Which game made you a gamer, and what technology made you a lifelong enthusiast?

[Megalomaniac]

Ironically, the game that got me into PC building and PC gaming was a game that never ever saw the light of day.

Babylon 5 space combat simulator was the game that I got my first computer with specs designed to meet.

I had a Hewlett-Packard pavilion 8570C

That is a Pentium III 450 MHz processor with 96 MB ram, 20 GB hard drive and integrated graphics.

So sure enough I rushed out to buy a 3-D accelerator in anticipation of the space combat simulator, but I also ended up needing the 3-D accelerator to play alien versus predator. I bought a Voodoo 3 3000 AGO - and if I had it to do all over again I probably would’ve sprung extra for the 3500 TV AGP.

I am extremely disappointed that the Babylon 5 space combat simulator never came out. Sierra in all of their stupidity, decided to simply cancel it.

I had a lot of fun with my computer right up until it became outdated. Soldier of Fortune II was coming and my computer was not able to handle its minimum requirements but I ended up buying an Xbox so that I could get that game. Xbox had a lot of great games early on such as Halo, gears of war, splinter cell, etc.. Xbox took me away from PC gaming for a while. I was even spending a large amount of time playing Counterstrike on Xbox.

 

[bviktor]

So many great games… Doom 1&2, Fallout 1&2, Diablo 2, Red Alert 1&2, Desperados, GTA 3&VC, Mafia, MOH AA&BT&SH, Quake 3, Star Wars Racer, Global Operations, SC1, The Thing, WC3, Heroes 3&4, Max Payne 1&2, CTR, KKND, AvP2, CS 1.6…

 

[p51d007]

Pong...Atari 2600, 1979. Going to college, had a 12" B&W tv that also had a 12 volt "cigarette lighter" plug so you could run it in your car.
I made a 12v adapter for the Atari so it could run off the car & when I would come home on weekends, my buddies would hang out and play the Atari on the B&W tv while having some beer listening to music on our 8 track tape players in the car.
Yeah, THAT old!

 

[abactuon]

1. Prey (2017)
2. Hybrid remontant varieties of garden strawberries.
'Pink Panda' is a variety developed in England through complex crossing of ornamental cinquefoil (Potentilla palustris) with Chilean strawberries.

 

[bandit8623]

Command and conquerer, commandos, diablo.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Initially it was Wizardry.
Getting back on the bandwagon it was Tomb Raider (1996).
Getting back on the bandwagon again it was Minecraft and Rocket League.

 

[user556]

First experience was Pong sometime in the late 1970's, but my real interest kicked off in 1980 when seeing for the first time a tank battle game on the Commodore PET that had been saved on tape after being typed in from a magazine. Having that freedom to program the CPU is what caught my attention. At the age of 12, I stopped being a train enthusiast that day.

 

[Axiarus]

I was about 10 years old. I was at my grandparents house playing outside and my cousin asked me, "Have you ever played Excitebike? Uncle has it on the NES!" I responded with, "Whats Excitebike... and whats a NES?" Ive been hooked ever since.

 

[Axeia]

Tetris was probably the first, first on PC might have been Lemmings. Those that left an impression were those that I shouldn't have played at that age. Duke Nukem (Hail to the king baby!) and Carmageddon. StarCraft was and is my favorite from the early days though, the story is great as is the voice acting.

 

[SRB]

ZX Spectrum was my first home gaming but Dungeon master on the Amiga was the first game that blew my mind and I kept replaying .

Remember that game as well. Spent a lot of time with that one too.

 

[felipetga]

First FPS was wof3d, that got my interest, then Doom! Though I have to say the oldest I played and had a blast was Secret of Monkey Island, epic!

 

[felipetga]

Terminal Velocity (1995)

Yes I am old!

Played that a lot too! back in the day! On a Nec Mobio NX Pentium 120mhz MMX, 96mb edo ram, 2.1gb HD, NeoMagic MagicGraph 128ZV vga, 5" TFT 640x480, Windows 95 osr2, later Windows98.

 

[fazy shah]

Project IGI and CS 1.6

 

[arrowflash]

Generally speaking, the games that made me a gamer would be Adventure, Berzerk, Enduro and River Raid on the Atari 2600 VCS. Maybe later reinforced by Super Mario Bros. and Super Pitfall on the NES. Super Pitfall was the pack-in game on the NES clone my parents bought me, I played tons of hours of it and probably helped shape many of my tastes and preferences in gaming.

The titles that made me a PC gamer, are the OG Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D, Alone in the Dark and many early 1990s point-and-click adventure titles. Especially King's Quest 5, Police Quest 3 and Monkey Island. I consider Doom my favorite video game of all time, but I was already an established PC gamer when it came out.

As for the technology that made me an enthusiast... video games? Haha

 

[TooQik]

Arcade machines were my first introduction to video games - Space Invaders, Asteroids and 1942 were my favourites.

The Commodore 64 got me into personal computers. Elite, The Way of the Exploding Fist and Pirates being well played titles.

Command and Conquer and Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator got me into multiplayer and online gaming.

 

[red1776]

Well pong I suppose in or about 1972 or so, and then there was the big upgrade
to 'breakout'.....it had four colors!




This was the one that did it for me.
Anyone remember Starsiege?

 

[Neutronbeam]

Pong, then A Mind Forever Voyaging, Pac-Man, Joust, Frogger, Half-Life and Deus Ex...yeah I was there at the beginning. Realistic graphics were and are big for me. I remember disassembling my GPU to install a custom cooler for it and thinking how far things had come.

 

[m4a4]

One of the earliest I can actually remember going through the whole game more than once was Gunstar Heroes for the Sega Genesis

And there was no particular tech. But I guess the controller for the original Xbox to play Halo:CE might be the closest.

 

[zavrix]

Pong and Space Invaders played on Arcade Machines back in the 1970s made me a gamer and I haven't stopped since lol On PC it was a Wolfenstein shareware disk 1.44mb

 

[Biostud]

I got 2mb of ram in Christmas present to run sensible soccer,only to find out it was something called "conventional memory" I needed more of. Then I had to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys and use loadhigh to get driver's out of conventional memory. And then I could play sensible soccer. But the extra memory helped in Wolfenstein 3D.

 

[GeoffreyA]

Despite starting off with the Family Computer TV games in the '90s, it was my first computer, a home-built Pentium 166 from my uncle in the US, that got me interested in technology. At first, I would play Jumpstart Haunted Island and various trial versions such as Age of Empires, The Neverhood, and Gex, and shareware titles like Rise of the Triad, Jazz the Jackrabbit, Terminal Velocity, etc. from a CD accompanying the Yamaha soundcard. But it was playing Icewind Dale and Diablo II in 2002 that left a permanent impression on me, making me want to become a game developer—something I never achieved. A few years later, Half-Life 2 became my all-time favourite.

From 2009 onwards, I mostly stopped playing, except for Oblivion, Skyrim, and other bits and pieces here and there. I lost the desire but always read about game development. It was in 2025, playing Doom 2016, that the old passion came back, and I played Expedition 33, the remakes of Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 4, and now the excellent Requiem (as a certain Waffler well knows). But the game I've waited for half my life is Half-Life 3—a disillusioning endeavour.

 

[LordVile95]

Probably Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie. Though the first game I remember getting demo disks for and wanting before release was Maximo.

 

[Nobodysfool]

GTA IV and Fallout 3. Playing these games on my ancient Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Vapor-X as a 14-year-old was a good time.

 

[Jyrkz]

Diablo, starcraft, c&c, doom, dungeon keeper, homm3, cs, - this is how became a gamer and overclocking amd and radeon made me a lifelong enthusiast

 

[loki1944]

Oregon Trail and Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego on my Dad's Apple II.