USgamer Community Question: What Was Your First Video Game Death?

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Can you remember your first video game death? If so, what was it? We'd love to hear about the first time you were taken out in a video game. We've asked the same question to the USgamer team, and here are their answers.

Jeremy Parish, Editor-in-Chief

Game: Ms. Pac-Man (Arcade Game, 1982)

There was that moment, that terribly brief moment, in which video games were seen not as tools of depravity designed to lead innocent children astray from the path of righteousness and homework-doing, but rather as super nifty. In that instant of history, arcade games overcame the stark gravity of their seedy origins as coin-operated amusements for deviants. Buckner and Garcia produced a top radio hit about them. Disney made a movie about them. Christmas carolers changed "a partridge in a pear tree" to "a cartridge for Atari."

Truly, it was a magical time. And it was in this time that I encountered my first video game - or at least the first that I remember. I distinctly recall not only being drawn to this game but also totally grasping the nature of the thing, so who knows? Maybe video games and I had met before. But this was the one I remembered: Ms. Pac-Man.

My encounter with the fairer Pac came about entirely because of our society's temporary acceptance of the video game fad. We'd just come off the '70s, where things like pet rocks and disco and polyester clothes had been embraced with equal aplomb. All things considered, a burst of enthusiasm for video games seemed comparatively trivial.

But what it did mean was that video game cabinets were everywhere - even, for some bizarre reason, the lawn and garden department of Sears. Amidst the mowers, the sky blue of the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet beckoned to me, and I was able to convince my parents to bestow upon me a quarter while they shopped for lawn supplies.

Being barely tall enough to see over the machine's control panel, my first (and for the time, only) session with the game proved to be rather brief. I didn't even make it past the first maze before running out of lives. But I don't remember the failure; what struck me instead was how well I had done. I survive long enough for the first level's bonus item, the cherry, to start bouncing its way through the maze... and heedless of the consequences, I made a beeline for it and snagged the fruit. "I got the cherry!" I bragged to my confused great-grandparents, who responded with a kindly look of acceptance that served as a front for a complete lack of comprehension.

It didn't matter. I'd gotten the cherry, after all. Man, I'd kill to reclaim that sort of glass-half-full perspective on life.

Jaz Rignall, Editor-at-Large

Game: Tank (Arcade Game, 1976)

Unfortunately, this simple question elicits a long and convoluted answer from me. My birthdate being closer in history to the Jurassic era than the present day means I've had to dig back way beyond the KT Boundary to remember which video game was responsible for my first death.

I'd actually always thought I'd encountered my first video game in 1977, but as I just discovered, that is not true. The event that I thought triggered my lifelong affair with video gaming did not occur in 1977, but instead in 1976: a family vacation in which I asked to be excused from the boredom of sitting on the beach with my parents so I could sample the delights of the local arcade on the boardwalk behind us.

I had no money, which somewhat blunts the thrill of a location filled with pay-to-play machines, but I quickly discovered that gently nudging the "Penny Falls" machines could dislodge a few coins from a particularly loaded tier, which I could then give back to the arcade via the coin slot of one of the nearby game machines. This revenue recirculation would be a standby for me for years to come, as I used ever more sophisticated methods to procure it.

Being America's Bicentennial Year, the arcade I was frequenting was mostly filled with pinball machines and mechanical relics from prior decades. However, there was a small group of games with screens in the center of the arcade: a couple of Pong variants, which I'd already encountered as a home system earlier in the year, and a trio of coin-ops I'd never seen before, The biggest was Atari's two-player Gran Track 20, one of the first versions of the game that would become better known as Super Sprint. Flanking that was a single-player racing game also from Atari called Night Rider, and Kee Games' Tank.

I played Gran Track 20 first, sawing at the the thin-rimmed steering wheel while I pumped the industrial grade steel accelerator to drive my lego brick car around the overhead-viewed lego brick track. At some point I crashed, and that was my first video game death. Or was it? It just didn't feel like a death to me: more a prang.

As it was with Night Rider. I raced between the twin rows of white blocks that represented the sides of the track, eventually running wide on a corner and "crashing" into the game's rudimentary trackside barriers. But again, death seems like way too strong a term to describe the brief slowdown experienced before I carried on my merry way.

Nope, it was the third game I encountered where I finally met digital death for the very first time: Kee Games' Tank, a versus game very similar to Atari 2600 Combat in which players drive basic tanks around a maze and attempt to shoot one another. My first kill happened before my first death I'm pleased to say, so I can claim to have been successfully PvP-ing since 1976. But in that very same session, my opponent nailed me with a big square bullet, and my tank exploded into nothingness. I was by all definitions, most conclusively dead.

Kat Bailey, Senior Editor

Game: MadMaze (Prodigy, 1989)

My dad spent the majority of his career in IT, so we had a PC earlier than most. I clearly recall sitting and playing "Mad Maze," which was a popular online game released on Prodigy back in 1989. Mad Maze was a text adventure; and as in many text adventures of that era, death was extremely common. You could stride up to a gate and get killed by guards; summon a roc and get eaten; p**s off a wizard; anger a volcano god... the sky was the limit, really.

One of the earliest hurdles though should be familiar to anyone who has played a tabletop game-a troll at a well. During the encounter, you're given the option to flee; attack (bad idea); jump down the well (also a bad idea); say hello; stand your ground; ask for a drink of water; dare the troll to jump down the well (the correct answer), or challenge it to an arm wrestling match (in which hilarity ensues). For whatever reason, seven-year-old me decided that it would be a good idea to jump down the well, at which point I drowned. I learned an important lesson that day, and that lesson was, "If you encounter a monster near a well, don't jump down the well." I like to think that it has served me well over the years.

I never did beat Mad Maze, mainly because I didn't really have the wherewithal to map out my progress (Mad Maze was not a game you could beat by trial and error). In the end, I wound up wandering around in circles in the desert and dying of thirst. It did leave a lasting impression on me though; and hey, I did eventually figure out that you have to convince the troll to jump down the well. MadMaze proved to be an important life lesson and a confidence booster all in one.

Bob Mackey, Senior Writer

Game: Cosmic Creeps (Atari 2600, 1981)

I came into this world just around the time of the video game crash, so Atari products were always cheap and plentiful throughout my toddling days. Since most tiny children want nothing more than to exert power over the world around them-in other words, break your stuff-I gravitated towards video games because they let me make magical things happen on the family TV. Only through the power of a child's imagination, or perhaps recreational psychedelics, could the vague shapes of a VCS game begin to look anything like their depictions on the box art. Yet garage sales, flea markets, and hand-me-downs offered dozens upon dozens of relatively simple experiences that nonetheless captivated me.

The act of abstraction could also work against a game's favor, though. To a very young person, most Atari games had a somewhat spooky quality because they tended to take place in an empty, inky void, and make all manner of terrible noises-mostly sounding like a Sega Genesis approximating a hair dryer-upon your death. The worst of these was Cosmic Creeps, and though the cover art portrays silly cartoon antics, nothing was as terrifying as those stalk-eyed aliens to three-year-old me. It wasn't necessarily my own death that made the game so scary: After completing the Frogger-like first portion of the game, you're tasked with blowing up aliens tailing some of your human friends. You fire on them from above, but you have to be careful, since a mistimed rocket could explode one of your poor allies-and the fact that you could do this absolutely haunted me.

Nearly 30 years later, and I've gotten over my fear of Cosmic Creeps-but what should I discover when doing some research about the game? The instruction booklet-which I never owned-refers to the missiles as "boppers," and explains that these unfortunate souls simply get "bopped" in lieu of dying. Had I known that, I doubt my experience would be as memorable.

Mike Williams, Associate Editor

Game: Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1986)

I'm going to be 100 percent honest with you folks. I've never beaten the first Super Mario Bros. When I was younger, I just didn't have the patience to continue hacking at the game and I moved on (to harder games, but that's beside the point). Now that I'm older I just haven't had the wherewithal to go back and play the first game. I owned Super Mario All-Stars on Super Nintendo and I've since picked up the 25th Anniversary Edition for the Wii, but that's so I can go back and play Super Mario Bros 2 and 3 again. For me, Super Mario Bros is a vestigial tail; something the franchise needed in the beginning, but has since has moved past.

So my first death is in Super Mario Bros, because it was one of the first games I ever played. I've pretty sure that I died in a pit somewhere in that game. Probably in the first level. It was always the pits in Super Mario Bros. Enemies are annoying, but I rarely found myself dying against them. It was always an ill-timed or executed jump that lead to my demise. In Mario, like in Mega Man, the environment always ends up being deadlier than the enemies in your path.

I didn't beat Super Mario Bros because it was particularly hard. I got to World 8-4 and that's where young Mike checked out. 8-4 has to be traversed in a specific order to get to the end, and after what felt like years of going through the same thing over and over again, young Mike just said "screw it." I turned off the system, switched to a different game, and never looked back.