If you ever want to feel old, read the notes on posts like this
I had been through four consoles and five jobs before most of the games in the notes had come out.
My top five were virtually chiselled on stone tablets by comparison :)
Pretty much every Sierra franchise.
Warcraft, C&C, Street fighter two turbo, and final fantasy!
Wingnuts was a dumb fmv 'dog fighting' game, but when you beat it you could play it again with silly dialogue. I also remember when setting up the sound card the test audio was a guy saying 'ah veiners, just ze vay I like zem!' In a bad German accent.
Burn:Cycle was an fmv adventure game that I adored, it also came with a sound track cd and a little packet of leaflets based on in game stuff that was really cool. I still listen to the ost on occasion
Civ 1. So many happy memories.
Baulders gate on ps2 was my introduction into RPG and a bonding experience with my aunts ex.
GTA 1 was my escape from an abusive house
Tony hawk kept me from getting picked on for my gaming choices
Smash bros had me bonding with my closest friends
NBA street helped me and my brother escape from our parents.
So I don't really feel that old when reading the notes, I do however apologise to anyone having an age crisis reading this.
Man, it's hard stratifying games you care about, especially when you have a massive log of them that all impacted you in one way or another. There were a bunch of free Linux games that I have very fond memories of too, like Nexuiz, OpenArena, Abuse, etc. Also a bunch of weird niche games and demos, like One Must Fall and Food Fight and Fur Fighters. It's an impossible task, honestly.
My top 5 were (in no particular order):
While it didn't make my list, I played a crazy amount of NFSMW
Zelda II The Adventure of Link
Super Metroid
Another World / Out of This World
Myst
Doom
Honorable mention goes to Super Mario Land.
Halo >!because I played it with my older sister!<
Skyrim >!because it reminded me that I like RPGs!<
RuneScape >!because it taught me that I like RPGs!<
Minecraft >!because I played it with my little brother!<
DOOM >!because I was young and too scared to play it myself, but my mom enjoyed gaming sometimes, and watching her play are happy memories!<
In chronological order
There are so many more but these were all big moments. Ugh I didn't even mention the IBM golf game or Carmen San Diego, I think I need to do this list based on the systems we had.
Bold choices with both Spinball and Final Fantasy 8. You're set to have some interesting fandoms with very deep chips on their shoulders -- not to mention cosplay buster swords -- arriving at your doorstep shortly.
Eep.
Bro, I almost forgot about Sonic spinball! What an acid trip of a take on Sonic.
Look behind you! A three-headed monkey!!
Murray how did you get all the way up there?
Sheer force of will!!
Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Space Invaders (on an Atari 2600), Tempest and Pitfall!
Homm3 is GOAT. I still play that with friends and relatives to this day.
It really was the best out of all the homms. I still play it too. Absolute perfection of a game.
Bro, it's on the play store. You can get it on a tablet, and is very much playable.
Boulders Gate? I know And I have it, along with a few other editions. I’ve just never get past the first tavern without losing interest. Which is strange because I was hooked when I first played it.
Just five is so limiting:
Mario Kart Mega Man 3 Donkey Kong Country Jet Moto Final Fantasy VII
Even expanding to ten feels restrictive, alas:
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 The Neverhood Perfect Dark Seventh Guest Earthworm Jim
-Copy Kitty
-Undertale
-Super Smash Bros. (4 & Ultimate)
-Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
-Fantasy Life
Have you played the new Fantasy Life? It's great
I have, and i like it very much :)
Halo:CE would probably be the single most important, but it just missed my teenage years.
I played a lot of Atari and Collecovision as a kid, but games didn’t feel “important” until my family bought our first PC. After that, game consoles in general stopped being important. It was a new world of possibility.
Journeyman was amazing! Great story and pretty amazing 3D rendered graphics for the time.
-Pokemon Gold (OG)
-Metroid: Zero Mission/Fusion
-SSBM
-Battlefront II (The OG one)
-The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
I can't limit it to 5.
I keep trying to, and it doesn't work, I end up leaving out something that I spent a massive amount of time on and also very strongly impacted my conception of what a game can be.
Morrowind Ocarina of Time Donkey Kong Country The Sonic chaos game on dreamcast Time splitters
Oh man, I remember playing time splitters at my buddies place. We spent so much time building custom maps
In rough chronological order:
Starflyers
Mario Kart
Shadow cities
COD zombies (ios app version)
Minecraft
I'm stopping this list before high school, as I built my first PC and figured out emulation, so I started playing a lot more games.
GTA: San Andreas and NFSU2. But not for the reasons you think. They were the first games that I could play on my school laptop. It was super slow (amd A6 1450 Apu, 4 gb ram) and those ran perfectly fine.
Heh I played NFSUG2 on a laptop with 2 GB RAM. It shipped with Vista but ran great with XP.
2 GB was a ton back then! You could fit a whole OS into that, twice!
I actually have a pentium M laptop that I played NFSU2 on during that time. My sister would use my school laptop (we weren't allowed to use my home computer) and I'd use the pentium m machine. I wouldn't be surprised if the pentium m had better single core performance than the A6.
Edit: I found a few benchmarks and the 735 is somewhat faster in single core performance provided that the instruction set is supported.
Mine is:
...
In no particular order
Command and Conquer Red Alert 2
Caesar III
Spyro
Metal Gear Solid
Gauntlet
Half life/2 should probably be on there, but it still doesn't feel like an "old" game, especially since I play them every year or two, they haven't left my computer since 2010, and honestly I can't see myself not playing it when I'm 60.
In no particular order and with limited time thinking about it:
My first console was a NES I inherited, but the first console gotten for me was a SNES, and the first console I received new in box was a GameCube. PS2 underrepresented in this list although Guitar Hero was on there and that game was wildly important for getting me more interested in music in general.
Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask
Super Smash Bros Melee
Halo: Reach
RuneScape
Guildwars 2
I'm not that old, ya old coots!
Very similar to mine except I had Link's Awakening (instead of LttP) and FF7
I really miss Ragnarok Online. Some friends and I played on iRO while that was free for a bit and then later on euRO. The monthly fee was a significant fraction of my pocket money as a highschool kid but totally worth it
One of the reasons I put RO here is that I actually forced myself to learn how to host a personal Ragnarok Online server because I had no money as a teen and I wanted to play with my friend. That involved learning a lot about computers and hosting that I wouldn't have otherwise bothered with.
I eventually became a computer engineer but it did take me a while because even though I was smart enough to do something like this I never fully believed I was intelligent enough to become an engineer so I spent half a decade working grocery store jobs and being a middle school teacher instead.
The instructions are contradictory. I’m not sure how it’s possible to comply.
• Pac-Man (Atari 400)
\
• Pole Position (Arcade)
\
• Parsec (TI-99/4A)
\
• The Legend of Zelda (NES)
\
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (PC)
Lego Star Wars
Discworld
Unreal Tournament
Doom
Halo
Moo2
FFT
Golden Eye
Red Alert
Mariokart 64
This list could also be alternatively titled: "Why I flunked out of college the first time."
True. For me it was counter strike source 😄
xenogears final fantasy 7 final fantasy 10 super smash Bros melee Diablo 2
Man, this is hard to narrow down.
What an interesting way to look at demographics!
Off the top of my head:
Oh wait, Elite (BBC, Amstrad, and ST) — probably more so than Xenon.
Minecraft, Team Fortress 2, Apex Legends, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare (1 and 2) and Terraria. I'm not very old X)
I can't believe I left Fallout 1/2 off my list.
stone tablets
Right there with ya OP!
with a bonus mention for "The Empire Strikes Back" on Atari 2600.
So yeah -- all these games people played as "teenagers" are games I started playing last year, relatively speaking :)
I m old.
You really aren't.
The first one on my list was a game in the arcade, then a game on the Atari 2600 :)
Listing ff8 hurts, my list didn't have a number attached to ff.
Damn, Atari 2600 looks so old. The oldest I have is nes kungfu. The sound effects are classic.
Age of Empires II and Rollercoaster Tycoon, that's about it.
I was born in 1995, but didn't have a capable PC until my late teens so I was stuck with whatever ran on my win98 potato without internet connection. Great games though, still play them today
My cut-off date for "teen years" is the year you were born. 🧓
Commodore Vic 20/Commodore64: Clowns, Omega Race, a space station game, Ghosts and Goblins, Zork, there was a Transformers game (looked fan made), Lode Runner, and about a dozen more