The first computer game I ever played

Remembering the exact first game I ever played is difficult. My school had Apple IIe machines, and so there I was introduced to The Print Shop and classics such as The Oregon Trail and Crosscountry USA (only my versions was *much* earlier than 1995), But even those these were "games", it was still filed away in my head as education.

One summer I helped my aunt, who was a vice principal of an elementary school in El Paso. I would move books and things around as needed, and in return I got 10 bucks a day. I was 11. I would take an hour break and sit in the teacher's lounge drinking a soda and eating a candy bar. One day though, I was bored, and I roamed around the campus. I went into the library and there was a machine sitting there with a game running on it. A woman was standing on a beach... there was a prompt blinking below her. The game was King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. I realized fairly quickly that the arrow kids gave me direct control and that I could type in what I wanted her to do. I explored as much as I could in that hour I had. I found dwarves in a mine, a fisherman's cottage, a glade with a unicorn, and even a witch house that I immediately knew to stay away from.

I was SO excited to go back and play it again the next day, but the library was closed. It was closed every day from there on out. I don't know why the library was open that one day, or why that game was loaded and running, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. At home I had Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, and a few other NES games. But this was different. Those games felt linear. They felt preplanned. Even if I had never gotten to Dracula myself in Castlevania, I knew that to get there I would need to jump and whip my way past all of his annoying minions. I had beaten SMB, and I knew that as long as I ran right, stayed true, avoided the baddies, and hit the level I could save the princess yet again. But I had no idea what else was waiting in the world that Rosella was in. Why was Rosella there? What was she looking for? What did you have to do to win? Could I catch that unicorn?? My head swam with questions, and I was so frustrated that I had no way to continue exploring.

Until one day I visited my uncle, and he had purchased a new game. King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. My eyes lit up like Christmas. He had no idea this was the game I had been waiting for. He purchased it because Radio Shack had it on sale for $19. I dove into that game and couldn't get enough of it. The day/night cycle, the haunted house, the grandmother (who was clearly a wolf!). And beyond that, I finally got to read the manual. I got to watch the intro. Now I understood Rosella's quest. I understood what was on the line.

This may sound trivial... but many games at this time really didn't make themselves clear. You just knew you were supposed to win. If you had a gun, you shot people. If you had fists, you punched people. Why? Who knows. Drug cartels, kidnapped girlfriends, monsters - any excuse was a good excuse to go on a rampage in a video game.

I did not beat KQ4 that summer. I actually ended up beating Leisure Suit Larry first (another game my uncle had picked up, and that I had to play when he wasn't around). But I did get far into KQ4, and a few years later I finally sat down and got all the way through it. I still play through it again every few years.

Years later I was reading online about the differences between the AGI and the SCI version of the game. Sierra had two different primary adventure game engines, with AGI being their original and SCI being the newer one. KQ4 was the one game they released under both engines. It was believed for a long time that all physical copies were SCI versions, and if they didn't run on your machine you had to mail your disks in and they would send you the AGI floppies in return. This, of course, would make original AGI floppies incredibly rare.

I was visiting my uncle in El Paso, a good 20 years after we used to play these games together, and I made an off-hand comment asking him if he still had the handful of old computer games he used to have on a shelf. He tossed his hand to the side and said, "Nah, I threw them out. I think the cat pissed on them." So I put it out of mind. Two days later as I was packing up to leave, he came in and tossed a boxed copy of KQ4 on the bed. Apparently, it had bothered him, and he had continually been looking for it. He found it squirreled away in a drawer somewhere. Inside, the original Radio Shack receipt was still sitting there. But immediately I noticed the system specs seemed off. This wasn't just any copy. This was a boxed AGI copy. Something that some folks online claimed didn' exist. It was worth some money, and I knew it. So, I told him that he may want to keep it or sell it. My uncle looked at me and said, "If you want to sell it and split it, I'm happy too. But if you want to keep it, then that is fine too."

He understood that the game meant more to me than its monetary value. He didn't know my complete history with the game, but he saw enough to know the game meant something to me. It means even more to me now. It was a game my uncle bought that meant everything to me in 1991, and then over 20 years later he gave it to me and now it meant even more. The fact that it happens to be a rare copy is just a fun fact. The fact I am lucky enough to still own the same boxed copy computer game that I first played... well, that makes it priceless.