• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

As a child did you play violent videogames?

15th Birthday, walked straight into HMV bought Grand Theft Auto PS1 1997. Had big BBFC 18 cert on it, didn't even get a second look back then. Out I walked with GTA.
Game is so tame in comparison to what is labelled 18 cert now, shocks my old man brain thinking what younger kids are playing now.
 
Maybe Castlevania if that counts as violent, apart from that not really, Nintendo games and RPGs were pretty much all that interested me as a kid.
 
yes, quite a lot of them actually, starting with Castle Woldenstein 3D. I was not a child though, more like a teen
 
My very first PSone game was Loaded, and I loved it. So Yeah...

I started watching R rated movies when I was around 8 though. So "video game violence" has never bothered me in the slightest.
 
wolf3d_title.gif


My mom got it on a floppy from a guy in her office.

Guys at my father's office had it. Wolf 3d all the way.
 
Played a ton of 'violent' video games on PC when I was little. Including wolfenstein 3D, the dooms and quakes, diablo, mortal kombat, phantasmagoria etc...
 
My dad wouldn't let me play T rated games at a really young age. I think by the time I was like 12 or 13 he got me the Half Life Platinum Collection though, and ever since then have been playing them. Don't think they've fucked me up too bad...
 
When I was like 7 or 8 my older cousins were playing MGS 1 infront of me one and of them covered my eyes with his hands during the ninja massacre in the hallway. I'm still hearing the sounds in my head when I'm sleeping.
/srs
 
Robocop vs the Terminator on my megadrive, I have played others but this is one I remember the most from when I was 12 or so. Especially the gore cheat.
 
Mortal Kombat for the Sega Genesis (8 years old at the time). Surprised my dad didn't take the game away from me after I did a fatality while he watched me play.
 
Wondering how young most of you were when you started playing mature oriented games?

Dude... back in the 80 everything was violence: cartoons, movies, games etc... Not more mess up than anyone else... Seriously I would think kids would be a lot more mess up with those Barney shows, Teletubies, pokemon or wathever is in nowadays for kids... glad I wasn't born in this age!
 
Eh, I started playing various M-rated (demos) on the Jampacks and PSM's demo disks when I was probably like 7 or 8, but I didn't fully beat a M-rated game until I was around 12 or 13 though.
 
I pretty much aged at about the rate that videogames did. I was probably a year or two too young for Mortal Kombat and Doom when I played them, but I turned eighteen just as GTA came out.

Other than very rare titles (that Exidy lightgun game, for instance, which wasn't realistically available to me), there wasn't really *that* much violent stuff for me to play as a kid, and very little I wasn't very close to a reasonable age for.
 
I remember playing a lot of MK with my older brother on the Genesis when I was a kid. Then when the PS1 came out, hoooooo man, there was a lot of violence in my face.

Great childhood.
 
No, I don't think I did.

My mom had no problem with violent games, or at least she thought I was smart enough to actively play games that were appropriate for me. I just didn't want to play them.

Violence wasn't inherently appealing to me, which is why I had no interest in playing games without substance (like Mortal Kombat, come at me bro :P). GoldenEye is probably the most violent game I played, or I guess maybe MDK.
 
One of the first gaming experiences of my early life was playing Mortal Kombat on my PC running DOS. :)
 

I just made a video about this game.

I played violent games. I let me kids play violent games. We keep a solid understanding of the difference between fantasy and reality. They are 15 and 16 now, seem pretty well-adjusted so far. We make our own podcast together about gaming, so I've done about the opposite of leaving them unsupervised, yet still been very permissive.

Steven Spielberg saw so many horror movies as a kid he was making his own by the time he was 12.
 
My parents gave me GTA 2 when I was nine years old, thinking it was... well, I don't know, but not thinkin it was GTA 2. I enjoyed the shit out of it tough. After that I played Mario, because that's kinda like GTA.
 
Smash Bros. 64 was about as violent as the games got in my house as a kid. My mom didn't like violence but she wasn't obsessive about it. I have enough siblings where there was always someone young enough for me to feel like this would be inappropriate to expose them to.

This all changed this gen though. Got my own money/job/place and just buy&play whateva.
 
First game I ever played was DOOM. Growing up I played Quake 2 on my ps1, the GTA's and all the other "culprits" being framed today.
 
I started off with an Atari. Nothing really violent was available until the first wave of decent DOS games. Some by Apogee, like Bio Menace, and I also played Duke Nukem 1 and 2 at a very young age. It wasn't until PS1 that I had "really violent" games like RE and Bloody Roar.
 
yeh i played violent games when i was younger, and i loved it. i was all into death and gore from like 6 yrs old through my teens. i'd look at death images on the internet, and i would draw people having their heads being cut off with blood spraying all over.i was really into drawing bloody scenes

and now that i am older i am not really into death stuff at all. makes me uncomfortable and sad thinking about death. i can tolerate it.. just makes me cringe sometimes.
 
Yup! Guessing goldeneye counts since I was in like 4th grade, and counter strike, starcraft 1 alot...but like most people here, I knew the difference between reality and a game at that age. And hey, I don't think I turned out a murdering psychopath either!
 
Sure did....but mind you when I was a kid it was on atari (river raid, boxing, commando, etc) and C64 (barbarian, patton vs rommel, last ninja) so it was a different time.
 
As a pre-teen i played either Vectrex or Atari tennis (at a friends house), or simple PC games (Pango, Digger, Lode Runner...). Started playing Police Quest and Space Quest around the age of 10. A little later, games like Operation Wolf on PC. Got a SNES age 13, played a lot of Super Probotector (Contra), Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, when those games released. Don't know exactly how old i was for each of them, but i'm from 1979.
 
Yea, I'm 33 now had every major game system up to the ps360...shooting slash slicing cuz my shit is fucked up my way through..

I turned out ok, funny thing is that when it comes to real life violence I am completely sensitive to it.....I can't bring myself to see any of the gore on the Internet ..I almost watched that Daniel pearl video only to minimize the window when the bad part was gonna start, stuff like that affects me so much..can't stand senseless real life violence , but have no problem shooting up people in game..

This is how I react as well. I didn't have any restrictions growing up -- heck, Mortal Kombat was a gift from my parents for learning to tie my shoe. My dad played the games with us so he knew what type of violence we were being exposed to. I've probably been a witness to millions of fictional acts of violence and death in my life time. Yet, when it comes to real life violence I cringe or turn away. There is definitely an emotion/awareness that triggers when I realize I'm watching real violence vs fake.

I don't think I'm unique in anyway. Every kid I knew growing up played violent games and watched the most depraved movies imaginable. In fact, we made fun of the few kids that didn't have the same freedoms. Somehow, none of us developed into murderous psychopaths.
 
I played violent games like Wolfenstein 3d and Doom, being like 10 years old at the time.

I remember my parents did not like me playing Kung Fu for the NES when I was like 7 years old. I can vaguely remember myself getting around mimicking the kicking in the game. However, that's the only time my parents have intervened in my gaming (apart from minimizing my NES-time sometimes, wich was only healthy for me. When I was 10 years, I played everything and I learned to take good breaks from it.
 
Top Bottom