I was hooked into gaming when I completed GTA Vice City storyline, at a time when I was 9, had no access to Internet and whose native language was not english

Hard to say let's go with Zork. Remember creating maps on graph paper while playing it on a computer of the friend of the family.

Hmmm... Probably at a friends how that had a 286 and they had a couple games.

Either that or it started with a C64 that the school I went to had.. which I later acquired.
Don't remember if I got that C64 before or after we got our first computer, a 386sx-25 system that I almost immediately started doing upgrades on.

I was hooked on overclocking after I went to a friend's house. They had a 486 25Mhz system and I noticed that the motherboard had a 25Mhz/33Mhz jumper on it. Switched it from 25 to 33 and what a speed difference.

No idea. I begun playing on Atari 800XL and Arcades. That's like 5 years before I got a 286. Since 2011 I hardly played any game on any platform.

For me it was Doom.

I was a Nintendo kid growing up. I loved my platformers, and my simple action games. RPGs or strategy games were intimidating to me. And when my family first got a 486/66 in 1994 or so, the games we had were ok. I remember Wheel of Fortune, some kind of Breakout clone, and not much else. Then a kid at school, I barely remember how we met, decided he simply had to show me all the awesome games that were on PC. Suddenly I had Doom, Heretic, Quest for Glory, Descent, Command & Conquer, WarCraft and more on my PC. Lots of demos and shareware that simply blew me away. But Doom first and foremost held my attention. I even got this probably atrocious WAD pack called D!Zone Gold at Best Buy and plugged away at as many semi-broken levels from that as I could one summer.

I didn't look back at Nintendo until I went off to college and bought a Gamecube towards the end of it's lifespan because it was cheap, and I was already feeling a bit nostalgic for my humble NES/SNES days. I've bought every Nintendo console since, and spend a good amount of time on them. But I still primarily game on PC.

Railroad Tycoon (original), period.

I had played Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo FamiCom/NES and ported Castlevania and Double Dragon II: The Revenge at my friends' places (didn't know they were poorly ported until many, many years later) but I was not good nor into side-scrolling platformers or beat-them-ups. Being a rail fan before into computing (I memorized all locomotives on the password protection screen in less than a week), Railroad Tycoon grabbed my attention instantly.

As a non-native English speaker it also taught me a huge amount of English vocabulary like "schedule," "inauguration," "consolidation," "assets and liabilities," "fertilizer," "armament," "magistrate," "commodore," etc., when most of my classmates were still learning "Good morning. How are you?" "Fine, thank you. And you?" This "language-learning" property was inherited by Sid Meier's next hit classic, Civilization.

Joakim wrote on 2022-06-16, 16:17:

I was wondering if you have a defining moment where you fell in love with pc gaming.

Mine was definitely the demo of tomb raider 1 from the cd of Swedish PC gamer back in 1996 ish. I played it so many times but never understood how to move any blocks. Demo games back in the day were often sparsely documented.. 😀

I did not play the finished game until years later and to be honest I think the demo level is the best even if it is quite short. When I was 12 I did not realize the main character was sexual, I just loved the gameplay.

It's most certainly a subconscious thing, anyway, you're not really thinking about it.

Brain be like: "hey, that look fun, let's do it again"

Probably started around 2nd grade (and little bit before that, getting acclimatized), being late for school while playing GTA 2 and Future Tactics: The Uprising.

Holy %#@&!

I think my moment was when PS2 was released and utterly failed to meet my expectations. While I had been playing and loving PC games like Doom and Command & Conquer at my friends I still had been a PS1 kid through the 90's and was expecting PS2 to be the natural next step. It wasn't.

I already had been completely hooked to Unreal Tournament 99 on my cheap-ass prebuild PC that had who-knows-what GPU and was intented for school work and when I got my hands on PS2 version of UT99, well, that was the point I finally really started to realize the strenghts and weaknesses of PC's and consoles. Been mainly a PC guy ever since.

When I was a young lad sitting on my families pc that had a matrox mystique graphics card and win98.

I fondly remember playing the bundled matrox api flavour games like mechwarrior 2 , destruction derby 2 and scorched planet. Much simpler times in my life.

Later I got croc 2 , Indiana Jones and the infernal machine , the original gta, tomb raider 2, worms 2 , age of empires 1 and 2.

I think most of the games were budget re releases from a few years after , except for maybe age of empires 2 which was the gold edition , so this would probably be around 2000-2001 ish.

I also played a not so great game called chronicles of the sword but it was memorable at least , what's more important to note is that it was a ms-dos game and I needed to get my dad to boot it for me every time I wanted to play it much to his annoyance.

Years later I always wondered what that weird old mystical operating system was and that probably planted the hidden seed in my mind that would be awakened once I started watching lgr which in turn started my long obsession with ms-dos gaming.

I was in elementary school, maybe second or third grade. I got to know my best friend got his cousin's college PC, it was a chunky 286 which had a handful of games on it. Exactly like this one, only with one (beige) floppy drive instead of two.:

If someone recognizes the exact model, I've been looking for one for a long time. The only pre-386 PC I'm interested in.

The first we played was Prince of Persia and my fate was sealed. The rest of the games, I don't remember that much. I'm 100% certain it had Grand Prix Circuit, and maybe Wolfenstein 3D and I think one or two other.

Probably as soon as I saw and played my first PC game - Pharaoh's Tomb - on my cousin's 386 PC back in 1991.

The original Command & Conquer was super addictive for me. It was one of the earliest PC games that I played, and probably my first RTS ever. I just couldn't get enough of it.

Been a big fan of the genre up to the early 2000s, but then my interest waned for some reason, and I got into RPGs instead.

dormcat wrote on 2022-06-16, 17:24:

Railroad Tycoon (original), period.

I had played Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo FamiCom/NES and ported Castlevania and Double Dragon II: The Revenge at my friends' places (didn't know they were poorly ported until many, many years later) but I was not good nor into side-scrolling platformers or beat-them-ups. Being a rail fan before into computing (I memorized all locomotives on the password protection screen in less than a week), Railroad Tycoon grabbed my attention instantly.

As a non-native English speaker it also taught me a huge amount of English vocabulary like "schedule," "inauguration," "consolidation," "assets and liabilities," "fertilizer," "armament," "magistrate," "commodore," etc., when most of my classmates were still learning "Good morning. How are you?" "Fine, thank you. And you?" This "language-learning" property was inherited by Sid Meier's next hit classic, Civilization.

That's funny. My first English word (from what I can remember) was ladder, I played Goonies 2 on NES without knowing the language (English) and you needed a ladder to rescue one of the kids...

A>_

probably Monkey Island, the PC speaker intro tune will be stuck in my head for eternity.

When I was about 8 (1986) and a friend of my sister's came over to visit. He brought all kinds of games over for our Commodore 64 and copied a bunch for me to keep. I think Jumpman was the one I liked the most then.

Or it could have been the first time that I did this:
LOAD "*",8,1

edit: OKOK C64 is not PC...
For the pre-Windows era, I was hooked the first time I saw Pool of Radiance on a new IBM PS/2 in 1989. Because of that, Curse of the Azure Bonds was one of the first games I got when I built my first PC, an outdated 286 in 1991. For the modern PC 3D Windows era, I was hooked when I first seen a friend of mine fire up Starsiege Tribes on his Voodoo 2 SLI. I still want to play that game to this day.

Joakim wrote on 2022-06-16, 18:37:

That's funny. My first English word (from what I can remember) was ladder, I played Goonies 2 on NES without knowing the language (English) and you needed a ladder to rescue one of the kids...

Well, most FamiCom/NES machines and games in Taiwan back then were pirated directly from Japan so it was not possible to learn English from them (aside from loanwords in katakana). The heyday of piracy (video games plus anime and manga) and the colonial history have made many of my gamer friends, either in my age group or a bit younger, more fluent in Japanese than in English.

The tug of war for rights of Nintendo's legal machines and games in Taiwan were worthy of a drama series; search "Nintendo Phuten" and "Hakuyu" if you want more info but I have yet read any detailed article in English.

Got hooked into the PC gaming with Wolfenstein 3-D since back then the environment felt immersive to the point that I played it many times.

Summer of 92'. My oldest sister had a 386 and a copy of The Secret of Monkey Island. Up to that point, I was acquainted with console gaming, and Monkey Island blew me away. Here was a game with "photorealistic" graphics, where I could talk to people in conversations that were more than "Welcome to Monitor West" or "Dodongo Dislike Smoke" or "There's a town in the west where you can buy keys!", and just about 30-75% of everything on screen was user-interactive.

Today it seems like nothing but back then it was a huge deal to be able to wander into a room in a game and pick up items, use items with other items, manipulate safe mechanisms, tailgate characters to find other characters, make soup, blow yourself out of a cannon, and all without the fear of dying for your omipresent exploration.

Getting Ultima VI after that only cemented my love of the PC as a gaming platform - I got that for my 11th birthday when I got pinkeye. I spent all week playing that game with one eye open - literally - and was amazed at the day night cycle, NPCs with their own lives and schedules, and the ability to interact with EVERYTHING - and I had not even found out about the SPam Spam Spam Humbug cheat yet.