986)
"A aventura de programar" (Adventure Programming)

[Ksandra]

Myst. I don't even remember why my dad bought it, but the only PC games I'd played previously were things like Solitaire and Minesweeper and the first Civilization game. I took one look at Myst and was utterly hooked. Been an adventure addict ever since.

[TheZodiacSpeaking]

Cool. I never got into Myst. My friend and her mom loved it. Even those books that came out later. I tried it once and found it horribly dull and boring. I didn't get too far into it, but the story wasn't interesting the part I did play. It was too fantastical or something.

[TekPunk182]

Well, probably 8-10ish years ago (I was about 12), my uncle sent me a copy of the Journeyman Project 3 I think it was, where you travel through time in a crazy suit to Atlantis and El Dorado and other locales.

Later on he also sent me Monkey Island 2 and 3, and I loved those games.

I played Grim Fandango a few years later, but had pretty much abandoned the genre.

Then, last year, I saw my roommate playing Dreamfall for a few minutes, and thought it looked like a cool game. I started playing it, got engrossed in the story and the characters, and loved it. After that, I went back and played TLJ, which I had never even heard of until then, and have since been discovering all the old games I never played.

[Terramax]

Had Blazing Dragons and Discworld for the Saturn. The former I just completed over and over again until I clicked on every item during every time period in the game and memoriesed it all.

4 years ago I bought Broken Sword and Grim Fandango then found out there there were two great sites dedicated to the genre (this and Justadventure).

[Boblebad]

How can i forget how the magic all begun?

My dad worked as a computer technician for a steel mill back in the early days and through his job he had access to PC's before they became common. (IIRC we had a PC at home as early as 1983-1984). Anyway, one day he came home with a brand new type of game, Larry Laffer in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. This was brand new, you could not only control the actions of your character, you could actually TELL him what to do, what to say, what to ask and so on.

I remember driving my mother nuts asking her to translate everything for me, as as an 8-year old (playing an 18y+ game, lol), my vocabulary was naturally rather limited. At one point she apparently had enough and gave me a dictionary. I learned alot of english playing those games.

Later on, as the LSL-series grew, along with other Sierra On-Line games, my dad and I always had a kind of competition to complete the games first. With no internet back then, hints were not easily obtained (unless you went and bought a hintbook). Good times, I really miss those.

[Nelza]

That's very similar to how I got into Adventure Games. When I was five years old my dad (wow, most of our dads are perverts ) came home with Leisure Suit Larry.

I watched him play it in and remember trying it myself and taking ages to type 'open door' before the black dog would come along and pee on me. I was stuck in the bar for ages before my dad told me you could call a cab. So I would start walking towards the 'Hail Taxi' sign hurriedly trying to type 'Call Taxi' but would always wander onto the road and get flattened. I had no idea that you could simply stop Larry.

But I've played Adventure Games ever since (or watch my dad play the harder ones since I was five and useless).

[Davies]

Around 1979, shortly after I left school, my parents bought me a Texas Instruments 99/4, which was one of the most sophisticated computers for the home market at the time. (16 colours! And all on the screen at the same time! And it could make musical tones and sounds!)

I had pretty much all the official TI-issue programs, among which were the classic Scott Adams text adventures. Later on, Infocom started publishing their text adventures on floppy disk for the TI, and I accumulated a pretty decent Infocom collection as well. Not saying I finished all of these, or even started some of them, but that was the beginning.

Another official TI game that I played an awful lot was something we'd now classify as on the border between adventure and RPG. It involved exploring a randomly generated dungeon to find the king's crown, and had graphics and sound. One advantage of this game was that you could complete it in an evening. Sometimes twice!

As well as buying programs, any computer buff worth the name was programming in BASIC (from scratch, or typing in programs from books and magazines). The TI computer could produce graphics and sounds in BASIC, but the generic program listings in books didn't have any such provisions, so a lot of the time you'd be running games or other programs with pure verbal input and output. A text adventure was just another game of this type, only with more sophisticated output.

There wasn't the clear distinction between game genres that we understand today. It was enough of a minority pigeonhole to be interested in computer games at all.

[DustyShinigami]

I swear there's a similar thread to this cuz i remember explaining how i first got into adventure games. Never mind.

My first adventure game was Simon the Sorcerer when i watched an old friend of ours play it on his PC. It must have been in the middle of the 90s at least and i must have been about 8-10. I remember he had the demo for StS2 but i'm not sure if the full game was out by then or not.

Me and my brother loved to watch him play it and we found it really funny and cool to interact with loads of unusual characters and collect items to use in other locations. Plus the graphics at the time were (still are really) beautiful and richly detailed.

We managed to find the original double pack version in PCWorld a few years later for £10. I remember us having problems running the games smoothly on our first Win95 computer. I think some time after that we bought Titanic: Adventure Out of Time and that game was/is incredible to us. Another one that wasn't very stable on our system and kept crashing.

A few more years after that it was Broken Sword 1 on the PS.

[Rizu]

I was about ten when my father got an Apple II for my elder brother. Among the many games my brother bought that I eventually got to play was "Escape from Rungistan". I remember getting hooked on it because it was just such a different experience from the "Pacman" and "Choplifter" type of games I had been playing at the time. I got stuck a lot in "Rungistan" (that silly 'find the baseball mitt' solution took me years to figure out); I died a lot, too, but I couldn't stop trying to puzzle it out.

"Escape" pretty much focussed my gaming attentions on to other titles that would give me a similar kind of play.

[colpet]

I was recuperating from surgery and had a month off work. It was time to revisit Riven, a game I started playing on our computer at work. I was hooked, and also discovered an online community for support (GB). That was in 2001. Since then I've played ~150 PC adventures and am an active member in 3 Adventure forums.
However, I find myself playing less and less now. I'm not sure why, but I'm reading a lot more and enjoying the thrill of a new book more than a new game. I'm hoping to get more motivated in the winter (ideal gaming time), especially since I have close to 70 uplayed games on my shelf.