Gaming Made Me - Goodjer edition

RPS have been doing quite a interesting series of articles called "Gaming Made Me", with people listing 5 particularly influential games that led them to the point where they were working in games journalism or as developers. I'd like to hear some of GWJ's equivalents.

These aren't just games you played a lot, but games that opened your eyes to what a game could be, that maybe had an influence on your life (e.g. losing you a girlfriend in Levine's case). In the interests of brevity, maybe we could set a maximum of two each.

I'm going to choose:

Elite
This really opened my eyes to procedural content. There is a massive amount of stuff here. I loved the upgrading of the ship, the contemptuous names for the ranks e.g. HARMLESS->MOSTLY HARMLESS, the icosohedral space stations. It remains a giant of its time. At the time I tried to work out how much space it must take up for all the data, and I couldn't work out how they had done it. (I was only 10 and hadn't heard of generating content procedurally from fixed seeds to produce massive amounts of stuff repeatedly). It all seemed like magic.

Civilization
Civ was a watershed for me. I was at university by this time, and the scope of the thing amazed me. I love systems, how a number of simple rules interact to produce complex results, and that's Civ all over. The way you create an empire from a single settler, the use of government types to produce differently geared civs (even though I could see how naive some of their effects were - no corruption under democracy?). I always played the science turtle to tanks, and then conquered the world, a strategy that served me well until King level, where you need to be aggressive out of the gate. "Our words are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" resonates still.

For PC gaming:

Wing Commander: Privateer -
I always loved X-wing and Wing Commander 2 for their combat but there was just something about being a lone wolf, trying to survive against the odds in a huge galaxy that drew me in. I never completed the game due to a glitch that kept me from progressing through the storyline but i loved 'levelling up' my equipment. Awesome sauce!

Dune 2 -
Again, the genre-defining game really stuck its claws into me and my friends. We played this for over a summer together, working out tactics and strategies to finally beat that ridiculously hard last level.... Shame we started with Atredies and Ordo - leaving the 'easy' race til last

Doom -
What can i say? Frantic FPS action really did it for me. I liked Wolfenstein 3D, Blake Stone and Heretic but this game just really took its hold in my mind.

Diablo -
This is a little later on but it was my first hack and slash experience. I upgraded my computer to be able to play this game.... it really cemented my tech/geeky roots and helped make me the gamer i am today. I remember playing this a lot when i first got it. Nevermind that i would keep getting myself killed on that first level into the cathedral.... nevermind that i would use the tactic of restarting to be able to get my guy up to a certain level before progressing through to the deeper levels (yes, i was rubish at the game!)... i loved the action, the ability to horde everything on the floor in the middle of town - so much so that i kept my 'suits' of armour and weapons as i progressed through the game - and, of course, the atmosphere and music.

Privateer, Civilization, Elite, Dune 2, Doom have already been mentioned, so I'll go for other ones.

Sid Meier's Pirates! overwhelmed me with the possibility to do anything - it was like Elite, but prettier, less abstract, it had pirates and swashbuckling and attacking ports and ship combat and you could loot the ships and sink them or salvage them and you could be a privateer or a ruthless pirate and.... I loved it, it was both open and alive. Probably my first game I played from dusk to dawn.

Sid Meier's Colonization was always perceived like a Civ-lite, but not by me. It had fascinating depth, where you could make pacts with native Americans, have a good trade with them or instead just raze and pillage them for a lot of money, all the while connecting your colonies, training experts for them, teaching others and trying to become self-sufficient and independent. War of independence was always ruthless, but that only made the victory much sweeter. Also: kissing royal pinky ring.

Transport Tycoon provided both continuous challenge and satisfaction. The possibility of buying out the competition always drove me to pursue the most profitable trade routes while in the lull times I just love to observe how the sleepy hollows turned into bustling cities - all because of my cunning in transport business. Plus the crashes, especially of the vehicles of competition, were so sweet. I have to get back to that OpenTT sometime. The first Rollercoaster Tycoon had a similar hold on me, the games where you can build and then optimize what you build while receiving instant feedback (and gratification) are the perfect genre for me.

Great games all - I particularly like the shout-outs to Elite and Transport Tycoon, which are in my all time top 5 ever.

Let me add the following few

Rebelstar Raiders / Laser Squad - came out for the much-maligned ZX Spectrum, but the first (AFAIK) individual soldier/MP mechanics, with each one having different stats and skills. Developer gradually nudged this up various notches to the magnificent X-Com, but this was where it all began...and once you've killed your first pepperpot robot, you just want more

Championship Manager/Football Manager - it may be a text-based soccer sim, but one with an incomparable depth and a database that active League managers admit to using as a basis for research. Responsible for the deaths of many PC mice (my count is currently 3) and real-life divorces.

Oh yes, Rebelstar and Laser Squad would both have been on my long list, probably at third place. Corporal Jonlan lives forever.

I came to gaming pretty late, I didn't consider them as a major entertainment when I was a kid, so at 18 I moved in with a friend who managed an internet cafe and I discovered:

Warcraft 2 and Starcraft

More than anything else these games showed me that videogames could be something other than Pacman clones or derivatives. Careful games that required planning and the ability to multitask. To this day strategies are still my poison of choice.

Birthright

My introduction to turn based strategy, on the Forgotten Realms license. Not super deep, but a great introduction to the genre for a noob. Without this I wouldn't have my love for Civ 4 and Total War.

Half-life and Quake 2

My first shooters, multiplayer Quake was too much for my reflexes so Half-Life and TFC were my introduction to the death match. Neither matched by their successors and the only shooter close in spirit to Q2 in recent times is Painkiller.

That's really tough to narrow down. Definitely on the list has to be:

X-Com - everything about it was perfect. The audio creeped me the heck out, as did night-time terror missions. The art direction was great and of course the TBS was delicious. As much as I want a straight up modern graphics engine remake with no gameplay changes, I can still play the original and not even notice it's almost 15 years old.

Wing Commander - I really did feel like I was the hero fighter-pilot of a space opera movie! I loved the military feel of the Tiger's Claw and the mission briefs and the dogfighting. When I got to the end it felt like a real accomplishment.

Civilization - another vote for a classic! I lost so many hours to the original "just one more turn" game. I loved finding the villager huts and wondering what I would get, I hated how the end game always became "cover every square inch of the earth with railroads".

Pirates- I'm not sure what went wrong with the recent remake (though the dancing certainly didn't help....), but the original was so much fun. Sand-box, go anywhere, I loved the fencing. Outside of maybe the original Prince of Persia, I can't remember a game that, while certainly not realistic, made sword-play a more fun mini-game.

Those all were definitely defining games for me, I spent hours for months with each of them (years in the case of Civ, and multiple playthroughs over 15 years for X-Com).

But I can't possibly make a list like this and not include at least one of the defining games that got me severely hooked on computer gaming in the mid 80's. What really got me hooked were the old-school western CRPGs. I played so many of them in such a short and seminal period of time I can't pick one, so I'll just list them: Bard's Tale, Ultima III, Phantasie, and Wizard's Crown. Special Honor to Pool of Radiance, I spent a lot of time soaking that one up at the end of the 80's.

DudleySmith wrote:

Oh yes, Rebelstar and Laser Squad would both have been on my long list, probably at third place. Corporal Jonlan lives forever.

Not when I was controlling his movement, he didn't. Curse you, Sterner Regnax !!

Oregon Trail - They had this at the library, so I credit this game with also making me love reading. I would (of course) put my entire family in and laugh and laugh as they died one by one from cholera and measles (and sometimes, causing my younger self to fall on the ground in paroxysms of hilarity, of diarrhea.) Every area I came to I would hunt to scarcity. Anyone lucky enough to survive until the end I always managed to kill with my horrible white-water rafting skills.

Super Mario Bros. - The neighbor kid across the street had this game, and as such was the most popular kid in town. We discovered secrets everywhere, and swapped legends of crazy additional secrets we had heard of but didn't seem to work when we tried them.

Epic Megagames - Not one game, I know, but my 486 was filled with every piece of shareware they ever released. Jazz Jackrabbit (designed by a young CliffyB), One Must Fall 2097, Epic Pinball - they were awesome. Especially for a kid who didn't own a Nintendo.

Counter-Strike - Some of the people here who play Left 4 Dead with me think that I am addicted to that game. Had those people seen how much and how passionately I played Counter-Strike, over a period of 5 years of my life, they would understand that my attachment to Left 4 Dead is comparatively mild.

Combat (Atari 2600) and Gorillas (QuickBasic demo game) - These two games have nothing to do with each other, but I put them together because they are the only two games that I ever played with my Dad. He never understood more complicated games, but when I was very young we spent hours and hours bonding - first over the tank game in Combat on my grandpa's Atari, then some years later over Gorillas, a little example program that came with QuickBasic. It was basically a ghetto Scorched Earth, where you had two gorillas on top of buildings in a city, you entered an angle and a velocity and they would throw exploding bananas at each other. I got my Dad to teach me how BASIC worked so that I could play tricks on my sister, like changing the program so that her Gorilla would explode when she hit mine with a banana. Looking back on it, Gorillas is probably the reason that I'm working as a programmer now. Edit: Hey, apparently there is a flash version. That is awesome.

I reserve this space for my inevitable criminal defense.

Mario Bros. served to inform me that I was a gigantic poverty stricken loser amongst my peers for not owning an NES.

Quake reminded me that a decent PC is just as good, and also you can kill lots of angry people using the internet as long as mom doesn't pick up the phone and cut off the modem. Quake also pointed out that sometimes people will love a game so much that they'll build other games on top of it (like Team Fortress) and some of those angry internet people will now be on your team! Er, clan. And someone needs to make a clan webpage so you'll have to learn a bit of Photoshop and HTML, and probably become an early adopter of high speed internet access so those pipe bombs will go off when you hit the key (IMPORTANT).

Moonmist - I'm not really sure where Moonmist ranks in the great list of Infocom text adventures but it was the one I played the most. I spent hours trying to find all of the different endings and I was so fascinated that the characters in the game actually moved around on their own, would talk to you and even react to things you said. It's funny how important story was back then and is now just finding its way back into gaming.

The Bard's Tale - The first RPG I can remember playing, I think Bard's Tale (and other games like Wasteland and Dragon Wars) made my love for fantasy, role playing games and loot I was just so amazed that you could build your own party of six people and adventure around this massive world. Really fantastic stuff. I even remember feigning ill so I could stay home the day Bard's Tale II arrived at our house!

Out of this World - This is the first game I played that made me realize video games could be a truly cinematic experience. It also showed me the power of animation as a story-telling mechanism. Still sits in my top five favorite games of all time.

Combat Mission: The game that all but ruined RTS games for me. Essentially, after having to maneuver my little Sherman to the edge of a little rise, hoping that I was in range and that the weather conditions would permit it to actually get side penetration on that Panzer IV (fat chance without a late-model Sherman), I just couldn't go back to Life Bars appearing over vehicles and infantry that could survive a firefight with a MG nest out in the open. Moreover, it was the game that began to get me into really, really simmy games. I probably wouldn't have decided to play titles like Europa Universalis or Football Manager or Jane's F/A-18 if Combat Mission hadn't convinced me that really, really simmy games could be supremely exciting and entertaining.

Next, i'll go with Baldur's Gate II, which, despite the fact that I still, to this day have never finished it, is still one of my favorite gaming experiences, especially from a story/narrative standpoint, and probably the definitive RPG for me. It's not just that the game was quotable (and it is, immensely, apart from Minsc), but the characters were interested, detailed, and the world felt full and alive around you. Given that most WRPG's are shooting for 20-30 hour timeframes now, I don't think I'll see another title that massively robust again anytime soon.

Mutant League Football: Still one of my favorites. You could kill opposing RBs by pushing them into a landmine, murder the ref, and threw bombs at the halftime band. Blitz: The League wishes it was as crass and entertaining as MLF.

Road Rash: The game that taught me the incomprehensible joy of hitting an opposing rider with a cattle prod, then kicking him into an oncoming truck. Or hitting a car and flying/skidding across the finish line in first. Or just hitting someone else on a motorcycle with a crowbar.

Prederick wrote:

Road Rash: The game that taught me the incomprehensible joy of hitting an opposing rider with a cattle prod, then kicking him into an oncoming truck. Or hitting a car and flying/skidding across the finish line in first. Or just hitting someone else on a motorcycle with a crowbar.

Oh how I miss Road Rash (1+2)!

Dragon Warrior: RPG's like this were unknown to me prior to this game. Eventually I buoght a PSOne just for FF7 all thanks to what this game showed me. I actually really like the 'Old English' dialog in the game too, and thought it was a great touch.

X-Com : If ever a game made sitting at some office chair in front of a computer worth it for me, it was this.

Wizardry: I've tried every RPG I could get my hands on since. All the pretty graphics aside, none have been able to recapture the sense of adventure I got from that green shaded wonder that was the original Wizardry.

Switchbreak wrote:

Counter-Strike - Some of the people here who play Left 4 Dead with me think that I am addicted to that game. Had those people seen how much and how passionately I played Counter-Strike, over a period of 5 years of my life, they would understand that my attachment to Left 4 Dead is comparatively mild.

This is absolutely true. People thought I played a lot of Company of Heroes (probably about 300 hours at this point), and they thought I played a lot of Call of Duty 4 on the 360.

None of the games I've touched in ages has compared in any way to the amount of time I dedicated to Counter-Strike, and with it Starcraft.

I remember I was a year or so into my Starcraft addiction when Counter-Strike started to get popular, and one of my clanmates for Starcraft kept pushing me to try it. We were already playing TFC together, so hey, what was one more mod. Counter-Strike was the first multiplayer shooter to really get me into it online. I was playing TFC at the time, but I didn't love it. I would rather have been playing Goldeneye on the N64 with my friends.

I then spent a couple years playing both games almost every day, and even longer than that playing just Counter-Strike. Lan parties, online leagues, tournaments, all of it. I was a server admin and ran the website for the clan I was in. We had our own server hosted on a T1 by one of the members who happened to work for an ISP, and it was routine for me to get home from school and hop straight into it.

I doubt any multiplayer game will ever grab me again the way CS did when it hit. I started in Beta 2 and played well past the retail release of regular CS and Condition Zero. I was still playing avidly when the Source version came out. It's probably good that I don't have any real way of knowing exactly how many hours I put into it. If I did I think it would probably rival the time some people sink into WoW and be extremely depressing to me.

As it is though, I look back on it and think about how much fun most of it was.

Haven't had a game experience like it since.

Night Driver: (Arcade) Previous to Night Driver, I'd played Pong on various formats and thought it was an interesting diversion. A couple years later I remember playing the arcade version of Night Driver and having a total epiphany on just how compelling gaming could be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFRp...

(note that the car at the bottom of the screen was just an overlay sticker)

I guess this would have been back in '76 or so, and I came from a background of enjoying pinball machines (my dad even owned a couple 'real' parlor models). While vacationing, the hotel where we were staying had a stand-up Night Driver unit complete with steering wheel, gas/break, and stick shift). While the game simply used the Pong engine (having the paddles represent road-posts), it was literally the first 1st person perspective game I'd ever seen.

I got lost in those endlessly curving roads and distinctly remember feeling like this was something BIG. Something more compelling and important than any toys I'd ever owned previously. I begged my parents for quarters the whole time we stayed at that hotel. While everyone else was on the beach, I was firmly planted in front of that arcade unit. Even when I was out of quarters, I'd just watch the attract sequence on the monitor.

For me it would have to be Neverwinter Nights. Still to this day I have yet to finish it all the way through. I almost dont want to finish it because its such a great game I dont want it to end, but I played so much multi-player that it got me hooked on RPG's and MMO's. Since then I have been looking for a game that compares to it and NWN2 comes close but just doesnt have quite the same feel to it.

I know we should stick to 2, but I just have to mention 3.

Warcraft 2
I had played Warcraft and Dune 2, and loved both, but Warcraft 2 exemplified precisely what an RTS, and more specifically a LAN-enabled RTS, could be. Everything from the unit balance to the fantastic music was perfect. It had an excellent single player game, with more background and character than many RPGs have, and it carried over a lot of fantastic writing and witty dialogue into multiplayer as well. Simply put, Warcraft 2 was the true beginning of RTS games for me. I learned all I know about PC and Apple networking solely out of a desire to play Warcraft 2.

Marathon: Infinity
Some of you will know this, some of you won't. Back before Bungie was a Microsoft studio, they were a primarily Apple developer, basically acting as the sole bastion for gaming on Mac OS. Before producing what I think is their crowning achievement (coming next), they made the FPS that I have played more than any other - Marathon Infinity. This game had such fantastic multiplayer, that I never even bothered with the single player. Tons of maps, tons of games modes (for any Halo fans who think Oddball was an original mode, do a google search for "Kill the man with the Skull", which originated in Marathon), and fantastic weapons, this game literally made LAN parties during my high school days. This game caused me to be banned from the high school computer lab several times.

Myth - The Fallen Lords
Bungie gets 2 nods from me today. While Marathon changed my gaming life in terms of shooter, Myth changed it in terms of Tactical/Strategy games. I am making the distinction between RTS games and Myth, because Myth really is more of a Real Time Tactical game, where the emphasis is on the single battle, and there are no second chances. In RTS games I had played, if you failed an assault, you could potentially try again. In Myth, if your tactics failed you, that was game over. No reinforcements, no resources to gather, just the battle and the units you had. Myth opened my eyes to games that could be focused so closely on one thing, that they capture it's essence and cause you to lose years in it. Myth was also my introduction to dedicated 3D hardware, and is the reason I bought a 3DFX card.

Too many runners up to mention, but those 3 games are what made me as a gamer.

I have played so many games, having come onto the scene during the late 70's and early 80s. But there are a few that really stick out:

The first game that really sucked me in like nothing before was Ultima IV. I had played III to completion, and later played through the two originals, but no game captured my imagination and fed that sense of exploring a vast, but somehow real fantasy world. The quest lines were superb (despite having a fairly limited dialogue/story interface), and there was such an established sense of place and world here it became real for me. I can still, to this day, see the layout of what was once Sosaria and became Britannia. Part of the magic came from having there be real (or what I remember to be serious) implications for your actions. This was my gateway drug that lead to such beautiful, stay-up-all-night sessions playing Baldur's Gate I & II, Fallout 1 & 2, Planescape: Torment, etc.

I am going to diverge here and go with an RPG for my second. Although I learned to play D&D at the ripe old age of 7, the game that really formed me as a GM and Player was the first Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game. The memories of walking into the Gamekeeper in Southern California one day in 1986 and seeing this odd, large, hardbound RPG are so incredibly vivid to this day. I remember flipping through the book and becoming excited about the potential stories sitting in there: the career system, the history of the world, the creatures populating the bestiary that were so different somehow than what you found in other RPGs, there was so much RPG meat to the book. This was not at all like D&D, Star Frontiers or Boothill. This was something different. Something adult. It remains, to this day, my favorite RPG setting to GM.

Being limited to two, I won't discuss how StarCraft brought out the RTS love in me, or how a little known computer adventure game, Star Saga One: Beyond the Boundary has so strongly influenced me in terms of the games I design and what I want out of space exploration themed games.

Zork pretty literally changed my life. When someone let me play it, I got interested in computers, and begged my parents to get us a Commodore 64. (Saying it was for school and learning, but secretly, I just wanted to play Zork.) I might never have gotten into programming or followed my current career path otherwise.

Edited to add-- Yes, I taught myself programming in Commodore BASIC (!!!) and wrote a shoddily-programmed text adventure in it! It was so awful. If I'd grown up with Inform available, who knows where I'd be now?

I am going to go with a game that doesnt get alot of love.
Shadowbane
I had played Everquest and had buddies that I met while playing but it was nothing like what went on with Shadowbane. I spent months before it released reading the lore and imagining characters I would make. The chance to build and siege enemies cities sounded amazing. When it finally came out it was one of the most difficult games I had ever played. You didnt ever go anywhere without some sort of posse. You were alone, you got ganked. When the game first started one guild completely dominated the server. My guild was feuding with another and a lone guy from the uber guild wandered past and no one would touch him for fear of reprisals from the Uber Guild of the server. It was like he was a Roman citizen and we were all barbarians. One weekend I was out of town and came home to play and everything had changed. Aftermath (the uberguild) was gone and tons of new cities had sprung up. That was the first major upheval and after that no one ever managed to rule the server in the same way. The second amazing thing that happend was when they got rid of our server. We got to be refugees. They let you take what you were wearing to the new server and that was it. No gold just what you had on. We had to build a new city from scratch while enduring the raids of older established guilds and other newly arrived immegrants. But we did it!! We built the new city! Then one day we found out that the guild leader sold it and some jerk took over. I PKed him and got banned from the city. Thats when I stopped playing. I still think that Shadowbane had the best Character creation system of any game I had ever played. My main character was a Half Giant warrior knight that could turn into a werebear. Never have I been so involved in a game and I dont think I ever will be again.

HedgeWizard wrote:

I am going to diverge here and go with an RPG for my second. Although I learned to play D&D at the ripe old age of 7, the game that really formed me as a GM and Player was the first Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game. The memories of walking into the Gamekeeper in Southern California one day in 1986 and seeing this odd, large, hardbound RPG are so incredibly vivid to this day. I remember flipping through the book and becoming excited about the potential stories sitting in there: the career system, the history of the world, the creatures populating the bestiary that were so different somehow than what you found in other RPGs, there was so much RPG meat to the book. This was not at all like D&D, Star Frontiers or Boothill. This was something different. Something adult. It remains, to this day, my favorite RPG setting to GM.

So from this, I'm guessing that I really should pick up a copy of this PDF?

Picking games that have not been already mentioned was...surprisingly easy. The 80's- early 90's really was the explosion of the gaming industry and there are no shortage of great games that were memorable, ground breaking and hobby making.

One of the great things about games is that they give you the chance to experience a whole new world or setting. Usually via Exploration. And the very best ones are able to tell a compelling narrative as we slowly explore our new playground as we see fit. Exploration being a visual aspect, as is gaming itself, the huge leap to VGA made for an extra-ordinary memory.
Now any of the Ultima series would fit having a rich world and storylines, but my own personal favorite was Ultima VI. Part of the reason was that it was my first experience of the "3rd-person isometric view" (in actual fact it was still top-down tile-based except made to look isometric as the characters were standing at an angle). The colors, the animations, even the sound effects were like a new dimension beyond the other RPGs I had played at the time (SSI Golden box series, Wasteland, 2400AD). Loving the game engine almost as much as the game itself, I went on to play the Worlds of Ultima series and enjoyed them as well.

Following the theme of exploration with narrative, I have to cite Star Control 2 as another game that got me hooked firmly into the hobby. While broken down it brought nothing new: borrowing elements from Starflight, Hyperspeed/Lightspeed and Space Wars. It was the whole package that was so engrossing. Of particular note for me was that it was funny. From history of the aliens, to ship design, to even the combat (B.U.T.T missiles comes to mind). I remember completing the game in a 3-day stretch, having meals at the PC, seeing everything in shades of green after slowly mapping out Quasi-space points the whole night and so forth.

From these two examples is one of the things that makes gaming just so entertaining above other forms of media. Why just passively view a story, when you can actively interact and be a part of the story first hand?

Dragon Warrior I - Never before had a fantasy realm sucked me in so much. I was the hero on an epic quest, exploring a (for me) huge continent, encountering dangerous baddies, rescuing a princess, and defeating a dark overlord bent on world domination/destruction. This game started my love for rpg's.

Thin_J wrote:

Counter-Strike was the first multiplayer shooter to really get me into it online.

I then spent a couple years playing ... almost every day, and even longer than that playing just Counter-Strike. Lan parties, online leagues, tournaments, all of it. I was a server admin and ran the website for the clan I was in. We had our own server hosted on a T1 by one of the members who happened to work for an ISP, and it was routine for me to get home from school and hop straight into it.

I doubt any multiplayer game will ever grab me again the way CS did when it hit. I started in Beta 2 and played well past the retail release of regular CS and Condition Zero.

Haven't had a game experience like it since.

Take pretty much all of this and swap out "Counterstrike" for "Quake I" in my case. That fateful night in October 1996 when I ventured online to the German Posbi server opened my eyes to the future of gaming. I too took over a capture the flag clan and ran it for several years - well past the release of Quake III even, and was the organizer of two online ctf tournaments.

Runners up:
Age of Empires - Command & Conquer was fun, but it wasn't until I played this regularly on a LAN in college that my passion for RTS games reached a fever pitch that would later lead me to Rise of Nations.
Sid Meier's Pirates! (original) - for all the fantastic reasons already mentioned (why they removed the Silver Train and replace it with dancing in the remake is beyond comprehension, however.)
Defender of the Crown - awakened my love of turn-based strategy, which later led me to fall in love with most things KOEI.

Adventure - Back when personal computers were things mad scientists created in their basement lairs, Adventure was an amazing creation...you could collect items and try to do anything with them in any combination! This fired up my imagination for computer games. I remember a bit later having a vision of how cool it would be if computer games used graphics, but having my dream crushed when an Osborne computer salesman informed me that computers simply weren't powerful enough for gaming graphics. I took it to mean they would never be powerful enough, and I really felt bad that computer gaming would never be as exciting as I'd hoped.

Empire - My introduction to TBS and any sort of strategy game, really...first played this when the "graphics" were letters (a fighter was an "f", etc). It was a classic war game...take over cities, create tanks and battleships and the like and go kill the other guy. Followed the game through various graphical incarnations and created my own maps for it. I remember the developers rejecting calls for creating spies and land mines and the like in the name of simplicity...which made sense to me, but then Command & Conquer came out and was real-time plus all that other stuff and Empire was never to be seen again.

Nethack - Long before Diablo was a gleam in Blizzard's eye, Nethack and its ilk were doing hack-and-slash loot-collection mechanics with alphanumeric characters. Amazingly, it's possible to get very scared when an "O" (Orc) comes in to the room. This was my introduction to RPGs...when Diablo came out, we originally criticized it for ripping off Nethack/Rogue, but due to the graphical nature not having the flexibility of the originals.

SimCity - This game brought complexity and life to games in a way I'd never seen before. It was a huge eye-opener to see a game contain fun, education, and, well, *life*...once this game came out, the possibilities were clearly limitless.

Populous - Bizarre, unprecedented...you got to be a God and you got to alter the landscape. The whole thing was just mind-blowing.

Cheating to add a sixth, but it must be here:

Civilization - I don't need to say anything about this other than note that my household has been playing Civ since day 1 and is still playing Civ to this day. The ambition of the game remains mind-blowing.

Note: It would not be polite to note that the nature of this list must make me as ancient as Rabbit.

Falchion wrote:

So from this, I'm guessing that I really should pick up a copy of this PDF?

I think so! This newer version book doesn't have the same art style that helped draw me in, or the breadth of content as the first edition book did, but this new system has better mechanics.

If you get into it, there are quite a number of supplements. I think you really only need four if you buy any at all: The Bestiary first, and then The Career Compendium (out from Fantasy Flight Games) as it has every career in every supplement, which is extensive. For magic, the Realms of Sorcery is fantastic, and if you want to level some nasties at the player, the fourth book choice would be Tome of Corruption.

Command and Conquer - The first game that I downloaded the demo for. This was over a modem connection that failed 3 times past the 75% mark. Once I finally got into the game, I became sold on the RTS genre and have been battling friends ever since. It was also one of the first experiences I had with playing against a person who was not in the same room as me. Yelling through out the house warning people to not pick up the phone became common place. Those were great times that lead me down the path that would have me attending an annual LAN with some of my closet friends.

Ultima Underworld - I was hooked on this so hard in my early high school days. A friend of mine had it on some compilation pack that I forget where he got, and I played through it about 15 times over the course of several years. Completing the map and just becoming a part of the world was so amazing to me at that time. Also, I had played Ultima VI and Underworld really showed me the power of a good franchise

X-Com - No other game has made me care about a squadmate so much. I reloaded so many games to save my "best man." To be able to get that same feel of suspense from not wanting my guys to die in a new game would be amazing. I actually cared if my squad members lived or died, and after a while, it wasn't even purely stat based.

Sid Meyer's Pirates Drawing my own pirate map, buckling swash on the deck of a Spanish galleon, and stealing away with the governor's daughter. This game pushed my 12 year old imagination to the max. Finding the right bar that had the right type of person that would sell me a treasure map piece was always so much fun

It's not so much about the games that made me, but the platform. Notably, the noble Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k. When I moved to England, aged 6, the family across the street from me had one, and I spent the rest of my single-digit years playing the hell out of that machine, eventually getting my own one. Still have vivid memories of coming home from the game shop on the bus, devouring the manual for whatever game on an audio cassette that I'd payed my 3 quid for.

Their Finest Hour: Battle of Britain

My first flight sim. I must've been only 5 years old or so when I first played it but this one truly helped trigger my lifelong passion in aviation. To this day, a good percentage of my time in front of a computer screen is spent shooting down, straffing, or dive-bombing a variety of german military equipement.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

This one is kinda weird, because I first played it in 2007, pretty much unaware of it's already-legendary status. And then I discovered what a really, really good free-roaming RPG with awesome world design truly was, that first time walking around the Bitter Coast... oh man

I know I'll be showing my age here, but:

Dragon's Lair At a time when all the other video games involved little colored pixels, Dragonslayer was the one game that looked like you were playing in the latest Disney movie. I was 9 at the time and really no match for the hardcore teens who dominated this game. I vividly remember waiting 20 minutes in line only to die in like 5 minutes. But this game was a window into the glorious future when video games would become more than an '80s trend.

Pool of Radience One of the first and best computer RPGs I ever played. Also loved Curse of the Azure Bonds.

Lord of the Realms My buddy could not get past the first mission in this old school historical strategy game. He challenged me to beat the game and I did in one manic all-nighter session. Victory never felt so sweet, especially since my buddy constantly cleaned my clock at Mortal Combat or early shooters. I've since moved on to the Total War series.

Warcraft 2 Launched my love affair with both real-time strategy and Blizzard.

Shogun Total War Several times I've discovered new favorites in the RTS genre, including Age of Empires or Company of Heroes. But all these games still have a lot of basic gameplay features in common with Warcraft and Starcraft. Shogun Total War opened my eyes to a genre that blended Civilization with Age of Empires, and I've been hooked ever since.

Asheron's Call My introduction to MMOGs. I can still vividly remember sitting in a tea house in the Asian starter area, having a drink with my cousin and a high school buddy who at the time lived 3000 miles away. Incredible experience.

Ultima Online The game that started all the MMORPG. It made me start upgrading my computer (28.8k, here I come!) and I was hooked. I was a walking convenience store, but my friends and I still hash out the PKs we were a part of and some of the treasure hunts and game time there.

Gold Box D&D Games Sure, props to Pool of Radiance, but really, all of them were games I spent a terrible amount of hours at that really drew me to the darkside. Fighting Lord Soth and then watching him get up and dust himself off only to taunt my paltry party through a simple static cutscene was pretty awesome.

Tie Fighter I had tried flight sims before this, but I don't have the patience. Another game that made me invest -- this time in a joystick. The first time I played through it with a mouse and arrow keys, for god sake. The joystick made it 100 times better.

Heroes of Might and Magic series Another played for hours and replayed again for hours. The early ones, I remember gathering ghosts and then going around and kicking friends ass while playing hot seat. Nothing like taunting your opponent in person.

Stars! / Space Empires Played by email and games would last over the course of a year at a turn a day. Another game that added a new dimension to my addiction, this one coming in daily spurts that was another great game, which leads me to my other daily game -- this one older...

TradewarsPlaying as the 'good guys' was cheating. Their heaviest cruiser could wipe the floor with the bad guys, but it sure was fun building that meanie rep. First real PvP action, even if it is sedate compared to our current plethora of games.

Vampire: Bloodlines I'm not a big story-game player, but this game was a great mix of storytelling and action and even had some 'freedom' associated with it. Seeing a few of the different endings was great and one of the best level designs ever were here, including the haunted mansion and the Malkavian's house with his creepy, creppy tapes you could play and have echo through the house as you moved through.

Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun What a tough game to figure out, especially since I started the game playing the Americans, which was tough starting choice to figure out all the controls and the UI. My greatest moment was when I was playing Prussia and made France a satellite state, which is awfully apropriate. You bring it England! I'll kick your ass back to the Stone Age.