....Oh dear god. The machines are trying to communicate with us.
I guess my first game was Oregon Trail (the *original* Oregon Trail for Apple ][). First time I ever played a game until the sun came up was when I was about 9 or 10 and borrowed a friend's copy of Silent Service for the C64. My mainstays back in the day were Gunship, Silent Service, Ultima III and IV, and all those wonderful TSR Gold Box games. But then I had a network of friends who were into the early BBS and demo scene, so I wound up with racks full of hand-punched floppies containing the weirdest assortment of coin-op conversions and homebrewed knockoffs. Most of those games came with absolutely no instructions, so I wound up learning how to figure out how a game worked really, really fast. Which is a critical thinking skill that I still find incredibly useful to this day.
EDIT: Oh shits, and ELITE. How could I forget you, my vector-based open-universe friend? Spent many a white-knuckle moment trying to dock without getting killed, until I could save up the credits for an auto-docking system. The strains of the Blue Danube Waltz never sounded so sweet.
Oh, and Mail Order Monsters, Lords of Conquest, Roadwar 2000, Mobius, Legacy of the Ancients, Bard's Tale II, Racing Destruction Set, Starflight...man, what the hell happened to EA? They used to be the macdaddy of awesome game companies.