I find it hard to resist So Blonde.
I have several early gaming memories:
I had a Casio calculator watch with a numbers game that I played during classes in school.
I remember programming a 3D maze game on a CDC computer (ASCII character graphics, well, I'm not sure it was ASCII, but you get the gist).
I remember visiting friends of my parents who had an Atari 2600, and playing a game. Their kid held a joystick which wasn't hooked to the system but he was sure he was the one playing and was very enthusiastic about "his" success.
I remember trying to write Space Invaders on the ZX81, in machine code (not assembly, actual byte code; calculating branches was hell) using a Z80 instruction which could move memory, and having trouble with the line endings (I'm not sure if anyone remembers the ZX81's display memory layout, I could explain if anyone is interested).
I remember the Nine Princes in Amber game for the C64 (played on a C128). I was a Zelazny fan anyway, but I thought the game was incredible, because you could just type stuff and get more and more responses, and walk in shadow where you wanted. Well, there was a limit, of course, but there was a lot of freedom (with quite a few endings) and a lot of text for an adventure game. Plus I looked at the text on the diskettes (which was partically compressed, just some bytes representing words for compression, and I think I managed to decompress some or all of that) and found some really entertaining texts there. Never managed to find out how to get to them from within the game.
Edit: Forgot to say thanks, happy birthday, and +1.
Post edited March 27, 2014 by ET3D