Here, I'll start. When I was 8 years old, my parents went to a dinner party and plonked me down in front of the host's computer so I'd stay out of their way. The game they booted up to keep me occupied was Space Quest II. Little did they know what impact that would have on me...
Hugo's House of Horrors
I remember getting surprisingly far for an 8yr old. I didn't know what a bung was at the time so that puzzle took a while though.
I first got hooked on adventure games with King's Quest VI, and then went back and played one through five. I still fondly remember talking to that rotten tomato.
Aaah I remember this game! I think my cousin played it, but I was still too young. The first adventure game that really got me hooked was King's Quest 7. It had voice over in my language. Sadly, the game is not compatible with modern PCs anymore. And GoG only has the English voices. I would like to play it in German again, for the nostalgia.
I think the game that got me hooked on the genre was Simon the Sorcerer on the Amiga 500. Still love that game.
The first adventure game I played was Lesuire Suite Larry, my bigger brothers had savegames in all the interesting parts and I didn't knew English so I accidentally deleted all the saves trying to load them, needles to say I was banned from the PC for a long time. The one that really hooked me on the genre though was The Curse of Monkey Island.
Holy crap, you sent me down a rabbit hole and a trip down memory lane. I remembered the cover of the first CD game I ever played but couldnt come up with the name, so I just read through all Point n Click adventures wikipedia knows off, looking for a bright green background and a weird clown on top of it.
It was Toonstruck! Never finished it, but it was my first PnC, so I guess that counts.
The first game that got me sold on adventures was Deponia and generally all of the Daedalic games.
Like many on here, Zork was my first adventure game, and King's Quest 1 my first graphical adventure game. Interestingly, growing up I really only played the Infocom and Sierra games, the LucasArts games somehow completely escaped me unfortunately.
King Quest II in Atari ST
Those old Infocom games basically taught me how to type. All the Zorks, Hitchhikers, and there was a Lovecraftian one maybe called Lurking Horror.
The first adventure game I bought and played was an Infocom interactive fiction ... I think it was Stationfall. Before I had briefly played Magnetic Scrolls' Fish! at someone else's computer. Fell in love with text adventures and started collecting them, I have a few of the Infocom folios as well (sadly not the Starcross saucer). The first graphic adventure I remember playing was King's Quest IV.
These games, along with later games like Monkey Island, had a huge influence on me, I learned programming to write adventure games myself but spent more time writing adventure game engines (both text and graphic ones) than actual games, and today I'm a software engineer (not in the game business).
I'm not entirely sure my first game counts as adventure, maybe more as a platform adventure, but for me it was back in probably around 1996 or 1997. I didn't have a computer at home, and during lunch break at school I joined the computer club. We had only two or three computers there that could have graphics and one of the games we could play was Prince of Persia. The second game I played there was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
A community for fans, devs, and general aficionados of the adventure game genre. This includes IF/parser games, point-and-click games, puzzle games, walking simulators, and whatever else you want to call these. To us, they're simply adventure games.