PC Gaming

The Secret World.

I loved the spooky Lovecraftian vibe and the stories.

The Siren Song is still stuck in my head.

Why do people consider Doom 2 so much better and more groundbreaking than Doom 1?

Half Life 2.
Bought it, and ended up having to bypass steam to play it on my garbage machine at the time.

The first game that blew my mind was a pirated copy of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in my older brother's computer. Back then I was intimidated by big and "complex" games like that. I was only playing mainstream online multiplayer games, particularly shooters, that are trending in my country (Crossfire, CS 1.6, etc.). I was bored that time, don't know what to play and decided to try this game. It blew my mind that games could be like this, and it's not complex than I thought. That was the first time I've played a "modern" game and made me fell in love with gaming.

Gonna date myself a bit, but the Original Descent and MechWarrior 2. The seemless use of a z-axis in a shooter was for some reason mind blowing, and the combination of resource balancing and evaluating pros/cons for how to approach a mission was amazing. TIMBERWOLF is the real Og.

Road Rash was the first game that made me love games then it was Need for Speed II I could replay those games for hours. nowadays the only game that gave me good replayability was Hades and live-service games like Valorant.

I remember when DOOM came out. There was a little crowd of maybe 8-12 people at the computer huddled around a 486 demo running the shareware version of the game, I think it was at Fry's Electronics, everyone was entirely stunned by how good the graphics were.

Has to be The Sims. I remember going into Toys R Us with my best friend and we each picked up copies of the base game with the Livin Large expansion (remember toy stores and when you had to go and pick up physical copies of games?!)

Say what you will about The Sims but it was my first real exposure to just how expansive, creative, and immersive games could be. The possibilities felt endless!

Probably Warcraft III

I did not grow up with a console. Pretty much just floppies with TLC games on them. My grandma introduced me to Sierra and Blizzard games, and they were exciting yeah but not mind blowing.

But then warcraft III (didn't play Starcraft much at this time, was young) introduced the concept of custom maps to me. Basically going from having one game to dozens. Tower Defenses, RPGs, genres that basically either didn't exist yet or don't exist anymore (rip Enfos...and RP maps seriously wth)

It pretty much shaped my childhood, friends, and all that stuff. Really sad that SCII never really became what Warcraft III was to me.

Day of the Tentacle! Going from Maniac Mansion on the NES to the graphics, voice work, and interactivity on this CD-ROM - I’m still in awe decades later.

Shogo: Mobile Armor Division by Monolith Production, before they made moved on to only making Middle-earth games they made some very interesting games, and Shogo was one that I fell in love with. The thing that really blew my mind, is that when you are in the mech parts of the game, which looks and feels like the same first person as on foot but with mech walking sounds and mech weapons, but then suddenly you see teeny tiny humans that shoot at you (sometimes with rocket launchers), literally shrunk down, you could even step on them lol. (and the blood effects on them were a bit comical considering how small they were)

First time I played Skyrim I was blown away. The Xbox Kinect had just come out as well and you could shout the shouts. It’s was amazing.

There were a lot, but probably MechWarrior 2 with a joystick. I feel like that was probably the first game I played that had true 3D elements. Such a fun game. After that, Air Warrior was my first time playing a game online, cooperatively, with people I knew.

Unreal. At the time Quake II was the most popular FPS and the colors and atmosphere of Unreal really were a new experience. I remember the graphics card wars at the time too. Really fun times for computer tech.

X-Wing Alliance. I loved playing around in skirmish mode and just acting like I was in the movies by flying through trenches in a super star destroyer. Shame about the meh campaign though. Definitely going to reinstall when I get enough physical space for a new flight stick.

I remember my father bringing home Wolfenstein and being blown away.

More modern playing WoW as my first MMO was mindboggling - I couldn't believe how big and seamless the world was as well as seeing all the RTS games in a 3d world.

Ooh the first game that really blew my mind on the PC was Homeworld Cataclysm. I spent so many hours as a kid just going back and forth in the tutorial section of the demo, making a huge space fleet with no pressure, just gawking at the beautiful space backgrounds, the cool spaceships and their visual effects of thrusters, lasers and beam cannons.
It's still one of my favorite strategy franchises and games of all time.

Flashback - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashback_(1992_video_game). Was playing Prince of Persia and hated how janky it felt, and Flashback just played so much better.

Probably Rome: Total War in 2006... After being used to normal RTSs, the scale and complexity of the battles in RTW blew my mind, I couldn't understand how it was technically possible.
Still a fan of the series so many years later, so great.

Unreal Tournament.

The first two PC games I ever played - Blood 2: The Chosen and Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive

Warcraft 3 probably. I played the demo at a friend's house and then saved up my pocket money to buy it. I would have been about 10 or 12 at the time. Absolutely loved the campaigns even though I sucked at them.

Still waiting for Warcraft 4.

Unreal. The graphics and the large open levels were jaw dropping when I played it as a kid.

Thief: The Dark Project is probably the first time I spent an entire game going "I didn't know games could be like this!"

SkiFree, I thought it was a serious simple sports game until the Yeti appeared!

Other than this, DOOM/DOOM2 for sure! They were the first games that made me feel like I was actually there and part of the action.

Quake 3 Arena. When I was a wee laddie during the early stages of internet adoption, it about blew my young mind that I could play with somebody on a different computer.

Quake. With a 3dfx card was the biggest bump for me in fidelity it blew me away.

Chuck Yeager Air Combat..there were torque curves and stall vector charts for all the aircraft and I had no idea what those stupid lines meant..it was amazing lol!

Total Annihilation. This game also got me into StarCraft, which got me into Diablo II, which got me into EverQuest, which got me into World of Warcraft. But the Total Annihilation was the RTS that started it all, and gave me a taste of competitive video games.

Diablo 2. I remember being a little kid and seeing my friends older brother playing it on his PC and being completely enamored with it. I mean, you could shapeshift into a werewolf ffs! I ended up getting D2:LoD a few years later when I was old enough to play it and man it blew my mind. Still my absolute favorite game of all time

For me, that would probably be Planescape:Torment.

STALKER. The A-Life AI system is something else, and the open-ended survival gameplay and atmosphere are really in a league of their own. Similarly, as a latter-day choice, INFRA. That's a Source engine total conversion that has a similar uncanny and immersive atmosphere where you are just blown away at the total package, map design, and the thought process that went into it. Those are easily the two most immersive games I've played.

I’m in my 40’s so I grew up on all the classics like Wolfenstein, Doom, Apogee based games (Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nulsen, ROTT, etc) but the game to truly blow my mind came later when I first played Half-Life.

Playing a game which had such a compelling story had me hooked. I felt so invested in the plot and character development.

DOS Doom! (I'm old). I remember we couldn't load it on Windows 3.1 and had to wait until Windows 95 to run it without exiting to DOS...those were the times.
Quake was spectacular back then. Discovering Strafe-jumping and using multiplayer was a whole new thing.

Little Big Adventure 2: Twinsen’s Odyssey