Allegra Frank:

Banjo-Kazooie

I’m not sure how old I was when I first held a Nintendo 64 controller.

We were standing in a Toys R Us, the games section, my sister and me. We’d always flocked to it, despite having no games and no consoles. But we had interest, and our eyes were huge as we stared up at a display that seemed to have the biggest TV ever created. I grasped the N64 controller underneath it knowingly, left thumb on the joystick, right thumb on the A button. We were going to make this adorable, dumb-looking bear run around, just like the people who were playing before us.

What would we do without video games?

I don’t remember the level of Banjo-Kazooie we played, or for how long we lasted. Whatever we did in that platformer — which must have been a few years old by the time I got to trying it — was enough to sell me on the N64 for good. It did more than that: It sold me on video games, period.

"Look at this big dumb bear in shorts!" my sister and I exclaimed. "He’s running! He’s jumping! He has a bird in his backpack! And everything he does is because I told him to do it!"

You start each game inside your cell, which sits in the center of the map. It’s the only place in the game where you’re actually safe. Outside your cell, the spider, the various bats and the crazy-ass robots all patrol the hallways at various speeds.

The spider moves slowly, carefully ghosting your movements through walls. It’s easy to avoid, which is good since when you trip over it you’re dead. The bats are more of an annoyance. When you stumble into them, they put you to sleep for a few seconds.

But holy smokes, those robots were merciless.

I waited until he got bored of the game and casually tossed it aside, going to play with some other kids. I grabbed the Game Boy, hid it under my jacket, and carried on with my day like nothing had happened.

Unfortunately, my child logic ran out pretty quick when he returned to his original spot to continue playing and noticed it was missing. He started crying, and while I felt really bad, I did not want to give up the chance to have my own Game Boy and Pokémon Blue, so I said nothing.

I handed it back, tears streaming down my face.

Along with the teachers minding the after-school program, we all searched for it until my guilty conscience finally became too much and I handed it back, tears streaming down my face. Upon finding out what I had done, my parents refused to buy me a Game Boy for a couple of years, until I turned 11. Looking back on it, the punishment was more than just.

I'm sure that I played another game before that. We had an NES and SNES at home that my sisters had grown up on, but the first really clear memory I have of a video game involves Pokémon Blue, watching the little pocket monsters come to life before me. As I'm writing this, I have Pokémon Moon on pause, the light from the 3DS' screen catching my attention every few minutes.

Just like that 8-year-old, I'm still mesmerized by Pokémon, but I now pay for every single Pokémon game that comes out. Lesson learned.

Justin McElroy:

Big Bird's Egg Catch

The first video game I have a concrete memory of playing was Big Bird's Egg Catch for the Atari 2600. I am impossibly old, just shamefully old.

If you don't reserve a space of your memory for early ’80s licensed games, allow me to refresh you. Chickens lay eggs and Big Bird catches them while "Turkey in the Straw" plays at a steadily increasing tempo.

The game is played with the Atari Kid's Controller, which was actually kind of genius. It was an oversized number pad, and games would be sold with an overlay that would label the buttons with the actions they triggered. For Big Bird's Egg Catch, this was a whopping two buttons: Left and Right. It is not a good video game.

Since the game was released in 1983, I probably played it in 1984. But I know for certain it was on a Memorial Day in Ironton, Ohio. I remember these facts because Memorial Day is a massive holiday in Ironton, where my dad was raised. In fact, the city plays host to the oldest continually running Memorial Day parade in the nation. I played Big Bird's Egg Catch with my friend Eric, my first best friend, whom I still keep in contact with today, even though he's since moved to Nashville.

I guess Super Mario Bros. would have been a cooler answer, but Big Bird's Egg Catch is the truthful one. I grew up alongside video games, and in those days, they didn't really have to be fun. It was wonderful enough, I guess, that they simply were.

I miss those days a lot, sometimes.

Matt Leone:

Gauntlet

I can’t remember if it was the first game I actually played, but the first game I remember playing was the arcade version of Gauntlet at an arcade on Catalina Island.

It was a simple enough game for someone young, since I had other people to show me where to go, and I could basically just follow them and mash attack to grind through.

It’s kind of interesting, actually, because these days when I play something like Super Mario 3D World with my niece, I see this from the other side, playing chaperone to someone who doesn’t always know what to do or where to go. So to everyone who put up with me slowing them down in arcades back in the ’80s, thanks.

Back then, I wasn’t quite the avid sports fan I would soon become, although I had started playing Little League baseball and following hometown teams like the perennially mediocre Yankees. (Like I said, it was the early ’90s.) Nevertheless, I was really into the idea of sports video games.

In case you hadn’t guessed, Super Baseball 2020 presents a modified version of baseball that takes place in the year 2020. Robots join the fray, along with men and women; the teams have names like Naples Seagulls and Taiwan Megapowers. In the sole ballpark in the game, Cyber Egg Stadium, glass covers the majority of the stands — shots that would ordinarily be foul balls or home runs turn into base hits after bouncing off the glass, while a drive must be hit to straightaway center field to end up as a home run.

The adults would sit in the living room, gossiping over shingaras and ghugni

But in all of that futuristic madness, what stuck out to me the most was the Crackers. You see, baseball is apparently a boring enough sport that transporting it three decades into the future and adding frickin’ robots wasn’t wild enough. No, the good people running this cybersports league decided to further spice things up by throwing land mines onto the field. If a fielder touched one of the Crackers, it would explode, sending them flying into the air and leaving them temporarily incapacitated. Steve Bartman ain’t got nothing on these things.

My parents eventually bought my brother and me a Genesis, but we never did get our own copy of Super Baseball 2020. That was fine. We almost forgot about every other game on the planet once we got our hands on NHL 95.