Pivotal moments in your own personal gaming history?

[Munter]

I'm 54 and been playing computer games since I was about 10.
I've been looking back at my game time with Elite Dangerous and with a little sadness as I've stopped playing, but also with some awesomeness at what I experienced. It has been a pivotal moment in my own gaming experience that got me thinking about the past. I decided to compile a list of those special moments that meant a lot to me. I guess you have to be somewhat old to understand.
So here goes. My own personal Pivotal Moments in Gaming History

Playing Asteroids in my local chippy with my best friend.
Being given a Vic20 for Christmas and mastering Blitz. I learnt to program basic.
Upgrading to the C64. So many games but if I had to pick one that inspired me it would be the Ultima series. Got lost for hours with my band of heroes. Tally Ho!
Learning to fly Sub logics Flight Sim. This is my longest running game (sim). I'm still playing it with MSFS2020 and have enjoyed every incarnation.
Playing Doom on the LAN at work. First experience of team play.
Playing Smash TV at the Trocadero in London with my second best friend. Awesome sounds and amazing game play.
Blood. A most underrated and oft forgotten game with depth, hidden gems and references to many horror movies.
Half Life. What an awesome immersion. I still play it on Dos Box.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I feel like I've been to Pripyat.
Elite Dangerous and VR. For me ED was the game for VR. I played from launch till Odyssey. Completed both DW1 and 2, got the cloth patches to prove it. Made friends in game and experienced some amazing things and people.
Half Life Alyx, well because Jeff! the best VR game for pure VR immersion to date.
MSFS2020. Just purchased. The adventure is still continuing....

So what's yours?

 

[Arioch]

My main gaming moments, which I consider to be those times my view of what games could be experienced a massive change:

Standing on an empty beer crate to play Space Invaders on holiday at a caravan park.
The Star Wars arcade game sit-down cabinet on Blackpool pier.
Elite on the Electron and later on the Speccy.
The first time I saw Amiga graphics in a multi-format advert and thought they couldn’t possibly be real
Shareware Doom on my first PC, a 486 sx25.
Watching my mate play WipEout on his PlayStation and when I asked if it was on rails he pulled a quick 180 and started driving back along the track - impressive 3d on a small console!
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis.

My biggest paradigm shift since 1979: VR.

 

[amigacooke {macOS}]

Well obviously as a Mac users I can't have a gaming history

• One of those TV bat games that could be tennis, football or some other spurious sport
• Space Invaders, always failing to get the supercharged final invader.
• Asteroids, working out for the first time there must be different difficulty levels.
• Defender, watching the guy who had got so far, that everytime he was destroyed, it generated enough points to get an extra ship. Perpetual motion in gaming terms.
• Mr Do - possibly the only arcade game I achieved any level of competence in. Obviously it impoverised me.
• Acorn Electron, using cassette tapes as SSDs (and marvelling over Elite of course). So many adventure games with so few correct input commands.
• Buying a Spectrum just to play Lords of Midnight. Singing about gold with Thorin. Remlok device for Spectrum Elite. Losing a day to a Market Garden play through.
• Gazing in wonder at the 16bit gloriousness of the Commodore Amiga. Only being able to afford an A500 and then paying £400 for a 20MB hard drive. No wireframe in the Amiga version of Elite, marvelling at a galaxy on a 1.4 MB floppy disk in Frontier. Drooling over the 3D graphics of Carrier Command. Civilization, the best game ever in my opinion.
• Claiming I was getting an IBM compatible for work purposes and then putting Fields of Glory (Napoleonic wargame) onto it. Wrestling with boot disks and high and low memory just to get games to run on DOS. Elder Scrolls games that could be escaped into.
• Bought a Mac, end of story (other than along with Windows users backed a KickStarter for Elite: Decadian).
• Late entry, Witcher 3, which had me playing compulsively for the first time in years.

 

[Space Menace]

Playing Pong in a dimly lit snooker hall where my mum worked around 1973. I was a teenager and a couple of years after that I left school started an apprenticeship and saved hard for the 2600.
Better years by far.

 

[Arioch]

Buying a Spectrum just to play Lords of Midnight. Singing about gold with Thorin.

I still play LoM every year starting on the winter solstice, naturally (though on my iPad these days)

Just about to give the fan-made Speccy 128k enhanced edition of The Hobbit a whirl, can’t wait to start swearing at the parser once again

I should really have mentioned FE2 - amazing that it fit an entire galaxy on a single 880k Amiga disk, but when I first ran it on my PC…wow! It was a slideshow on my A500 but stunningly smooth on PC. I showed my bezzie mate it (he was still playing it on his Amiga) and he’d bought a PC by the end of the week

 

[amigacooke {macOS}]

I still play LoM every year starting on the winter solstice, naturally (though on my iPad these days)

Just about to give the fan-made Speccy 128k enhanced edition of The Hobbit a whirl, can’t wait to start swearing at the parser once again

I should really have mentioned FE2 - amazing that it fit an entire galaxy on a single 880k Amiga disk, but when I first ran it on my PC…wow! It was a slideshow on my A500 but stunningly smooth on PC. I showed my bezzie mate it (he was still playing it on his Amiga) and he’d bought a PC by the end of the week

Was the sound in glorious beep-around on the IBM compatible or had sound cards come in by then?

You're right of course, Amiga floppies were only 880k.

Sad news about Mike Singleton.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Civilization best board game ever

M.U.L.E. 1st MO

Battle Isle, Empire, Artillery Duel for hotseat

Dune janky RTS but my furst

Total War franchise, maybe one day it'll be seamless total war.

Silent Service - subsim kickoff

Portal 1&2 simply top 10 games ever

Elite 1984 fueled interest in space

 

[Jezzah]

My first game was Elite! Played on the school computers way back then.

Hooked straight away.

After that I suppose the next biggest pivot was Half Life such an amazing with an AI that seldom seems to be matched even now.
That led into another big pivot ... online gaming with the multiplayer version of Red Faction of all things. Swiftly onto more mainstream stuff like counter strike.

Massive pivot for me was EVE online, first MMO, oh boy I choose a toughy there. Played it almost every day at some point for 9 years.

I've not made any pivots into the likes of VR gaming, doesnt seem like it's a thing for me, low takeup by mainstream developers and expense being the main reasons.

 

[CMDR Von Abrahart]

I’m 60 so we going back to penny arcades when games were electro-mechanical And yet they still had bombing games and periscope sub games, then it was Pong and Asteriods. Our sixth form had Defenders and I got put on report for playing when i should be doing lessons.

I even started writing a game for the Speccy in 1988ish but then the market crashed and WHS emptied the shelves of cassettes . Was fun learning Z80 and using the HISOFT compiler ( anyone remember that ).



Games that I remember being important are

• The Atari wood grain with six switch and Empire SB
• Original Wolfenstein
• Doom
• and yes Lords of Midnight
• Elite ZX Speccy
• Elite Acorn A410
• Quake - the demo on SG workstations
• Half life
• Unreal - the first one
• Halo Xbox

Not been much of interest since cos its all very similar even with PS3’s, Dreamcast, GameCube etc being a Mac owner also limited me of a decade.

But Elite Odd is my exploring game now / that and MSFS - its a shame i had to invest in a PC for this but…

 

[Macros Black]

ZX81: Entered game source code from a magazine where lasers could be fired. I had no storage, so to play again, I had to re-enter the source code again.
C64: My first Elite game. Big trouble in entering the starport. Never made it to Elite in Elite
Amiga 500: Bought it to play Elite in filled vector graphics. Played 16 hours straight on day one, was tired next day, only played 14 hours. Never made it to Elite.
PC: Played various games, Unreal, Half-Life, Halo, Far Cry, Civ...until a co-worker told me about ED. Basically only played ED since 2015. Made it to Elite

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

ED was also pivotal - in a negative sense. I'll probably never play online game like that again where some rando update and dev fashion can screw up your playthrough just like that. Usually you get a game and it keeps its character - online game the dev just chucks in whatever they like - and if they think you're not running enough hamstermills they'll try make you. No thanks.

 

[Arioch]

Was the sound in glorious beep-around on the IBM compatible or had sound cards come in by then?

You're right of course, Amiga floppies were only 880k.

Sad news about Mike Singleton.

I had a Soundblaster, SVGA monitor, and a 2x speed CD-ROM (and some hefty debt to pay for it all )

The guy who’s done the updated retro versions of LoM and DDR worked with Mike for a few years before his sad demise and I think he still intends to realise Mike’s vision for the third game, The Eye of the Moon, but using the engine created for the earlier games - The Citadel not being considered a “true” sequel.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I had a Soundblaster, SVGA monitor, and a 2x speed CD-ROM (and some hefty debt to pay for it all )

The guy who’s done the updated retro versions of LoM and DDR worked with Mike for a few years before his sad demise and I think he still intends to realise Mike’s vision for the third game, The Eye of the Moon, but using the engine created for the earlier games - The Citadel not being considered a “true” sequel.

Everytime I hear Soundblaster I think of System Shock 1. By its time there were a number of different sound cards in use and they produced diefferent outputs - you can scrounge some on YT. I never finished the game - got stuck at some point and couldn't progress. But the music was kinda pivotal - must have been one of the first soundtracks that had contextual music: the level theme would shift between downtime and chill and agitated during combat - but was clearly the same theme. Quite awesome experience at the time.

 

[Northpin]

Lords of Midnight on Spectrum

Adding a 20MB HDD to my IBM PC XT compatible that was using 2x 1.2MB 5.25 FDD

Wasting nights to go to a friend's shop that was sporting a 386sx/25 to play Elvira Mistress of the Dark

Upgrading from IBM PC XT compatible (4-color CGA display) to an IBM PC AT 286/12MHz with an EGA video card (soon after that i upgraded to a VGA card)

Getting a soundblaster compatible card in my PC

Upgrading from 286 to a 486dx2 66, with a 2x CDROM and playing Star Wars Rebel Assault.
But iirc, one of the most played games on that 486 was Master of Magic. This game was also the reason of my first overclock ever- setting that dx2/66 to run at 100 mhz
Wasting mouse after mouse by playing countless hours of Star Wars X-Wing using a kb/m setup. After wasting 3-4 mice, i had to learn to fix them by cutting and shortening the mouse cables (they were getting interruptions right where the cable was getting inside the mouse case).

Experiencing for the first time a true 3d game on a 3dfx Voodoo2 12mb ram card (Unreal, the game, but also the entire experience)
Playing Half Life, it was a bit more immersive than Unreal, but i did liked Unreal better

Upgrading to a 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 as soon they hit our stores

 

[Arioch]

Everytime I hear Soundblaster I think of System Shock 1. By its time there were a number of different sound cards in use and they produced diefferent outputs - you can scrounge some on YT. I never finished the game - got stuck at some point and couldn't progress. But the music was kinda pivotal - must have been one of the first soundtracks that had contextual music: the level theme would shift between downtime and chill and agitated during combat - but was clearly the same theme. Quite awesome experience at the time.

Played quite a bit of the floppy version before getting the CD enhanced one a few months later with all the voice logs etc - still an awesome game that I play every few years while waiting for the remastered Kickstarter version to release

One of the first games to support consumer VR as well, the VFX1 headset.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

The Lords of Midnight was our approach to: "How did they even code that?" By then we had a bit of knowledge and there was no way to store all that info of the map in the memory. And have armies move about. Or was there? Elite, too: How would they store a huge world like this on just a floppy! Mind-boggling. We knew nothing about compression and seeding.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Lords of Midnight on Spectrum

Adding a 20MB HDD to my IBM PC XT compatible that was using 2x 1.2MB 5.25 FDD

Wasting nights to go to a friend's shop that was sporting a 386sx/25 to play Elvira Mistress of the Dark

Upgrading from IBM PC XT compatible (4-color CGA display) to an IBM PC AT 286/12MHz with an EGA video card (soon after that i upgraded to a VGA card)

Getting a soundblaster compatible card in my PC

Upgrading from 286 to a 486dx2 66, with a 2x CDROM and playing Star Wars Rebel Assault.
But iirc, one of the most played games on that 486 was Master of Magic. This game was also the reason of my first overclock ever- setting that dx2/66 to run at 100 mhz
Wasting mouse after mouse by playing countless hours of Star Wars X-Wing using a kb/m setup. After wasting 3-4 mice, i had to learn to fix them by cutting and shortening the mouse cables (they were getting interruptions right where the cable was getting inside the mouse case).

Experiencing for the first time a true 3d game on a 3dfx Voodoo2 12mb ram card (Unreal, the game, but also the entire experience)
Playing Half Life, it was a bit more immersive than Unreal, but i did liked Unreal better

Upgrading to a 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 as soon they hit our stores

Booh. Tie Fighter was the proper career path. Should have joined the dark side.

 

[Northpin]

Booh. Tie Fighter was the proper career path. Should have joined the dark side.

Oh, i did play a lot of Tie Figher too, but somehow i liked X-Wing better

 

[Mole HD]

I've had a few pivotal moments over the many, many years I've been around computers as a whole. I began my obsession proper like many others did with Elite on the BBC micro in 1984.

I was 25 back then and had been a soldier for almost 9 years with several active service postings under my belt, not to mention returning from my first real war unkilled by the heathen... So no youngster by comparison with many others...but multiplayer games in their infancy before the days of social media or any online presence was the norm...there were only us geeks and gamers floating around the various BBS's all gathering on a weekend for some gaming. I'd stick those experiences as standing out a bit from the run of the mill solo gaming.

Then...

XvT on the Microsoft gaming zone
Quake 2
Division one competitive Tribes 2 on Barrysworld servers on a dual bonded 128k modem...just before my first DSL connection.
Jumpgate, my first space (or any other) MMO

Perhaps a few others that have already been mentioned or covered by others pre-dating all of those...plenty after too

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

I consider only 3 events in my gaming career as truly pivotal.

1st was seeing Elite on the Atari 800XL of a friend in 1984. I was 11 years old. That started my gaming career, I hadn't had any contact with computer gaming before that. It still took two more years until 1986, before I could finally get my own C64 (parents and stuff standing in the way) and of course Elite.

2nd was when I moved to PC from my C64 in 1993. The first game I launched was Lemmings, and I had to pick up my jaw from the floor after this first time of seeing a game in 640x480 VGA glory. That one has stuck more in memory than moving from green screen monitor to color TV on my C64 sometime in between 1986 and 1993. I don't remember exactly when that was.

3rd was 1998 with Unreal 1 in 3dfx Glide and 1024x768. That was my move from 2D to 3D gaming.

Ever since then nothing has wowed me anymore like these 3 events did.