Hmmm, had to think about what computer games I played growing up. I remember playing Pong once on an arcade machine in the early 70's, but thought it was fairly primitive and uninteresting. Particularly after having seen
2001: A Space Odyssey a few years earlier, so had a much higher expectation of what I thought computers should be capable of. Didn't look at arcade games again.
It wasn't until my third year of university at SFU in 1979, that I came across a version of the text-based
Adventure game someone had ported to Basic for the North Star Horizon CPM machine. I quite enjoyed playing that, since my imagination could conjure up better images than any graphics game that came out over the next 10 years. I ported a version of that Adventure game to UCSD Pascal for the North Star a few months later to help me learn Pascal. At the same time, one of my Computer Graphics classes made use of a PDP-11/34 with an
Evans & Sutherland Picture Processor attached to it. Using UCSD Pascal again, we could create programs to manipulate wire frame images and large amounts of pixels on a 1024x1024 monitor in real-time. So we wrote a simple game to simulate a space craft flying into earth orbit with star fields in the background and coming up to a wire frame version of the 2001 space station.
Since the late 70's, I've written various versions of text adventure games in dozens of programming languages, primarily to help me learn the grammar & syntax, and find interesting ways to code the logic necessary for handling the game. For example, the verb imperative language parsing for statements like "kill the troll with the red sword", and data structures / databases for holding all of the text, objects & current game state. But beyond that, I didn't really play any other console or computer games, since I had more fun just writing text adventure games.
It wasn't until Nov 2006 when Blizzard offered a one month free trial for WoW, that I got hooked into playing it as as an escape from reality after my dad passed away from prostate cancer earlier that month. It had the feel of all of those text adventure games I had been writing for decades, and the visuals were about equal to what my imagination might create. Since then, I continue to play since I find that it is a pleasant avenue to de-stress from the day, and gives me a comfortable nostalgic feeling.