PC Gaming

Age of Mythology for me after my first ever game of Age of Empires 2 AOK

I think it was Morrowind for me. I walked all the way to Balmora and I distinctly remember how astonished I was when I saw the starry night's sky. It was truly a magical experience.

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.

@s804 The original Tomb Raider

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.

GTA3 for me. I didn't even care about the missions, I was just blown away by the open world. I remember spending a whole summer just exploring Liberty City.

That's a tough question! I would have to say it's a toss up between MechWarrior 2 and the original Half Life. I spent so many hours customizing mechs and tearing stuff up. There was something magical about the first Half-Life game though. So good and led to so many mods that I played for such a long time (CS, TFC/2, DoD).

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

Quake was pretty mind-blowing. Full room-over-room and all.

EverQuest completely blew my mind as a younger teen.

Original Warcraft. Descent was pretty sick too.

The very first Sim City. Before that? Pong. I'd never even seen or heard of a video game before that.

Trite, but probably the original Wolfenstein, quickly followed by DOOM.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oregon trail... xD

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.

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

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!

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

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.

Dungeon Keeper I would say. Possessing a fly for the first time what quite a surprise.

Half-Life playing deathmatch for the first time on a 56k modem, lagging like hell but when i saw someone else for the first running around my mind was blown haha

For me, that would probably be Planescape:Torment.

Either Mechwarrior 2 or Star Wars X-Wing, probably. Can't really remember that far back but I remember watching my dad play those on his computer, which probably got me into gaming from that moment.

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.

Doom, no question. I was an Amiga owner at the time, and we were used to being the go-to platform for computer gaming. Then Doom came along and pretty much sent the Amiga scene on a quest for a "Doom clone" that it would never achieve.

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.