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What are some of your favorite videogames from your childhood? What made them so special?

I'll start:

I could never choose a single game, but some of my favorite games that I played as a child are Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 & 2, The Sims 1 & 2, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Runescape 2 ("OSRS") and GTA San Andreas.

The RCT and Sims games gave me a lot of freedom, while making it hard to screw up. It was so cool that I could design my own house or amusement park. I loved spending hours doing just that. I also learned a lot about living life, managing people and things like economics.

Medal of Honor Allied Assault was my favorite shooter in that time. It very well might be my first proper FPS. The atmospheric story-driven campaign drew me in a lot. The music and missions gave some very intense moments and the online multiplayer was absolutely amazing. Rifle-only battles, freeze-tag or a regular (T)DM were a blast!

Runescape is one of those games that I never really get tired of. As a child I only played as a free user, while being impressed by every member I saw. I loved the atmosphere, the people that I met and the progression of my character. I went on adventures in the wilderness with classmates or went mining for hours to make some money.
I can still get drawn into this game and really feel like I'm on MY adventure, where anything might happen. There are not many games that have this effect on me, so intensely.
This game also learned me a LOT about life. I learned about having to work for getting a result, I learned about economics and how you can use markets to make some money (this was long before the Grand Exchange). I also learned to watch out for ill-intended people: I stopped playing for a long time when 11 year old me got scammed out of my gold-trimmed black armor that I had been saving up for for a long time.

Lastly GTA SA made me feel in love with the GTA series. I already loved previous games as I had played a lot of GTA 2 and a little bit of GTA 3. But San Andreas was on another level. The huge feeling map, the intriguing story and all the thing that I could do blew me away.
I loved learning about the lore/backstories of the characters and even joined a GTA-related forum which opened up even more to me. I stayed a big fan of GTA and Rockstar Games up untill GTA 4 and bought all theirs games, often multiple times on multiple platforms. GTA 5 was fun to me, but it never really got to me like the previous entries did. I think this is partly because I really enjoy the stories and characters of the previous games, and the (admittedly interesting) choice to use three switchable protagonist resulted in character development that wasn't as deep and refined as games like GTA SA or GTA IV. But San Andreas... Man, I love that game!

Now I'm curious about the games that you loved playing during your childhood! What made them so special to you?

94 comments

  • It's cool how most here seem to be older, I was almost expecting people to name drop Skyrim and make me feel like a dinosaur lol.

    I used to love the text-based adventures, like "Adventure" and I believe one was called "Humbug". Even learned C programming at a young age in an attempt to make my own.

    Enjoyed the Hugo trilogy too. Wasn't a big fan of side-scroller games but I fondly remember Secret Agent, Duke Nukem I+II and Commander Keen.

    My real love was RPGs, specifically Ultima VII.

    • I used to love the text-based adventures, like "Adventure" and I believe one was called "Humbug".

      There's an archive of a lot of them on https://www.ifarchive.org/ and https://ifdb.org/

      You can get modern clients for them, including on mobile (though I find playing with an on-screen keyboard to be kind of frustrating).

      I could recommend Babel and Anchorhead, though both are kinda dark and may not be to everyone's taste.

    • I used to love the text-based adventures, like "Adventure"

      Any relation to the Atari game of the same name? I have fuzzy memories of playing a literal block that had to pick up a vaguely shaped sword and fight blocky looking dragons to get a blocky magic chalice.

      • Did some digging and the full name is "Colossal Cave Adventure", though was commonly just called "Adventure"
        Was the first well-known game of that type.

  • Ooh! Nostalgia time!

    I have very vivid memories of Sonic, Pac-Man 2, Moto Racer 97, Contra, Final Fight 2 & 3, Knights of the Round, Earthworm Jim, Spyro, Phantasy Star IV, and Mega-Man. I don't remember a lick of storyline but when I close my eyes, they're there.

    As for games that have a more emotional tether, that would be things like Legend of Mana, Chrono Cross, and Threads of Fate. All of which helped build my love for fantasy. I was enamored by the art style and gameplay of LoM, the fact that you could mix and match different skills and discover new ones was like a drug, add in a crafting and pet system and I was stuck. I have a deep love for the soundtrack of Chrono Cross, the combat system also challenged my stupid child brain. Threads of Fate was more of a casual playthrough, but I remember going back to it over and over again, because I kept losing my saves.

    I also have games that were more communal: sometimes played with cousins and siblings or with me as the riveted audience. Things like Bomber-man, Tetris, Puyo-Puyo 2, Worms, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy 7-9, Valkyrie Profile, Prince of Persia and Grandia. I have stories for all of those but this is already getting too long. 😅

    • I see a lot of great names on your list! Legend of Mana and Chrono Cross are still on my list of old games that I want to play! But I want to finish Chrono Trigger on the DS first :)

      I discovered I really like J-RPG's and since then I've been trying out classics that I've missed when I grew up

      • Chrono Trigger's pretty good! The soundtrack is equally phenomenal. :D I never got to finish it because I got stuck, but I hope to return to it someday.

        I find J-RPGs have a unique sense of optimism and whimsy. Then again, maybe that's just me being biased.

  • The tip top number 1 for me has always been TIE Fighter Collector's CD-ROM. Everything about it was awesome. Mindblowing for the time 640x480 graphics, the iMUSE music system that dynamically changes the music to react to what's happening in game, really fun flight mechanics, a massive amount of missions to complete, and the overall really excellently done Star Wars treatment.

    For those who are interested, a free community-made remaster of sorts called TIE Fighter Total Conversion was released a couple of years ago, and has received several updates. It is based on the ancient (although not as ancient as TIE Fighter) X-Wing Alliance engine, and has been hacked and modded so much that it feels like a modern game, and it includes both the original campaign from TIE Fighter and a reimagined version of it that uses things that the newer engine can do that the old one can't, such as having many more ships present at the same time and the ability to travel from one place to another via hyperspace within a mission, etc.

    TIE Fighter works fine in DosBox btw. TFTC works natively in modern Windows. If you're going to play either game I highly recommend using a joystick. Mouse control does work but it is not that fun. Gamepads will probably work too, but still won't feel 'right'. Also you're going to need to keep your keyboard within reach as there's a whole bunch of keys you're going to need.

  • Escape Velocity was pretty much the game that instilled a love of gaming for me.

    I got the game on a CD that came with Mac Magazine or something, played beginning missions for hours thinking that not being able to save was part of the shareware limitation; then realized I just needed to install it on disk. Sank many more hours into it as free, then a registration code was the first thing I ever bought online - I still have the postcard it came on, somewhere, and inexplicably still have the code memorized.

    If steam existed back then, I'd be showing up on thousands of hours I think - I played as much as my parents would allow, grinding out credits and playing each storyline and then various self-imposed challenges ... from there, got into mods and modding; I'd have to carefully set up the computer to not sleep and then run downloads overnight because we were on dial-up.

    Probably put similar amounts of time into the sequels, as well; Override and Nova were both fantastic games as well. When I got my first PC and swapped off Mac, I still put a crude emulator on it just so I could keep playing Nova. I played from

    Across the whole series, that was my main game from grade 5 to second year of college. In all those years, I met exactly two people who had ever played.

    • Hooray for Escape Velocity! My brother and I played that (alongside Lode Runner: The Legend Returns and Sim Tower) extensively growing up, and I remember excitedly awaiting the release of Nova. Though I probably spent the most time in Nova (especially after finding the TCs for the original and Override). And similarly, I've never met anyone since then who has played it.

      If my whole home server setup went up in a fire, one of the things which would worry me most would be losing all the mods, cracks (since Ambrosia is long since defunct), tools, and original installers for EV.

      • (since Ambrosia is long since defunct),

        That one winds up being such a wild story, too.

        That Ambrosia went from The Darling Star of Mac software and gaming, into near total obscuring and quiet collapse, is just ... bizarre. The choice to pivot to "serious, adult" tool software from gaming, where they had this loyal and devoted following and could have continued collecting cheques if they'd just made an agreement with a platform ... over to a marketplace that was already saturated, no one knew them, and most of their tools were significantly more expensive than competitors with only minor polish and UI advantages to justify the price was one of the most openly self-sabotaging choices I've ever seen a company make.

        That Andrew Welch just vanished afterwards is probably even more confusing. Trying to find out where he ended up or what he's doing now ... no dice. He's occasionally surfaced for retro interviews about their old games, but it doesn't seem like he's still active or visible anywhere; huge change from a guy who was loudly That Mac Snob for years and was a constant presence on early internet BBS and forums.

        Matt Burch doing nearly the same thing just compounds the impression. He is doing computer engineering stuff, walked away from games work entirely after EV Nova and says he "never" intends to return to the EV series or games dev in general. It's seemed like he's super emphatic across a few interviews that it was rewarding at the time but it is absolutely under no circumstances something he'd return to, no matter what fans say or what other inspirations strike.

        Have to wonder if the internal collapse of Ambrosia was so horrid that everyone in leadership burned out completely and just wants to put that entire chapter into the rearview.

  • Deus Ex: invisible war. it was so cool. it introduced me to cyberpunk and was one of the first games i ever played that really gave me freedom to choose how i was going to play.

  • I got a whole list, but I'll stick to a few:

    Super Mario 64 made me fall in love with video games in general. In another timeline, I would have been a game journalist because of this game.

    Spyro the Dragon was super impressive when it came out, and was the second game I ever owned. It made me fall in love with the PlayStation and choose it for my first console.

    Final Fantasy 7 is my Baby's First RPG. But, Chrono Cross has the honor of my first major fandom. I enjoyed weird timey wimey stuff even then (and when I got to Chrono Trigger, I loved it too).

    My dad surprised me with a PlayStation 2 due to my really good grades. He also bought me a copy of Tekken Tag Tournament. Later I got Final Fantasy 10 for Xmas, and that is still my favorite FF to date.

    And like I said, PlayStation was my first console. What I missed out on, I emulated. Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, but most importantly: Radical Dreamers and Bahamut Lagoon.

    Honorable Mention: my family played Bejeweled on the family computer A LOT. My little sister and I also played the hell out of that Gorilla DOS game.

  • It's hard to pick just one but... the Tony Hawk Pro Skater Franchise! I played this with my childhood best friend during the "skating and ska is cool" phase we had in the 90's - early 00's. I remember we'd try to replicate the moves on our skateboards in his basement. Also the soundtrack was one of the best I heard at that time and it really shaped my musical tastes

  • I remember watching my uncle playing Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past when I was younger, and when it was finally my turn with the SNES, I just couldn’t stop. It was the first game I ever played all the way through. I played the Mario bros, and 2 and 3 but I never could beat them (for some reason we didn’t have Zelda 1 and 2, but I doubt I could have beat them either). It was a moment for me, where I realized beating a game was fun! And it was easy enough for me to progress through, but not so hard like the other games that I would quit. And unlike the Mario games - I could mess up and end up not too far from where I left off!

  • Street Fighter II
    Training special arts command, fighting with my friends, joining small tournament of my town ... very nostalgic for me.

  • Definitely The Sims and Runescape for me too!

    I used to try to build the wackiest terrains in Sims 2, the tallest mountains with a house on top and things like that. Also messed around with cheat codes most of the time, building graveyards and killing sims in every way imaginable, you know just regular stuff…

    Runescape is definitely a unique experience! I remember being really pissed when I had my favorite cape stolen after I got killed in the wastelands (or whatever it's called) by another player. I used to try going as far as possible to kill the demons there, the danger gave me a thrill lol. I had to cook so many fish and fill my inventory to stay alive.

    Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Zelda Twilight Princess are also very near and dear to my heart. I must have played through PH at least 10 times. I harassed my mom endlessly to get a DS and she ended up addicted to the game too lol.

    As for TP, i don't know if it’s the nostalgia but no other Zelda game came close to dethroning it for me. I don't see it talked about as much as the others. I love the atmosphere of this game, the story, the world, the characters… I still get the creeps just thinking about the floating hands in the twilight realm lol. I had to look up a guide to find all the insects, I wanted to collect everything. The minigames were so fun too, albeit frustrating at times. The one where you try to find all the cats in the Hidden village was my favorite I think, the western music alone was just too good lol. Also bc I love cats.

    These are the ones I remember loving the most but I'm probably forgetting some. Above all I think I loved video games (and still do) because they provided an escape from the real world, where the anxiety just faded away whenever I was playing.

  • Heros of Might and Magic 3 is still one of my favorite games. Too many games from childhood to name, but that one holds a special place in my heart.

  • Midtown Madness 2.

    I only had a handful of games growing up and MM2 was my favorite! I'd would drive through the cities for hours doing whatever. I did every race, I knew the game inside and out. I even had a steering wheel and pedals for it.
    Eventually I discovered modding and that sparked my interest in computers and made me love the game even more.

    It took until 07 when I finally convinced my parents to get me a console. I had been playing a game from 2001 for 6 years, I was shocked seeing the graphics difference.

    Other notable favorites:
    NFS Hot Pursuit 2
    Combat Flight Simulator 3
    Zoo Tycoon 2
    Crashday
    18 Wheels of Steel: Pedal to the Metal

  • Link’s awakening was my favorite game on my game boy pocket, which was the first gaming system I ever owned. Ocarina of Time absolutely mesmerized me though.

  • This Godzilla game
    It's a 2D puzzle-platformer I played almost a decade after its release, back when I couldn't even say my own name properly lol. I'd spend a few hours each day until the batteries run dry, then recharge it so I could play the next day. Will never forget the day I solved that final stage, and how I replayed it over and over again looking for other solutions. Man, those good ol' Game Boy days.

  • What are you defining as childhood in this case? I started writing a little bit, but ended up breaking up my response into different ages. My memory might be a little fuzzy, but here goes:

    In elementary school, some of the most important games I played were X-Wing/TIE Fighter, Wolfenstein 3D, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, and Pokémon Red (at least off the top of my head). I loved getting lost in the different worlds, and Super Metroid in particular was really cool because it seemed like there were so many secrets waiting to be discovered. Pokémon Red launched when I was at pretty much exactly the right age to catch the wave, and I took a lot of pride in grinding out levels for my Pokémon so I could win battles against friends. Ever used a game link cable?

    Around middle school, Perfect Dark came out and I basically played it for an entire summer. Practicing against bots and playing co-op multiplayer against them was a lot of fun, and I also ran through the campaign cooperatively a bunch of times with my best friend. Smash Bros Melee was also a great one, and Rogue Leader blew away any previous expectations I had about graphics in video games.

    In high school, I got hooked on Phantasy Star Online after borrowing my friend's Dreamcast for a week or so. I never got a Dreamcast, but I picked up the GameCube version and the broadband adapter so I could play online. By the time I stopped playing, I had a couple memory cards with four characters each. My main character had well over 2,000 hours, and all of them had at least a few hundred. The chase for loot, the grind to level up, and the silliness of playing online (look up PSO symbol chat) captivated me like no other game I had tried to that point.

  • Monster Hunter Tri really holds a special place for me. As a teenager I only had a Wii during that console generation, and there reached a point where I was getting disinterested in the typical Nintendo releases. I wanted something a bit meatier, and I've been hooked on Monster Hunter ever since. Tri also had probably the best social interaction with randoms in an online game that I've ever played, and even in the brand. The Loc Lac hub holds so many fond memories for me and the flagship monster of that release, Lagiacrus is still my favorite momster in the series.

  • The earliest video games I remember playing were the Magic School Bus CD-ROM video games when I was like 7 or so. We had an ancient PC running Windows 98 or something that was the only computer we had that could still run them, since our other computer ran Linux at the time. (I don't even know if any Windows versions past 98 or maybe Vista can even run them either) Those old PC's were LOUD AF when they booted up; both an old-ass hard-drive and the disk drive would calibrate itself on boot making a bunch of noise. I played the shit out of those old games. It was so much fun coming into my Dad's office and sorting through our stack of CD's to pick out a game and listen to the disk drive spin up as the game loaded, and playing the game while my Dad was working beside me. I also played a lot of flash games at the time, but looking back those old MSB games stand out much more to me.

  • Where to start…

    Odyssey 2/Philips Videopac

    • Munchkin

    PacMan Clone with a map editor. Spent far too much time on that game as a kid. Simple as hell but a decent clone.

    ZX Spectrum

    • Arkanoid
    • R Type

    Excellent Arcade ports on the lowly ZX Spectrum. Amazed me that I could play Arcade level titles in my living room.

    Nintendo Gameboy

    • Tetris

    One of the best ways to play Tetris. The gameplay, the sound, the console itself. Pinnacle of handheld gaming.

    Sega 32X

    • Virtua Racing
    • Doom
    • StarWars Arcade

    Both StarWars Arcade and Virtua Racing were excellent Arcade ports and Doom on the 32x was real special to me, after experiencing the SNES port of Doom, the 32x was leagues ahead.

    Commodore Amiga

    • Lemmings
    • Worms
    • Cannon Fodder

    I could list endless amounts of Amiga classics but Lemmings is one of my all time favourite games.
    Worms was multiplayer perfection and cannon fodder shows me that rat has never been so much fun.

    Sega Saturn

    • Duke Nukem 3D
    • Quake
    • Powerslave/Exhumed

    All running of the same engine. Fantastic fits person showers on the weakest of the goth gen consoles.

    I could go on all night but I must stop…

  • Edit: I'm a dumbass and forgot to mention the game I've easily played the most over the years: RuneScape 2 and currently Old School RuneScape. I love it. Lol

    The biggest game for me in my childhood was Starcraft: Brood War. It got me into super RTS games, and even though I played it on the Nintendo 64 (which sucked in retrospect lol) it was the first game I really got into.

    The next two games that come to mind were Super Smash Bros and Halo (specifically 2, but really all of the ones before 4 I played a ton of) just because these games were super easy and fun to play with friends and family.

    And there were some honorable mentions like Phantasy Star Online: Episodes I & II and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 and Star Fox 64, since these were also games that I played a ton of.

  • Sonic and Knuckles- This was probably one of the first games I ever played, which is what makes it special to me. The game and the Genesis I played it on were hand-me-downs from a cousin. I never managed to actually get very far, but for a while, it was my go-to game to play after school.

    Spyro the Dragon Trilogy- A few years later I got a PS1 for Christmas and Spyro the Dragon was the game I got with it. Like S&K for a while it was the only PS1 game I had so I was constantly playing it and replaying it. Spyro was the first video game franchise I actively followed and begged my parents for. Then Enter the Dragonfly happened, but at least by then, I had Ratchet and Clank.

    Elder Scrolls III Morrowind- This was my first real RPG and open-world game. Go anywhere and do anything has kind of become a Bethesda marketing meme, but my twelve-year-old self was floored by the fact that I could actually do that. It was the first game I had played that let me just ignore what the game wanted and let me wander around and make my own fun, which amounted to me wandering around and reading every book I could get my hands on to learn about the world.

    Persona 4- Not sure if this technically counts as a childhood game since I was around seventeen or eighteen when I played it. For some reason up until P4 I had convinced myself that I didn't like JRPGS that much. I had played a few growing up, but none of them were really my favorites. Honestly, I probably would never have picked it up if I hadn't seen gameplay on youtube. I had sort of stereotyped JRPGs as all looking like Final Fantasy or something like that and Persona was just so different that I had to pick it up. Ended up loving it and the Megaten franchise, which got me into JRPGs in general.

  • Total Annihilation. But probably not for the usual reason anyone might think, I actually am not much of a fan of RTS games. I was obsessed with the lore of the game, the Core vs. Arm war in which the game's designers obviously intended Core to be the villains but IMO they were the more sympathetic side (until the silly Core Contingency plotline, of course).

    Coincidentally, a community was just created for the modern open-source recreation of Total Annihilation, a game called "Beyond All Reason". !bar@discuss.tchncs.de

  • Power Rangers The Movie, Sonic 2, Pokemon Red and Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outkast were all games I spent a lot of time on. PR and Sonic 2 were practically two of the only games I owned for a long time, Pokemon Red was the first time I got truly addicted to an RPG and JK2 was the first online computer game I really ever played. Good times.

  • a game that i don't see discussed a whole ton is ape escape 3. i've actually never played any other games in the franchise but 3 has solid platforming, cute character design, tons of things to unlock, cool soundtrack and the gameplay and puzzles weren't too hard for me at 8 or 9. i've replayed it tons.

  • Wing Commander: Privateer.

    I'll never forget when I went over to my friend's house and I couldn't understand how the pirates weren't attacking him. And then we loaded up my save (off a 3.5" floppy) and he couldn't understand how the militia weren't attacking me. It's the first time we were ever exposed to factions that responded to your actions.

    I sank so much time in that game. Never paid too much attention to the storyline, but I did have the fastest ship with highest-end targeting computer and a full load-out of the best weapons.

  • I feel a little old/weird here as I started gaming on a Atri and Commodore 64. However my favortie childhood games were Commander Keen (PC) Medevil (PS1) Donkey Kong Country (SNES) and Spyro (PS1.)

    Donkey Kong Countrys graphics blew my mind when it came out, the world was lush and colorful. It had WEATHER.

    I loved the humor, art design and pogo stick from Commander Keen, the free "open" world of Spyro, and EVERYTHING about Medevil. I played through that game so many times, enchanted by the story, concept and voice acting. Yes, I was a little goth kid. While my freinds were playing Jetmodo and Golden Eye I was contolling a rotting corpse! Good times.

  • Pokemon Red got me started drawing long ago. Imagining the starters getting a 4th evolution. Mostly putting a bunch of spikes on everything. But i havent stopped drawing since.

  • Video games did not exist when I was a child. They came much later, with text based games at first like moria, adventure etc.

    Board games I remember are Risk, Monopoly and Business.

    I played video games a lot in my early twenties, played a lot of Unreal Tournament and Quake when I worked on device drivers for sound cards... supporting... games! We had a modded UT with all sorts of custom maps and crazy taunts set up - hilarious as we played it at lunchtime on headphones.

    "Respect my authority!" would ring out as someone got blasted, or "Meat! He He" etc.

    After writing device drivers I went on to work for Codemasters on their racing games: DiRT, GRiD, F1 2011 and the ill fated BodyCount. I also fixed a bug in Just Cause.

  • Mario Galaxy was one of the first games I played, and Pokemon Black was the first I beat. IMO both still hold up today.

  • Sim Tower and Sim Ant, Escape Velocity, Age of Empires and later on Starcraft

94 comments