What is your earliest and most impressionable childhood memory of reading the original D&D or other games

[Voadam]

Moldvay Basic. The writing is clear and succinct and a great introduction to D&D.

The art is the specifics I remember the most though.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Reading the classic Red Box, going through introductory adventure repeatedly, both utterly captivated by it and seeking an ending where Aleena didn't get fridged. I would've been nine years old at the time.

 

[Li Shenron]

For me it was after a friend had run a game of BECMI for us (my first D&D game ever) and I asked if I could borrow one of the booklets (it was a boxed reissue) to better understand the game. I remember locking myself in the bathroom to read the monsters section, getting hooked on the undead list by increasing difficulty, which ended with the "necrospettro" (probably the spectre) and its double-level drain... that's exactly when I knew I was going to be a DM eventually!

 

[MNblockhead]

Sorry, I was at that age...

 

[bennet]

Sorry, I was at that age...

It created such unrealistic expectations, took me a while to find a girl that could go toe to toe with that.

Myself, earliest memories in I think 1982 playing a red box version, creating an epic adventure of monster after monster for a friend to kill.

 

[MNblockhead]

It created such unrealistic expectations, took me a while to find a girl that could go toe to toe with that.

Glad you found one who could. I settled for a woman without wings. ;-)

 

[Tantavalist]

For me, the defining moment like that was when I was six years old and got The Warlock of Firetop Mountain without even realising that it wasn't an ordinary book. Once I did work it out though... The next few years were a string of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks that I became just a little bit obsessed with. Wet weekends spent in front of the gas fire as I ventured through the Forest of Doom or the City of Thieves are a defining memory of my childhood.

A secondary moment came when I was 10/11 and realised there were these games like the Fighting Fantasy books that you could play in a group. That led to Dragon Warriors after my 11th birthday in the summer and WFRP 1e for Christmas of that year.

 

[MGibster]

I'm going to pick Vampire the Masquerade. My fifteen year old self was impressed by almost everything in that book because it was very, very different from anything I had seen up until that point. The use of Biblical stories as part of the setting, the complicated world of the Camarilla with princes, justicars, and archons, and a game that was decidedly different from the kill 'em and loot 'em paradigm I'd enjoyed thus far. It's not the earliest game I have an impression of, but it's one of the first ones I played that was just so different from what I was used to that it left an indelible impression.

 

[kenada]

Playing Baldur's Gate. I remember I was really bored during summer break and pulled out my videogame magazine collection to look for games that looked interesting but I never paid any attention to before. That Baldur's Gate thing had gotten really rave reviews half a year earlier, and even though I've never bothered reading reviews in the "Roleplaying Games" section and wasn't into fantasy, I was really damn bored and so I got on my bike to get into town to check if one of the stores had it on the shelf.
Even that game manual was a small tome, showing off all the class abilities, spells, and some of the monsters. It was weird, but awesome, and I'm still coasting on that wave.

Same. I remember pouring over the Baldur’s Gate manual trying to decide what class to be. I didn’t actually get into tabletop RPGs until college (with 3e).

I did play Hero Quest as a kid, but I don’t think that would quite be considered an RPG. We made my brother be the referee. I had a character with a crossbow who (through a rules misinterpretation) got to shoot every creature in the room every round.

 

[Cadence]

Reading the classic Red Box, going through introductory adventure repeatedly, both utterly captivated by it and seeking an ending where Aleena didn't get fridged. I would've been nine years old at the time.

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Also the Moldvay basic art for me too. I think the Kobold stood out most. They were the centerpiece creature to the first "module" I wrote myself.