What was the game...

HMTKSteve

What was the first video game that you actually worked and saved money to buy?

I'm not talking about one you bugged your parents to buy for you or one you received as a gift.

I want to know what was the first game that you really put your ass in gear over and worked to earn the money to buy it.

I'll start by saying I put my ass in gear to buy the original NES and Legend of Zelda. One of my friends had it (only child who got everything) but since we still had an old Atari 2600 at home there was no way I was going to get one as a gift. I busted my ass doing lawns, delivering newspapers and all sorts of odd jobs around the neighborhood to get enough money to buy my NES and Zelda.

This was about 5 months after Zelda was released and I busted my ass for two months over the summer to get enough money to buy it. I think the console was around $100 and the game was about $40. This was 80's money too so keep that in mind!

I ended up buying it at a Kay-Bee Toy store and I rode the bus to get there. Oh yeah, the bus stop was about two miles from my house so I carried that box for a while too!

Apreche

I never really had that problem. Before I ever worked my parents got me games. They didn't get as many as I'd liked, but we got new games on a semi-regular basis. In late high school I got a part-time job making minimum wage. My first pay check was hundreds of dollars. It was easy work that made me tons of cash. It wasn't really tons of cash, but it was tons considering I had no expenses. I bought a computer, a GameBoy Color, plenty of games. It came easy though, I definitely didn't put my ass in gear or anything.

Jason

Though they lavished gifts upon me at Christmas, birthday, and every other holiday, my parents always had a strict no-frills policy during the rest of the year. I remember being 7 and having to save up my own cash to garage sale hunt for Atari cartidges. They taught me that if you want something you have to work for it. The first old Atari game I remember buying was Warlords. After that, I remember spending many, many hours leafing through old Shareware mags circling the PC games I wanted to try, pre-Internet days. You could order a Shareware title for $4.99 on 5.25-inch disks back in 1989-1992. Good times.

Rym

Honestly, I never worked a day until after I graduated high school. All of my income came from my parents, and they usually simply fronted me the money for whatever I wanted (within reason). I never asked for anything outrageous, so there was never a problem. The first significant purchase I ever made was the computer I built over the summer before I went to RIT, which I paid for with savings bonds and the money I made from my first job; the 2000 US Census.

(The above computer is to this day my primary machine).

During the NES/SNES days, my parents simply bought us games every month or so, and otherwise we regularly rented games from the local blockbuster. They purchased PC games up until I discovered software piracy, at which point the issue became moot. I stopped buying video games in college, playing almost exclusively PC games *cough* Counterstrike/Natural Selection*cough* with the $15 copy of HL1 I purchased from a bargain bin.

The first game system I purchased outright with my own money was the DS. ^_~ The first game was Quake III for $20 from Amazon.

Apreche

(The above computer is to this day my primary machine).

Yeah, but it's not the same motherboard, RAM, CPU or video card. You can hardly call it the same computer because it has the same case, optical drives and sound card.

Kiey

I remember the first game I traded games in for was Final Fantasy II (IV) I was hoping to get III but I didn't have enough money so I ended up getting II instead.

Brineshrimp

By the time my parents stopped getting me games, I had a huge amount of cash saved up and I didn't have any payments to make yet and I was making about $300 a month... but the first game I bought with my own funds was Tribes 2.