What was the first Game you ever played?

[Salnax]

It was sometime in the second half of 1995. I was not quite four years old yet. My mother, who worked part-time as a sort of consultant at the time, had recently gotten a shiny new laptop with Windows 95. I haven't seen that laptop in a while (I last used in circa 2007 when writing a paper for high school), but it was a thick gray thing that would be mistaken for a brick nowadays. It used the hard Floppy Disks, had about 1.5 GB of storage and under 20 MB of RAM, etc. I remember being impressed by it, and I suppose it must have been a good machine if I was using it for homework assignments over a decade later.

Anyhow, the Windows 95 came bundled with Solitaire. That's the card game with seven piles of cards that you have to sort through and organize based on numerical value and suit. Basically, the back in the late 80's was that people would be scared of using a mouse, so the game would be a low-stakes way of improving one's skills.

I spent a fair amount of time in the room in my house where my mother did her work, and saw her on her computer quite a bit. Naturally, I saw her playing Solitaire every ten minutes (Mom, if you see this, that was a joke). Somehow, between watching this and Sesame Street's explanation of numbers, I learned quite a bit. One day, when she was off doing something and I was curious, so I went over to her laptop, opened the Start menu, picked the corresponding icon, and started placing low value black/red cards on large red/black ones.

When my mother came back, she was somewhat surprised. This was the first time to her knowledge that I had ever touched that laptop, and I had apparently learned enough by watching from a distance to navigate the desktop, play the game, and do so using that little mouse nub that was used instead of the mouse-pads of today. That's why I didn't get into too much trouble for playing with the Big and Expensive machine for Mom's Work.

What's funny is, I was, and still am, pretty bad at Solitaire. There was a point around 2009 where I was winning about half of my games, but as a little kid, I was pretty pathetic. But when I was allowed to play the game in the future, I would often do so, despite the likelihood of failure. On the rare instance I won though, it was all worth it.

Best Victory Screen of PC Gaming History.