Which PC game showed you the light?
- Thread starter Dirty Apple
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I had played games like Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D on DOS as far back as the age of three, but it was Starcraft that turned me into a PC gamer. I started playing Red Faction online a few years later and that ultimately peaked my interest in shooters, something that's led to me to where I am today, leader of a TF2 clan of over 200.
My very first ever true PC game was the Lord of the Rings games produced by Interplay.
For those of you who don't know: http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/lotr1.html
I remember up until that point (I was about 5 or 6) I'd only been allowed to play educational games. But my father was a programmer back in those days and he brought this home from work.
Good memories.
For those of you who don't know: http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/lotr1.html
I remember up until that point (I was about 5 or 6) I'd only been allowed to play educational games. But my father was a programmer back in those days and he brought this home from work.
Good memories.
My first gaming experiences were on the pre-cursor to the modern PC, but none of those really were all that magical for me. My first game for something resembling a true PC (some model of IBM with a 486DX and 8MB of memory, running PC-DOS) was Falcon 3.0 - a flight simulator. While I certainly liked that game, it did little to ignite a love affair with gaming. No, that honor gets bestowed on a game that a friend delivered one day in a pair of diskettes - the shareware version of Doom.
Doom was utterly unlike ANYTHING I had ever played before (at that point I had played video games for 5 or 6 years with fair regularity). I had heard tales about this game of course - the shareware games that predated the internet were like that. All you heard was the name and the slightest of details in passing, and in the grand abyss that this lack of information spawned I was free to imagine whatever I wanted about the game. Even the imagination of an 11 year old proved no match for the spendor that was Doom.
I played that first episode of Doom many times over the course of summer, never once tiring of it, even though I could likely beat the game on the hardest difficulty level on feel alone. My parents at the time were unaware of the presence of the game on the system - for I had this computer in my room (This was afterall, before the internet came about), and through luck alone it's existance wasn't revealed for quite some time. I was so impressed with the game that it was discovered when I intentionally revealed it's presence, assuming that everyone would have the same appreciation for it that I did. My parents, however, refused to accept my enlightenment and insisted I remove the game from my sytem.
But, Doom was a most insidious agent. The gaming bug had burrowed deep and no threat of reprisal would stop me from seeking out new horizons to explore. During the next few years I often went out of my way to acquire shareware versions of games like Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D and a host of other games long since lost to the ages. Eventually, my parents relented as it seemed that no matter how hard they tried to control what I played, I was always willing to go one step further than they were. The fact that I had not begun openly worshiping satan, strangling small and adorable animals or gone on a brutal killing spree finally sank in and I was, at long last, allowed to play games without restraint so long as my behavior was satisfactory.
Doom was hardly the greatest game ever made, but, at the time, there was no question in my mind. In the years since, I have played through the entire game and owned nearly a half dozen incarnations of the series. Even now, I have the entire doom series for PC, I can enjoy it on my N64, I can revisit on my game boy and most recently I downloaded it on XBL. With time, the guilded venier of Doom has worn thin, revealing the primitive and often shoddy makings of the great giant but it still retains a spark of the old magic. It stands along with games like Pac-Man and Tetris as an ancient game that can be revisited again and again.
Doom was utterly unlike ANYTHING I had ever played before (at that point I had played video games for 5 or 6 years with fair regularity). I had heard tales about this game of course - the shareware games that predated the internet were like that. All you heard was the name and the slightest of details in passing, and in the grand abyss that this lack of information spawned I was free to imagine whatever I wanted about the game. Even the imagination of an 11 year old proved no match for the spendor that was Doom.
I played that first episode of Doom many times over the course of summer, never once tiring of it, even though I could likely beat the game on the hardest difficulty level on feel alone. My parents at the time were unaware of the presence of the game on the system - for I had this computer in my room (This was afterall, before the internet came about), and through luck alone it's existance wasn't revealed for quite some time. I was so impressed with the game that it was discovered when I intentionally revealed it's presence, assuming that everyone would have the same appreciation for it that I did. My parents, however, refused to accept my enlightenment and insisted I remove the game from my sytem.
But, Doom was a most insidious agent. The gaming bug had burrowed deep and no threat of reprisal would stop me from seeking out new horizons to explore. During the next few years I often went out of my way to acquire shareware versions of games like Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D and a host of other games long since lost to the ages. Eventually, my parents relented as it seemed that no matter how hard they tried to control what I played, I was always willing to go one step further than they were. The fact that I had not begun openly worshiping satan, strangling small and adorable animals or gone on a brutal killing spree finally sank in and I was, at long last, allowed to play games without restraint so long as my behavior was satisfactory.
Doom was hardly the greatest game ever made, but, at the time, there was no question in my mind. In the years since, I have played through the entire game and owned nearly a half dozen incarnations of the series. Even now, I have the entire doom series for PC, I can enjoy it on my N64, I can revisit on my game boy and most recently I downloaded it on XBL. With time, the guilded venier of Doom has worn thin, revealing the primitive and often shoddy makings of the great giant but it still retains a spark of the old magic. It stands along with games like Pac-Man and Tetris as an ancient game that can be revisited again and again.
The city-builder series by Sierra. Makes me sad that they stopped expanding the games (Caesar, Zeus, Pharaoh and Emperor), but those halcyon days will live with me forever.
Don't wanna sound like a fanatic with this whole "the light" [http://penny-arcade.com/images/2009/20090202.jpg] thing but when my friend showed me Dawn of War and F.E.A.R. I pretty much just upgraded my PC the next week.
It wasn't so much a specific game as the fact that it was a computer. My first game was probably the original Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, which my mother played with me when I was a very small child on our Apple IIe. Other games I remember from that computer include Math Blaster, Swashbuckler (if you've ever played the original Prince of Persia from 1990, it was like an entire game made out of the swordfighting minigame), Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Bruce Lee, Ghostbusters, and Wasteland (the original Fallout was actually the spiritual successor to Wasteland, and I can tell that there's a fantastic game in there, although I still can't figure out how to play it properly, let alone 4-year-old me).
We also had a game where you were a sheriff in an old west town, and you got into a series of encounters. We didn't have a mouse, so we controlled with a joystick. If the cursor was in the main part of the screen, you pulled out your six-gun and aimed; at the bottom were dialogue options. Young me did not understand that they were dialogue options - I thought the highlighted one was what the person I was talking to was saying. One day, I just shot everyone until I got to the end of the game. It worked. I wish I could remember the name of this game, although these games were so old that there's no way in hell they'll work on a modern system. (I tried with Bruce Lee, which somebody had supposedly ported. It didn't work.)
We also had a game where you were a sheriff in an old west town, and you got into a series of encounters. We didn't have a mouse, so we controlled with a joystick. If the cursor was in the main part of the screen, you pulled out your six-gun and aimed; at the bottom were dialogue options. Young me did not understand that they were dialogue options - I thought the highlighted one was what the person I was talking to was saying. One day, I just shot everyone until I got to the end of the game. It worked. I wish I could remember the name of this game, although these games were so old that there's no way in hell they'll work on a modern system. (I tried with Bruce Lee, which somebody had supposedly ported. It didn't work.)
Mine was *relatively* recent. When the Wii/360/PS3 generation came out, I looked at their price tags, and looked at the cost of a few simple upgrades to my PC, and the PC won out. I still play my PS2 and original XBox from time to time, but I've no intention of returning strictly to the realm of console gamer.
In the earliest days, MUDs on the C64, followed by games like Railroad Tycoon for Win 3.1. Then I took a long hiatus from computers, got into the old Nintendo, Sega, SegaCD, and finally Super Nintendo and PSX. The last console games I played were FF7, XCom: UFO Defense, King's Field 1 & 2, Wild Arms 1, and lastly, Persona: Revelations. Around the same time I was hanging around a video store a lot, and the guy running the place asked why the Hell I was wasting time on consoles. He showed me The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall. And XCom with zero load times. That was enough to get me to drop consoles forever. Daggerfall. Yummy. Show me that on a console. Impossible.
Edit: Incidentally, I've been using this avatar a few years. A gnarled tree. It's a gif ripped kicking and screaming from the bowels of Daggerfall.
Edit: Incidentally, I've been using this avatar a few years. A gnarled tree. It's a gif ripped kicking and screaming from the bowels of Daggerfall.
Well i had a C64 and remember very little due to the curses of alcohol/weed enduced fun during my student years but for PC (I remember this stuff) F19 was the fist game I played and then DOOM shareware version had me and my brother literally poohing ourselves at some point around the age of 10 or 11 i think.
Quake (played that on a 33.6k modem!) came along and games like Transport Tycoon, Colonisation, Total Annihilation, Warcraft and down the years to Half-Life and CS (beta 3 was my initial version) and MMO madness that still haunts me! My first console was a game cube lol and I only own consoles now because all my friends are lame console retards (j/k)
Quake (played that on a 33.6k modem!) came along and games like Transport Tycoon, Colonisation, Total Annihilation, Warcraft and down the years to Half-Life and CS (beta 3 was my initial version) and MMO madness that still haunts me! My first console was a game cube lol and I only own consoles now because all my friends are lame console retards (j/k)
