Yeah I figured as much :) Last I tried a few years ago I quickly got lost :P

Gauntlet on the Spectrum.

Me and my cousin used the shift key cheat to walk through walls and get to the exit as quick as possible.

We'd gone through over 100 levels and been playing for over an hour when the power pack over heated.


...
..
.

For those that don't know (like me at the time) the spectrum version had no ending, you just kept flipping the tape and old levels were loaded with more mobs.

Two oldest games I have are Ultima 4 and Starflight. I might beat Starflight first.

Sometimes I think TES: Arena (1994), but that game is rather long and goes for too long without introducing new enemies. There's the question of whether I'll finish the game as a Nightblade (class I got the farthest in), Sorcerer (fun class when you use Spellmaking, could try doing it without Potions of Restore Power for extra challenge), or Knight (the one non-spellcaster I consider worth playing at the moment, mainly due to the auto-repair of weapons and armor).

I have also been thinking, lately, of playing Wonder Boy in Monster Land (1987) (this isn't the Wonder Boy game on GOG; the GOG game is a remake of the sequel); it has a strange combination of rpg-ish mechanics (gathering money to buy items, raise max health by earning points) and arcade mechanics (no backtracking between levels, timer that causes you to lose health, can't revisit shops, no save system).

There's also Cadash (1989), which looks interesting and is another game that combines rpg-ish mechanics with arcade gameplay, though it does allow backtracking (until you run out of time, though that game lets you continue (but not save) if you insert a coin). It's more RPG than WB2, though neither game comes close to my definition of RPG.

Sounds like something my grandfather would yell when he thought something was bullshit.

"Cadash! Don't give me that crap!"

I was playing Mario 64 just yesterday, well technically I did finish it already but I wanna grab all the stars this time.

No wait, if we're considering consoles I'm thinking of binge playing a lot of editions of Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quests during the holidays. Those will probably go back to at least 1988.

If we're talking PC only I'm thinking of Quarantine or Dark Colony, as soon as they get a GOG release or I fiddle with DOSBox enough to make them work. I can't be bothered to check which one is older right now but I'm guessing it's Quarantine.

There probably is an older game I'm not remembering anyway.

One my earliest doesn't have a name known to me, so I won't ever be able to find nor play it. That game featured a top-down perspective, allowed the player to walk through walls as secret passages, there was a series of upgrading shields, and you could shoot arrows at skeletons and mummies. The final boss resided in a dog-bone shaped room. This game was probably from Softdisk, on the Apple II GS.

Since it is impossible for me to find that game, my second oldest is Castle of the Winds. A roguelike game that played on Windows 3.1, it was very user-friendly and featured a number of useful spells. As the player, I could pick one spell every level - things like Detect Objects, Identify Item, Light, Ball of Cold, and Transmogrify Monster. Quite enjoyable, and I might be able to play again if I use a virtual machine to create a 32-bit version of Windows 7.