I remember a few from various stages of my life (born 1984).
Seeing the demo footage of Sonic 2 in Woolworths and thinking the leaves falling down in Aquatic Ruin zone was so cool and advanced.
The original Sega arcade of Virtua Racing with the moving cars completely blew me away.
I remember my uncle loading up Cannon Fodder on his Amiga, and a REAL song with REAL music came out, along with REAL photos. I was amazed haha.
A few years on I remember a PlayStation demo disc having promo footage of the first Gran Turismo and it looked so real to me, I watched it over and over. The first Driver on PS1 looked absolutely amazing to me also.
Pairing two TVs and two Xbox consoles together for an eight player local Halo death match. Online gaming will never match the energy in that room.
My buddies and I had easy access to a theater, which had giant curved walls on each side of the stage. We hooked up three projectors to three Xboxes; One projector for the stage, and one for each of the curved walls. Then we ran them into the sound system.
We did it two or three times a week for months.
The funny part is that you could always tell who was screenlooking, because the screens were so big that you had to physically turn your head away from your own screen. And at that point you just die, cuz you start missing the people right in front of you.
Any theatre that doesn’t facilitate this has my express permission to go out of business. That sounds incredible.
Starfox 64. I played it at Toys R Us…oh, uh, kids Toys R Us was a toy store that had been around for like 80 years. And everybody knew it was never going to close, because there was always going to be more kids…and then it closed.
Anyways, they had a demo unit you could play. It reset every 10 minutes. Then Mario would pop up and say “THANK YOU FOR PLAYING NINTENDO 64, WHO’S NEXT???”
And like a stupid teenager, I yelled “I AM!!!” as if it were voice activated. It wasn’t. I was just a dumb teenager telling at a CRT tv.
One time I got so invested in it, that I didn’t even notice a kid was behind me for like 20 minutes. And eventually he said “Excuse me…you went 3 times in a row. Can I try please?”
Man I felt like an ass. He probably felt like I was bullying him out of playing. I was twice his age, twice his size, and even compared to other kids my own age I was always a kid who was at the top of the food chain. I genuinely didn’t see him, and thought I was alone. I let him play all the turns until his family made him leave.
But those visuals…THE RUMBLE PACK!!! OH MY GOD!!! THE CONTROLLER SHAKES WHEN YOUR SHIP GETS DAMAGED!!! And it had 3D space ship flying and voice acting, and oh my god…
It was all very overwelming. I’m not saying Mario 64 is a bad game. I loved it. But Starfox 64 was the game that made me buy a game for a console I didn’t even own. I was THAT sure that I’d have to have an N64 one day…that day was like 6 months later.
There are some very memorable games.
No game has ever matched the freedom of Morrowind. You are only limited by yourself. Even Oblivion and Skyrim feel restricted by the game itself.
Half-Life 2 interacting with the environment. I must have played with the can for hours the first time.
Final Fantasy VIII though was the single most impressive game for the hardware it came out on. The character models being actual human proportion, the summons looking like actual monsters, and the FMVs where people look like damn people in a movie.
In the same vein, FFX being described as looking like FFVIII’s FMVs but all the time. And then living up to the hype.
Morrowind mentioned, based comment.
Final Fantasy 6, the three mechs marching through the snow in 3d… followed by the emotional impact of the game elevated gaming to another level I had never before seen
Yes. One of my moments is a certain event late in the game where the world map music changes after pounding the player with an oppressive atmosphere and some very low lows for a couple of hours. It’s amazing how well a 16-bit game was able to make it so cathartic.
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3 of them:
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watching an Amiga 500 load from disk having only seen 8bit games on tape. Everything that machine did at the time was like magic.
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watching the castle fly through intro for Unreal on PC when the first 3D accelerators appeared. Everything changed after that.
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experiencing the shark diving demo on PlayStation VR. And also how nothing changed after that! xD
And to have been able to experience that evolution from space invaders to cyberpunk in a single life time has been a privilege.
We’re the only generation that grew up alongside video games. We watched them grow up into what they are today, and our kids don’t even know of a world without them.
I don’t know what “Age” we’re in right now, but I think 1970-2024+ should be referred to as the Video Game Age.
I feel the same way about it being a privilege. I missed the earliest part… but even to have lived through the NES and Master System era through to today has been amazing.
Games will continue getting ever more impressive, but nobody again will witness the kind of seismic leaps in what games could accomplish that people saw between the 70s and 2000s.
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Just remembered that seeing Doom for the first time is another obvious one. Man that game was incredible when it came out.
I remember my brother telling me about Wolfenstein 3D. I insisted that something like that, that moved smoothly at your command in any direction instead of in clunky 90° turns and blockwise steps, was impossible with the current technology.
I was wrong.
you were right, the computers couldnt do the math in time. the trick was to precalculate the sin/cos tables for angle steps into tons of lookups instead.
It wasn’t just the trig tables, but realtime raycasting altogether felt like sorcery.
And was re-released last week. I was pleased to see the 2024 console ports still support LAN play.
The beginning of Link to the Past, with the rain, thunder and lightning. LttP took it to another level coming from NES games and even most PC games at the time, setting a mood and atmosphere I had never experienced in gaming before.
When you could walk up to the strippers in Duke Nukem 3D and they would flash their titties at you.
Shake it baby!
Getting into Hyrule field for the first time in Ocarina of Time after being stuck in the forest for months or years. I got promptly destroyed by a pineapple.
I don’t remember much from my childhood, but that stuck with me.
The first thing that jumped to my mind was Half Life 2. The facial expressions on the characters, and the physics of objects in the game world.
Playing the Mario 64 Demo at Walmart.
My brain had a hard time trying to navigate in 3D.
That game was so futuristic. It was nuts.
Back then, the camera didn’t feel as shitty as it does today. It was all so fresh and new.
The moment when you see the first colossus in Shadow of the Colossus. You’ve watched a contemplative intro movie that sets the stage, been faced with a desolate land that you’re seemingly completely alone in, and charged headlong with only the light shining off your sword to guide you. You’ve seen nothing but you and your horse moving in this place in the half hour or so you’ve been playing so far. You’ve done just enough platforming to know that you’re a very normal human with no magical abilities, and if you’ve swung your sword at all you’ve seen that you have no real skill with it. You just know that you’ve got to kill these unseen colossi to hold up your end of the deal with the voice in the sky. And then a building shaped like a gorilla walks past you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ckn0mdFyEU
Tap for spoiler
Also the dawning realization that you’re doing something horrible by killing the colossi
spoiler
I’m not sure you are doing something horrible. Destroying somrthing majestic and, in several cases, benign, certainly. But you’re doing it with the express consent of the greater consciousness that makes up those things. Like you’re destroying a prison with particularly beautiful art on all the walls to let the prisoner out. Dormin actually holds up their end of the bargain the whole way through, and we don’t know for sure if they did anything bad to make the priest’s society bind them. Hell all we know about the priest’s society is that it does human sacrifice, if anything I’m leaning pro-Dormin here. There was clearly once a thriving society in the Forbidden Lands and the priest’s society broke a seemingly honest god into a bunch of monsters and shut the door on the place.
Stepping out of the sewers in Oblivion for the first time. Nothing has really captured that feeling since.
Yes! That is a true masterpiece that at the time set a new standard.
Playing side scrollers my whole life and seeing Mario64 at a Walmart. Being able to play in actual 3D and thinking at no way they can surpass this.
