The First Game You Ever Played

The first game I ever played was Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Sega Master System II, which was also the first console I ever had. At the time I didn't know anyone else with a games console, I was born in 1988 and grew up in the 90s. The aftermath of the Video Game crash of the 1980s had left gaming the pursuit of a minority, partly due to the wider impact of the economic troubles of the 1980s that left a lot of people in the 90s broke to put it bluntly.

Consumerism in the 1990s in the UK centred around things that were cheap and mass produced, it wasn't unusual to buy more expensive things second-hand or used. The Sega Master System II was a revision of the original Master System released in Japan in 1985. I was around 5 or 6 years old when my parents picked one up around 1993 or 1994. It came with one game built into the system preloaded on the ROM of the motherboard, and a few other games that I played to death.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World was eventually remastered and re-released as Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX if you do want to try out the game I'd recommend that version as it is more accessible than finding the ROM and using an emulator. The remaster also has the option of playing using the classic graphics if you want to tickle your nostalgia.

The game itself is ultimately a platformer, with a few special levels where you can ride a bike, fly a helicopter, or swim, but the bulk of the gameplay revolves around platforming with limited combat. I never managed to finish the game as a kid, I would always die in the volcano level or the forest that immediately followed it.

The first time I actually finished the game was while I was at college which took considerable effort. I needed a walkthrough to figure out what to do in the end, the actual mechanics of freeing the Crown from the vault are convoluted, how anyone was supposed to figure that out as a kid I don't know. This obscurity turned out to be something that would follow my journey through gaming in the decades that followed, it remains one of my gripes with game development, Alex Kidd in Miracle World is particularly egregious considering you can "finish" the entire game and miss the key item you need in order to actually pick up the crown, with no way of going back if you missed it.

The game still holds a lot of nostalgia for me, since everything that followed is anchored to it. There are other games in the series but as far as I can tell continuity isn't maintained, they seem to be games that just recycled the character but in a different story or environment - their gameplay styles vary, Alex Kidd in High-Tech World in particular is an action-adventure game that sees the player navigate a castle interacting with NPCs with dialogue and completing basic quests, which again grow in complexity and end up convoluted, this trend of non-intuitive gameplay is one reason why my taste in games veered away from this kind of game when I was a kid as I didn't have the patience. The puzzle element of gaming is something I didn't return to really until the release of The Witness in 2016 - spoiler alert, that game will appear in this series somewhere.