What games would you have someone play as their first games ever?

King of Posters
1

Hypothetical scenario, or maybe it’s really happened to you before:

An adult friend or relative comes to you with a question.

“I’ve never played a single video game before, but I’d really like to. What should I start with?”

They own no gaming hardware except for a Macbook from 2012 they use for email and an iPhone 12.

They’re willing to spend money to play games, but they live far away so you can’t set it up for them or easily walk them through it. They have next to no actual practical tech knowledge but they’re willing to read manuals.

Feel free to project whatever interests and hobbies on this person as you see fit to answer this in an interesting way.

Your goal: To ensure that they play this video game, they like it, and decide to take up gaming as a hobby.

What do you suggest to this person that they buy and play as their first game or games ever, with the hopes that they will:

  1. Be able to figure it out on their own without your help
  2. Enjoy it
  3. Come back to you with more suggestions
  4. Continue playing games
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2

Prince of Persia , Q*Bert, Myst .

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3

Warlords

4

Remember, they need hardware too.

They could emulate these but I wouldn’t expect the hypothetical person I described to figure out how.

5

Tetris

6

Which one?

7

Whichever, tbh. If they feel comfortable with trying it out on a computer, some basic version that runs on macOS?

8

I could see Tetris as a dead end for this experiment though. It’s very easy for someone to become satisfied with just Tetris and never seek out anything more.

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9

Q*Bert available for streaming online at the digital library (and if they don’t want to google “play Q bert online” they can always use OpenEmu which is as relatively streamlined as emulating gets)

Prince of Persia has an open source port they can just download & run (and the site has pdf guides to emulating the originals if they’re comfortable with a few steps)

https://www.popot.org/get_the_games.php?game=SDLPoP

Myst they can buy a close enough version on computer

or Iphone

Phone would work for Q*Bert too although it seems they’ve sadly delisted the official ports of that (and prince of persia) . they gotta make it easier to stumble into q bert

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10

Kirby for NES.

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11

imma beat that ass at third strike

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12

Barbuta

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13

Show them the cool boxart thread and let nature take its course

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14

Espgaluda 2

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15

yeah you can lead a person to Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! but you can’t make them Sid Meier’s SimGolf

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16

What things do they like that aren’t video games because that’s really important.

I would also say this premise is kind of implausible in 2025 since the Wii, DS, and iPhone are all twenty years old at this point. Everyone has played some game or another.

All all that said, Chocolate Doom and the base game fit in a discord attachment.

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17

portal or full throttle

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18

pong

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19

Galatea

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20

My actual serious answer is tell them to get an SNES Classic. Plug and play, wide selection of fairly straightforward games, no need to connect it to the Internet or deal with software updates, account creation etc.

Sales pitch: “The games included in it are considered all time classics, and many of them are games that really cemented my love of gaming when I was a kid. I think the majority of them hold up wonderfully even if games have become more sophisticated over the years. I’m sure you’ll really have fun with them and I can share tips and tricks because I remember a lot of them pretty well”

I think my only gripe with the selection of games on it is that there are two Street Fighter games on it but maybe discussing the differences between them with our hypothetical noob could be an interesting intro into how series iterate and how gaming subcultures interact with that etc.

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