Pac-Land. 10p per play in the cafe that my old girl used to go to in the mornings - she clocked that I wa I to that sort of thing and kindly got me an Atari 800 XE for a birthday or Christmas - I forget which.

It was all downhill from there.

Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country

Two great side-scrollers

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

Only because Sonic Mega Collection wouldn't work on the defective GameCube I had.

flashgames if it counts

I wouldn't call it a hobby, just some entertainment to pass the time/hang out with friends.

It was Counter-Strike 1.6. I didn't leave the house the summer I discovered it as a kid.

Mario Bros 1-3

The first game I ever really wanted to get good at was the arcade game spy hunter. The first time I got the speed boat was a dopamine high I've never recreated.

Counter-Strike 1.3

Memory, Monkey Island, Diablo 1 and Street Fighter 2

Age of Empires II

The early 90s Lucas Arts adventure games. Most notably Monkey Island 2.

Sonic 2. I was like 3 at the time.

Lemmings or Descent, I don’t remember.

I'd have to go all the way back to pinball, since I've always been fascinated with games.

But the very first video game that really sucked me in was Batman on the NES. I'm talking fully immersed; no awareness of my surroundings. Jacked in.

The music paired with the grim visuals was such a vibe. Just playing it made me feel cool. My parents had to drag me away from that birthday party haha.

I always clicked with it really hard as a kid, but my parents banned me from it, so I just wound up making friends so I could play OG Red Alert or Commander Keen or whatever. I also played Tabletop 40k from a pretty early age, which my parents were more permissive of. In tabletop I have a very good systemising mind, so I wind up being the rules person, but I'm not super obsessed about any one system (I am a little "obsessed" with how few people play something other than D&D systems).

Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22 started it, Toy Story 2 for PSX detonated it.

Breakout, Sokoban, Prince of Persia, Command & Conquer, Tilt!, Space Invaders, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, Fallout, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Wolf3D.

This was in the '90s but some of those games were already quite old by that time.

Daggerfall was the first game that really got its hooks in me. It had everything I wanted, a huge open world, tons of different items, getting to dress up my character :)
I must have spend hours just visiting every single town, playing tourist and just ignoring the story. It was all about exploring and role playing for me.

Pokemon games and older 2D Zelda games. I really got into it when I found Halo

Kingdom Hearts II

That game is the reason the X button stopped working on my PS2 controller when I was like 4 or 5

Probably doom/Wolfenstein 3D (the original DOS title, obv.)... That started the whole thing, but FF6 and 7 were also huge catalysts for it back in the day. I think FF6 on the SNES was the first game I was addicted to. I couldn't have been much older than 10 at the time.... I can't say that I really understood the plot, but I enjoyed it a lot.

FF7 and 8 were both fun too.

After FF 6, we got LTTP and that's also huge for me. I've fallen away from LOZ, because I don't want to pay the Nintendo tax....

Super Mario Bros 3. Never beat it until the Allstars version on SNES, but it's the first video game I remember playing. Or maybe it was Gauntlet, but SMB3 was the funner one.

Asteroids, the arcade game.

My dad bought us a multi game pong console, then an Atari 5200 years layer.

But we often went to arcades and got $20-$40 in quarters.

In later years I remember truly loving the Buck Rogers and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom arcade games.

First computer was an Apple II and I had about 500 floppies of pirated games by the end of its life.

Always always been a gamer. Also had a Merlin handheld game for car trips, which saw constant use.

For me it was more a system than an specific game. I got a second hand GameBoy when I was like 5 or 6 and have been gaming consistently since then. Probably the highlight of that period was Super Mario though.

Xmen arcade game

Motocross Madness 2, baby. That's when I knew...

Age of Empires 2 on my parent's crappy old laptop.

Myst.

Watched my dad play kings quest 2 when I was a kid.

The Little Big Planet series.

The first game I regularly played may very well have been Chex Quest. Unless you count Math Blaster. Or maybe Chip's Challenge.

Pokémon Gold, when I was 8, got it for Christmas. Technically my first game was Battleship, which I opened first, but I probably spent thousands of hours playing Pokémon Gold. :) I've played almost every Pokémon game since, up until Scarlet/Violet, which I haven't gotten yet, but maybe I will eventually.

Bubble Bobble on the C64 :)

First games i played were Pokémon and super Mario, but I think the first game that REALLY got me hooked was Banjo Kazooie.

Super Mario Bros. from the famicom

Neverwinter Nights and Roller Coaster Tycoon when I was a little kid. I watched my dad play Neverwinter and had to indulge in my own tiny fantasy to play as a "dragon." Still at it.

Couldn't give you the exact game that got me hooked, but I have been playing for pretty much my whole life. Earliest I can recall that could have gotten me hooked is either Yoshi's Story on n64 or some edutainment PC game where in one part you were moving pirate objects like a pyramid of cannon balls and other stuff away to clear a stone room.

Otherwise it could have been plenty of other games like some ps1 Egypt pharaoh themed game that was something like tetris or something similar.

Sonic Heroes

Evercrack and Diablo 2 were my starter games

Wolfenstein 3D. I had played other games before but this one blew my mind and made me a gamer for life.