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  • We have a Home Movie of me at 3 years old playing Tetris on my cousin's Gameboy. I don't remember a time that video games weren't a part of my life.

    The first game I remember realy clicking for me was Donkey Kong Country. I can still play that game off muscle memory alone.

  • I once stumbled into my parent's computer room as a little 6 year old and saw my older brother playing Sim City 2000. That moment literally changed my life.

    Before that, I had seen my parents on the computer, but they were always just emailing or faxing stuff. I thought computers were boring machines for adults to do paperwork on.

    The day I saw my brother playing Sim City on the computer was the day I realized it could do something awesome.

    That was well over 20 years ago, and I've been a PC gamer ever since.

  • Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Elite back in the mid-90s. Jagged Alliance 2 and Fallout 2 a few years later got me finally hooked.

  • Doom and Doom II.

    They certainly were not the first games I played. For my young self, games before then were either trivial games which you can figure out and play easily or difficult games without manuals which held my interest for brief periods of time. Games were (and are?) a certain difficulty and operate as they were designed. For Doom and Doom II, that was different.

    Doom and Doom II were the first games I used cheat codes in (because they were the first games that I knew cheat codes for). The cheat codes in those games spoiled because they did more than just "make you invincible" but they also let you walk through the walls of the levels (noclip). They allowed you to see how the game worked (at least in a small way). You could also level jump (a more common cheat code) so that you can see levels that I did not have skills to reach. This made the games more than just a triviality since I could keep exploring and trying new things despite my skill level.

    Those games were able to be modded though. You could easily get CDs with plenty of mods that changed the weapons, added levels, completely changed the game, and so on. This was the first game that I ever played that could do that. The CDs also came with editors which let me dabble in messing with weapons myself (where I managed to get around 1 FPS with all the rockets I fired at once from a rocket launcher). As such, the games could be made fresh and new again by modding it to be something different.

    Those games also had a great sound track. It seems like a minor thing (and other games have great sound tracks as well) but I learned that music significantly influences my like or dislike for a game. Games that I played before didn't have bad music per say but nothing earlier really grabbed my attention like Doom and Doom II.

    I do enjoy many modern games. Still, I miss that games typically do not have cheat codes (and things like noclip are a rarity in any new games) and modding has never seemed as "wild" as some of the Doom mods that were created back then. If Doom was never around, I'm sure that some other game would have grabbed my interest in different ways (likely it would still have a great sound track though). However, I would have likely missed the wonder of seeing how a game worked and seeing a game be modified.

    Fortunately, these games are still playable today and still have new mods released for them today. As such, I can take a nostalgic trip and play them whenever I want.

  • Crystal caves, doom, Duke nukem 1, commander keen.. the incredible machihe, legend of kyrandia. Those are the earliest games I can remember playing. Fuck crystal caves I spent way too much time trying to beat that game.

  • I just remember that first game I ever played was Lode Runner.

    First game I started that I actually owned was Congo Bongo.

  • Gaming in general would be the original Far Cry, Fallout 3, Battlefront 2, the Sims, and Age of Empires.

    You can trace a lot of the games and genres I play today back to them.

  • I've been into gaming since as long as I remember. My dad played halo 2 when I was a baby. First game I played tho was Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga.

  • I was kinda born into it? My earliest memories are of some Tom Sawyer game on an Apple IIe sitting on my mom's lap while she taught me how to play it. My parents had an intellivision with a good collection of games, the most notable I can remember being Microsurgeon. One of my aunt's had an Atari 2600. She even had E.T. I was born earlier the same year the NES released in the US, and when I was 4, I think, we got one but I had played Nintendo before at other kids' houses. I always loved Balloon Fight. I kinda latched on immediately and never let go.

  • Mario Kart, I was a military brat my dad was kind of a jerk he played to beat me one day I got really good and kept beating him. He quit playing after that. Then he quit with everything else I beat him at.

  • I honestly couldn't tell you exactly which game that hooked me for life. My first exposure was when I spent summers with my grandparents on their farm.

    Grandpa and I would ride his trike out to the fields, and we'd... do stuff? To the plants? I don't really remember the work.

    I do remember that work ended at noon, and we zipped into town on the trike. And we went to the pub. Grandpa would get me a root beer, and we'd split a poutine. Then he'd give me a roll of coins. I can go nuts on the arcade machines, he can have way too many beers, and WE DON'T TELL GRANDMA.

    Anyway, a half century later I'm a recovering alcoholic. Good times!

  • Dark Souls.

    I remember the first game I played was Super Mario World on the SNES at my cousins place.

    That game enthralled me because I was not good at it, but each time I played through after losing all my lives, I had the chance to get a LITTLE further, to DISCOVER something which I had EARNED.

    Most games I played after that on Playstation 1 and 2 or Xbox had a lot more hand holding. There was not such a sense of achievement, though I learned to appreciate stories in games much more then.

    Then I played Dark Souls 1. My BF at the time told me about it, and good god did I struggle with it. But like SMW, I found such a large sense of achievement as I inched further into the game. The non-standard story telling in the game was also really interesting, learning about this ancient lore from items and weapons and armor that I would find in the most desolate and obscure places of this dying world.

    The combination of what I loved from high difficulty early games on the SNES in conjunction with what I loved from the story of games on later consoles were both present in Dark Souls, and to this day it holds a very special place for me.

    Since, I think while Dark Souls 1 and 3, and Elden Ring have some of my favorite gameplay, Bloodborne has my favorite story of all time.

    In Fromsofts games the world building is incredible and the difficulty is treacherous, so the journey is worthwhile.

  • D&D 3.5 got me into both kinds of gaming. I remember me and some of my friends wanting to play it, and I remember tracing characters from the dot hack manga for our character sheets and playing the starter set. Later on I found out my friend had an old computer in his house (I think it was an Apple II?) and one of the Gold Box D&D games, and that ended up being the first computer game I spent a ton of time playing. Before then I had played SNES and Genesis a bit but they weren't really a focus for me at that point, but then when I got Morrowind I was fully bought in to video games too.

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