Your First Nintendo Experience

[Nester the Lark]

This may be ground we've already covered on the forum, but if we did, it was probably a long time ago. I was just wondering about everyone's first experience playing a Nintendo game.

- What was the first Nintendo game you played (if you remember)?
- Were you familiar with Nintendo before that?
- Did you become a fan from that first experience, or did that happen later?

For me, we have to go back a long ways. I don't remember exactly what my first experience was, but it was likely the Atari 2600 version of Donkey Kong. (Although it also could've been an arcade game. Possibly either DK or Popeye.)

Was I familiar with Nintendo before that? No, and I don't think I was even aware of Nintendo as a company until the NES was out.

Did I become a fan from that first experience? Not of Nintendo, but I became familiar with Donkey Kong, as well as Mario. I recognized Mario when I saw him in other arcade games, such as Mario Bros (obviously) and Vs. Pinball. (This was probably also due to the Donkey Kong cartoon from the early '80s.)

So, yeah, this is basically a "how you got to know Nintendo" kind of thread.

[nocturnal YL]

I was born in 1989.

My first Nintendo experience was quite orthodox. As an almost-2-year-old child (actually, how old was I exactly? Must be younger than 4, but my memories are blurry), played Super Mario Bros. 1 (well, more like saw others play it) in a relative's home. They also had TwinBee and City Connection. It was then when I knew about Mario and Luigi, and how SMB1 looked like up to World 1-3.

There, I also incorrectly got the impression that Luigi means 2. As a result, when I got to play Super Mario All-Stars later, I thought Luigi Game in The Lost Levels was a 2-player mode.

My mother had a Game Boy when I was 4, and, since I was a young child, I didn't get far in both Super Mario Land and Tetris. We also had this little gem.

My family had a home console when I was 5, with another relative lending us a Super Famicom (it was then 1994 already), with Super Mario World and Aladdin. I became aware of Nintendo as a company at that time, although my go-to games were the Super Bomberman series.

By the way, I played Super Famicom and N64 games with backup devices that play ROMs off floppy disks and CD-R discs (Game Doctor SF3, Doctor V64). I was a child back then, and my father was the one playing for the most part (though he now claims to be too old for action, preferring puzzles and escape games instead). Yep, I can not-so-proudly say that my homeland's favourite pastime was to actively harm the software industry. On the flip side, pirates get to have extended exposure of what the industry has to offer, although it doesn't mean much if said pirates don't eventually go back to buying legitimate software.

Here's another trivia: I thought Pokémon was a game based on an anime, not the other way around, until I played Smash 64. Didn't matter either way; I wasn't even attracted to RPGs in general until much, much later with Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones.

As for becoming a Nintendo fan, that happend when Melee came out. In retrospect, it was a rather foolish thing; I went so far as to denounce every other publisher, keeping a pure Nintendo profile for the most of GameCube and Wii's lifecycle. Eventually, I ran out of Nintendo franchises I could like, and there was also this realization that such a mentality was good for neither me as a player nor Nintendo as a console manufacturer, so I started looking elsewhere. I now think of myself as less of a Nintendo fan and more of a fan of several series that happen to be from Nintendo.

[The Qu]

It's a tossup for me. I had an uncle who had a SNES and Super Mario World. That's likely the first time I played any Nintendo game. The Pizza Hut my family went to back in the day had one of those SNES arcade cabinets with Mario All-Stars, so that's also a possibility.

I was likely already familiar with Mario as an advertising icon, but we're talking real young here, so it doesn't really matter. I know I had a Super Mario Bros. Super Show VHS around that time.

Did it make me a fan? Yeah, probably. I've been playing Nintendo games from such a young age, though, it's sort of a moot question. Only console I had before getting a SNES myself was a Genesis, and that was when I was 4. Not much time to *not* be a game fan.

[Evie ❤✿]

For me, I was born in the early 90s. As such the Game Boy era and Pokémon was very relevant to me, with many people at school liking these games and the later Game Boy Advance games (and my brother once liking it as well, but he now focuses on The Legend of Zelda which he is a big fan of (like he even cosplayed as Link for Halloween), and just preferred Generation I) and I've always had a natural love for animals and technology. Also when we got to secondary school, I would play Mario Kart DS with my friend but we lost touch. I'm still building on my real world social skills, but accepted it's OK to be shy as well. I was a more of an introvert then, now I am an ambivert. Me and my friend also played the non-Nintendo MMORPG Runescape.

Edit: As for actual first game I played, I'm unsure, my brother had a SNES so it could have been one of those games and one time we were playing Super Mario All-Stars, pulled out the controller quickly or some exploit like that and it glitched out (on Nintendo 64 its common knowledge there is such a thing as 'crooked cartridge' where you gently lift the side of a Game Pak - a well known exploit being a corrupted model Mario in Super Mario 64. There is actually an obscure exploit for the original Nintendo DS where you place the DS in Sleep Mode and quickly eject and reinsert the cartridge, presumably disabling new specific instructions from the ROM - you can get the crash debugger in Super Mario 64 DS, Animal Crossing (I think), New Super Mario Bros. that way). I do remember playing Pokémon Yellow at a certain point, which we found at a car boot sale (like an American garage sale but you go out into an open space park a car and set up goods, typically from a collapsible table). At that time it was much more often you would find things like Game Boy games there, I even remember there was a Game Boy bootleg of a certain game. I bought it by mistake because I was young and naive, but I personally don't believe in paying for them or collecting them so we just took it back.