One of my first games was on TRS-80 back around 1979. The idea was that you were in a submarine (at the bottom of the screen) waiting to torpedo ships as they passed. The ships would move across the screen at different speeds and you had to press a key from 1 to 9 to launch a torpedo. 1 launched it to the far left, 9 to the far right, 5 straight up with the other numbers in between. Not bad for a machine with 16K RAM (yes, that’s 16384 bytes for code, data and display) and 128 x 48 graphics. Also did a space invaders clone in Z80 assembler and another a bit more like galaxians in Forth. Messed with my O-level results big-time!
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My very first game was a kind of “capture ascii characters on screen” game on my ZX Spectrum where ascii characters appeared moving on the screen and the user had to catch them by pressing some keys on the keyboard. It was very basic (no puns).
I also remember some of the games I wrote that my friends and colleagues really liked. One of them was based on arcade’s Polaris in which the player controlled a submarine trying to hit other submarines, ships and airplanes on the Tandy Color Computer. Dude, I wrote those games back in 1987, 1988!
Another game I wrote was a Tron like game (the cycles part) for the PC in 1991. My friends at school lined up to play it and even made me change the game so it would have 3 rounds each match, just like the arcade’s new release Street Fighter 2 - The World Warrior. Those days were really fun!
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I think my first playable game was a river rafting game, written in Basic on a TRS-80 Model /// at my school circa 1980. My brother has a photo of me working on it. The “graphics” were ASCII characters. The raft was two characters wide and could be moved one column left or right each time the river scrolled upward. The river was crowded with rocks, which you earned points for avoiding. Occasionally you’d see a naval mine, which (if you hit it) would end the game.
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I see I’m late to the party but well, my most early project of a ball bouncing around ended up as some sort of fullscreen particle simulator.
Made in Swing, had four particle guns you could choose from (water, snow, fire, seed) that interacted with each other, had some gravity applied to them that you could adjust with + and -, and gravity direction with the arrow keys.
All stuff bounces around a lot. You could stack snow into piles and burn it down with fire, water + seed would make a tree that could also be deleted with fire. Fire also deletes water.
It was quite elaborate, even has a settings menu with a funny option called “transparent background”. Iirc it took an image of your desktop with awt robot right before starting to fake the effect 
Eventually a classmate told me “hey that looks like powedertoy”. So I found out what powdertoy was, messed around with it for like a week straight before going onto the next project 
This was like, dunno 3 or something years ago.
Anyhow I still got the thing (which got me slightly confused which tense to use while writing this lol), here’s a download if any of you have too much time to spare.
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Not bad
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I didn’t suppose it was even possible to make such ahem complex shapes lol.
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