I wrote my first “game” on 8bit Yamaha MSX somewhere in 1993… I tried to make a clone of a game that I’ve seen on my buddy’s Spectrum - the one where you shoot badasses that pop out of the windows.
Lots of things changed since then and now I can’t imagine a teenager who wants to program his own game, considering abundance of megabudget games, that we have now.
haha i missed so much i guess. first computer here was a c64 in 1988 when i was 5 years old. and i was not allowed to touch it.
Hm. I guess I’ll be having a kid or two soon. How and when should I start teaching them some programming? What language should I use? Should I write something simplistic that will be compiled into another language or be interpreted for that teaching purposes?
You should start as soon as possible, and have them do LEGO Mindstorms. There is a lot of ‘problem solving’ doing Mindstorms… Language should not be important during the early stages.
HI ppls. i am 18 year old 
I am computer fan XD i play games a lot and i kno most of Progamms in my PC (i say most becouse some programms i dont use) I rhink my english is not very well but i want to learn Programm and make games 
I learn preaty quickly but i dont know with what i need to start All tutorials is not in my language and who is is preaty stupid :S And it is very hard to mee read in english and understand programming i read and dont understand nothing :S with what programming language i need to start and how can make 3D game?? To make game i need know programing?? Or i need to write scripts?? with what i need to start???
Currently the best way to do a game is to go into “mod”, for example the half life mods games. Sadly that even when you are free to the programming, you are required to known a lot about arts, specifically 2d, textures and 3d without counting the sound.
Other choice is to program a flash game, macromedia flash is “quite” easy to learn and to program but still you are forced to known about 2d (and vectorial) arts.
First time I used a computer was 5th grade in 1980, a commodore pet. Had used an atari 600xl after that and had my own C64 in april 1994. Didnt even have money to buy games or a disk drive, just typed in programs from books magazines and saved on tape. Did program a few games and other sorts of programming on my commodore atari machines since and still have some of those. These days I’m running a small business mainly doing computer support and audio / video transfers. In my spare time I still do some programming on my 8bit 16bit classics. Perhaps one thing from the old days we should bring back first, a programming language included on each computer, and the means for people to use it if they wish.
I remember my uncle “donating” an old apple IIe when my parents couldn’t afford a computer. My favorite times in early elementary school were in those computer labs. Must have been around 88 - 89.
I had to hack around on that old thing forever. Learned LISA and some BASIC on the school computers.
I spent summers in the early ninties with my cousin who had a 286 and a cheap modem. We’d go to the library and get books on BASIC and stuff and spend many an afternoon typing in those games and messing around with them.
My favorite was a book on cryptography geared to kids – really simple stuff about creating simple “ciphers” and “deciphers” to send your friends secret messages. We had sooo much fun with that. Inspired a lot of games both infront of and away from the computer.
While I tried to resist my leanings towards programming and math in my teenage years and early twenties (rock and roll n all); my destiny was sealed. My childhood fascination led to a career and a full-time bonafide hobby. I still program games for fun and even incorporate it into my music and art.
There’s just some elusive allure to it all. Like prime number theory. 
‘IIe’ was a typo. Meant ‘IIc’
My first experience was with a PC clone by Hyundai (yes, the car manufacturer). My dad bought it around 1989 to write his doctorate (I was 12 by then) and it came with MSDOS(?) and GWBASIC.
Around that time there was a science show for kids in PBS(?) called 321CONTACT, which published it’s own magazine monthly. The magazine had a monthly column called “BASIC Training”, where they presented you with a game written in,… you know, BASIC, which I typed into the PC. Not many of them worked, but that wouldn’t stop me from writing them. I can say I started debugging before I could write my onw code!
Then came high school, were they gave one semester courses on BASIC, PASCAL and spreadsheets.
Started my carreer by making Lunar Lander II on TI99 in 1980, published it two years later, so yes, video games taught me programming too…
I remember my first programming experience. It was on a BASIC cartridge for the Atari 800. I was 6 years old, and my dad showed me how to write my first program. It looked like this:
10 PRINT DANIEL
20 GOTO 10
Or something like that. I was unbelievably happy when I saw my name get printed on the screen over and over again, even though I didn’t really know how it worked. It wasn’t until I was about 11 when I discovered QBASIC and started writing text-based adventure games in horrible, horrible spaghetti code.
Oh, the memories. Now look at where I am; I’m currently developing an RPG for the Xbox 360 using the XNA Framework.
Quite the opposite of others here: I was a huge math nerd and wanted to develop my own implementations of things like complex numbers and linear algebra. I delved into programming languages, and then became interested in CS. But the math thing overcame me in college; I got a BS in EE.
I never really had enough patience or dedication to try and write a game. It seemed like too much work for making what would be a crappy game.
I want to chime in for the Commodore 64 crowd. I too did my first programming by typing in undecipherable code into the machine so that I could play a game. Excellent article Jeff.
So reading this thread has officially made me feel like one of the youngest people reading this… Most of you were programming computers before I was born :P. I didn’t even get properly into computers until this decade, and my first programming was 2006. Nowadays I’m working towards a degree in Software Engineering…
It sounds like it was way easier to get exposed to programming at a young age in the past. My first real experience with it was at 15.
When Parrot (the Perl-6 VM) was in its early development stages, I was so excited. There were no high level languages, just a very crude assembler. And out of nostalgia, I commited a classic BASIC interpreter and it’s first game: Hunt the Wumpus.
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cvs.parrot/2002/04/msg1606.html
(BASIC description at the top, Hunt the Wumpus down below.)
In its day, it found a LOT of bugs in Parrot and was useful for that. Dan Sugalski (the maintainer) seemed amused.
Sadly, it no longer works. My ISP was blacklisted from the Perl mailing lists (some compliance issue upstream) and PASM (the assembly language) changed registers, instructions, and made itself more friendly to “modern” languages. Bah. spit
But for a few weeks in 2002, I was back in 1982. Good times, good times.
Many years ago, my start was with a PET 2001-N. The real beauty is that in the next few weeks, I will actually have that machine back, the very same one.
I remember how mad my mom would get when she sent me to my room, and I would just mess around with my old VIC20 or C64.
I wrote a couple of games, but found, even at a tender young age, that I could make money making business apps. My first paying gig was an inventory control application for a small (3) chain of hardware stores in 1980 om CBM 8032’s.
I was 12 years old that day, playing a game of Snake of my father’s Commodore 64 ‘work machine’. Suddenly, the game crashed and code splattered the screen. After getting over the horror that I may have broken my dad’s computer, I found myself oddly tranced by the BASIC code in front of me, each line numbered by 10 with cryptic yet traceable instructions. I did my best to figure out as much as I could on the screen, and although I grasped a very tiny portion, I credit that afternoon as the day I became a programmer.
My dad actually had book called BASIC Computer Games (http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=cover) that contained source code for a handful of games (including Snake!), which I immediately began to replicate.
And yes, the challenge of wrapping your head around the logic was much more fun and ultimately more thrilling than than the actual game itself.
That Minesweeper video is priceless, by the way!
Wow, looks like we’ve got a small TI-99 crowd here! 8^D I’m in the same boat. I got my cousin’s TI-99/4A back in '89/'90 when I was about in 3rd or 4th grade after oogling their IBM for a while now. I started eating up the BASIC book it came with like mad. I’ll never forget spending hours on this bouncing ball program, feeling all smart because I read some where that the SAVE command would keep the program. And then shutting off to show my parents later. That’s when I learned about memory storage vs. disk storage. 8^D
That summer I took a summer school class (the non-remedial stuff) in “computer programming” The CS-1 class literally was trying to find the power button on the first day and I kindly walked up to the teacher and said I already know how to do all this. So I got put in with all the 6th graders doing BASIC programming on an Apple ][ for the rest of the summer. 8^D The rest, you can say, is history. Though I admittedly spent more time doing BBS and batch scripting (yeah, I can make QModem call out to the Zmodem protocol for the download since it wasn’t “native” yet 8^D) though my Jr. High and High School years, which is probably why I have my bent towards web apps today 8^D