[02] Dice and Ladders

 I remember some of the games I played on Grandpa's XT, before I had one of my own.  Other than Castle Adventure, the earliest game memory from that PC I have is Willy the Worm.

Willy the Worm in color mode

Willy the Worm was released in 1985 as a shareware title from Alan Farmer in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Sadly, his name is one way too common to track down, the best I found so far is a few other game credits through about 1990.  This game is both simple, yet impressive for different reasons.  Firstly, it was distributed with the source code, in Pascal.  Secondly, it came with a level editor (also with the source code).  While admittedly not a very challenging game, unless you play it on a modern speed computer, I'm sure that, in the right hands, a challenging set of levels could be designed.

[01] My first computer, and my life of piracy at age 9

My grandfather was an early adopter of the IBM PC/XT, their early foray into the personal computing field inhabited largely by Apple and some others.  I was 7 or 8 at the time, so I don't remember all the details, but it initially had an amber monochrome screen and only one 5 1/4" floppy drive, to which he later added a second.  He also added a hard drive, likely a 10 megabyte one.

It looked very much like this, with a printer by its side.

Together, we played what was my first adventure game.  A shareware classic named Castle Adventure, written by a 14 year-old kid, although I hadn't noticed the typos and bad grammar at the time.  I do plan to do a detailed post on this game -- and try to solve it with a fresh set of eyes 30+ years later.  [Edit: I've since done this, for The Adventurer's Guild.]