D&D, got the basic set and went wild from there, eventually got the AD&D books and really had a ball. You never forget your first set of dice. I still have them too.
Dude... SPOILERS! I remember sitting around the campfire with my uncles back when we used to go camping every summer playing their old purple box D&D set. I also remember the original Bard's Tale, way back from the wayback when dinosaurs roamed the earth and floppy disks were... well, floppy. And you needed like 20 of them to fit one game on, heh. Surprisingly, as much as I liked to read back in the day, I never really got into text-based games like Zork, or any of the later point and click adventure games. If you're asking what my FAVORITE RPG is of all time though, I'd have to answer Witcher 3. I've put 1600 hours into it across six playthroughs and still haven't been able to bring myself to get the "bad" ending. I also haven't touched the DLC on any of those saves either, which should add another 500 or so hours before I can call the game "completed". Rounding out my top five after that is Mass Effect 2 (hands down, the best Bioware game ever made, and the most memorable and well-developed characters in any RPG barring Witcher 3), Final Fantasy 6 (best FF, fite me bro - Locke+Celes 4ever OTP), Final Fantasy 4 (barely gets beat out by FF6), and Chrono Trigger (originally released for the SNES in 1995 and still one of the best games in terms of branching storylines and ways to complete it).
My first tabletop was D&D, way back in the early 90's. My first game was probably the Legend of Zelda around that time too. First MMO was World of Warcraft.
Funnily enough, I didn't play the original Legend of Zelda until around 2003, when my dad found an old NES in our attic along with a bunch of games. No surprise, it was my favorite game alongside Bionic Commando, Super Mario Bros, Castlevania II (the one AVGN hates), and, strangely, Yo Noid!. I have an NES emulator on my desktop with all of those games on it, coincidentally. I still love playing through OG Zelda and wish that there was a proper Legend of Zelda III. As the aforementioned Angry Video Game Nerd said (rather calmly, ironically), Legend of Zelda II is canonically the last game in the timeline. Every single title afterwards has been a prequel or a sequel of a prequel, except now there's a split timeline jumbling everything up. Before 2011, I would have been a linearist.
Yup. I remember renting it from a video store, back in the day. Man I had so many late fees on video game rentals, sheesh.
My very first was Final Fantasy on the original NES (which I wish I still had lol). I still enjoy the Final Fantasy franchise and have played most of their games. *edit* Oh and what it means to me? HA! see I missed half the post. The RPG fueled countless hours of 'pretend' games between me and my friends. There was three of us together and we each would choose what "our" character would do. I suppose in that sense the RPG was very good at making you feel part of the game. Sadly we never finished the game because it was rented and my dad wouldn't rent it again! Sad sad days.
