Probably FF4. My attachment of the series ends in the 16-bit era though and all those 201x/202x+ updates don't do anything for me.

i'd also say Quake for technical merits only (3Drenderer/modularized game/clientserver). do not care for the sandy/lovecraft parts etc. nor do i ever desire a 'true sequel'. what's done was done

oh yeah there was this VAMPIRE thing, but similarly, i also don't care for any true sequels either because post-MTX/post-Ono CAPCOM would definitely F it up. also the scene in the west has several hate problems, ironic considering midnight bliss...

Unreal (FC) and Star Control 2 amplified my attachment to tracker music. 😀

Descent 2, I like the six degrees of freedom. Final fantasy VIII, that game made me adicted to j-rpgs. Three Sisters' Story, it was the first visual novel I've played and got me into the genre.

I'd say on PC the biggest influential games would be Monkey Island 1 & 2. Before that, Microsoft Adventure and Reader Rabbit was all I knew and I found the PC boring, banal, and over-educational, save for maybe a copy of "Memory Match".

So here's why. The Secret of Monkey Island really showed me what the PC could REALLY do. Here's a game where I had nearly "photorealistic" for the time VGA graphics, a "Sandbox" as they call it now to run around in. You could not die, but you had to solve puzzles to keep from getting bored. The only exception was the music because my sister's weedy little DOS 5.00 equipped 386 had internal speaker only - so the only background music was the theme. This took me to digging around my sister's 1980's record and tape collection. I met A-ha, Mr. Mister, Bon Jovi, Duran Duran, Bryan Adams, Loverboy, Cheap Trick, Kenny Loggins, Miami Sound Machine, Tina Marie, Journey, Shalamar, Karla Bonoff, Marietta, Steve Stevens outside of Billy Idol, and numerous others that way. Literally the Top Gun soundtrack was the soundtrack to SoMI to me. Those songs I listened to playing Monkey Island with the internal speaker are what drew me to want to learn to play bass, synth, and guitar. I still can't go to the Fettucini Bros to this day without hearing Gloria Estefan singing "Hot Summer Nights" - despite it not at all fitting almost getting a concussion for 400ish pieces of eight (in game of course).

Monkey Island 2 was the first game I ever wrote a hint-guide for, for my 25 year old sister, because some of the puzzles in that were quite unfair (particularly the door guy for the wheel game in the alley, and the forest on Dinky Island). I wonder if she still has that somewhere, 🤣. IIRC "The Call" was what I was listening to playing that one.

Console wise, probably Illusion of Gaia and Dragon Warrior series were what got me into RPGs heavily along with Ultima VI for PC - which was the first DOS PC Game I ever owned - I played that game for an entire week while I was stuck at home with PInkeye during/after my 11th birthday. I remember being happy to at least have one eye open to play that game, made me forget I even HAD pinkeye for awhile. I think U6 might have also been why I like GTA and Postal so much because that's how I played it when I was 11 sometimes - once digging my Karma score so low that when Lord British revived me, I was just a dead sprite floating around Brittania, having not atoned for my sins....I have to wonder if Lord British ever considered just turning me into a Candlebra or a piece of cheese to "disarm" my malicious and klepto in-game behavior. 🤣.

Then my friend who had a Mac as a kid, he had Sim City 2000, which introduced me to the Sim series, and turned me into "that guy" who can spend hours upon hours micro-managing and building whatever the sim game is about. Probably the reason I spend all my time in The Sims building houses is a result of years building massive cities with SKURK, only to watch them burn afterward due to imbalance in infrastructure, power, and citizens.

Probably Doom made me take PC seriously as a gaming platform, before that games it had were "alright" but Amiga's games were alrighter.

This one the most:
Infocom games - Taught me that games were more than pressing buttons on a gamepad and making a character jump. Zork taught me to be prepared and the how important maps are.

The rest:
Daggerfall - Taught me how shitty companies were at testing their games but the scope of the game was impressive.
Doom - Showed me what a well coded game could do on a PC with impressive gameplay and mods!
Mean Streets - Flying car in what seemed like a large world and realsound. Different type of gameplay than used to and usage of PC hardware than what I was used to.
Tradewars - Multiplayer via BBS. Not the first BBS game I played but the scope was impressive and was more "multiplayer" than other BBS games.
Wolf3D - FPS on a 286 with good graphics and responsive gameplay. Began my love of FPS and my constant wonderment on how or why people would play them with a gamepad.

Wolfenstein 3D
Doom
and before those, probably Myst and the King's Quest series, particularly KQ5 with its wonderful and rich graphics.

I remember reading at the time 1990 or so that all of the art in KQ5 was painted on canvas and scanned in. At crummy 320x190 resolution. I just wish those original paintings had been saved and preserved digitally decades later at something like 3072x2048 or higher. They're probably lost to all time and we're stuck with the 320x200 256 color art.

Of course all the Infocom games, going all the way back to Zork, as well.

While I'm thinking about that, I'll drop some bombs from my ZX Spectrum years. Anyone that is going to make a game should give them a try and learn something:
- Jet Pac: Playability distilled on only 8k. Just to remember what makes games fun to play.
- Spyhunter: The arcade has some controls that weren't really suitable for ZX Spectrum... they made and adaptation with good controls and very playable.
- Mad Mix Game: A good lecture about how to copy, extend and enhance a good game. Everything they touched, it made the game better and less repetitive.

Some games that influenced me:

• Duke3D - one of the first games that I played on my PC, introduced me to the FPS genre
• Command & Conquer - got me into RTS games, had great looking cinematics for the time
• Heroes of Might and Magic 2 - my first contact with turn-based strategy games
• Diablo - solidified my interest in (action) RPGs, had amazing music and visuals
• Thief: The Dark Project - my first stealth game, very atmospheric
• Chrono Trigger (SNES) - got me into jRPGs, loved its multiple endings and new game+

To this day, I enjoy games that are in some way similar to these. I guess you could say that most of my gaming preferences developed during the late 90s.

Elite 2: Frontier is notable for its scale and detail. Also, real physics (mostly).

• Prince of Persia - This was my first PC game ever and I love the series since (except Forgotten Sands, it's just mediocre and disappointing, and that VR crap I don't care about).
• Carmageddon - This was my first vehicular combat game and my absolute favorite ever since.
• Need for Speed: High Stakes - One of my favorite racing game to this day. Back in the day I've only played the demo, but it was enough to make me addicted and I played that one track probably a thousand times.
• Quake III Arena - I'm generally not a multiplayer gamer, but this is one of the few I grown to love and ready to play any time.
• World War III: Black Gold - Not my first RTS, neither the best, but kickstarted my RTS phase in the noughties
• Call of Duty - This game turned my friends and me into a WW2 freak so bad, we started to make a pseudo Band of Brothers movie adaptation we were working on for 3 summers inspired by the first mission. We never finished , but at lest we got stupid drunk like soldiers on their days off.
• Grand Thert Auto III - I was so addicted to this game it's not even funny. Also I this game helped me through the English language elementary school leaving exam.
• Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl - Junky Eastern-European game, but it's doubly important. It kickstarted my late-noughties post-apocalyptic game phase and through that my RPG phase (I was a late bloomer when it comes to RPGs)

I don't know what games influenced me, but I would say that my favorite series are Rayman and Prince of Persia. At a significant distance behind are Mortal Kombat and Doom series, and then many others.

Starsiege, Starsiege: Tribes and Unreal are the three big ones for me because it's what got me started in making mods and maps for video games in the first place.

I know more about Unreal 1 modding than any one person should really ever know, heh.

Hearing the Wolf3D background tune through cheap mono speakers via the MediaVision Thunderboard I'd just fitted to my 286/16 was a wonderful moment...

Ah, yes, I forgot the original Need for Speed for DOS. It was for driving games what Doom was for the FPS. NFS required a beefy system for the 640x480 30fps graphics. I remember playing it with excellent speed on a Pentium 233 MMX overclocked to 292 Mhz back in the day! Everything else paled in comparison compared to NFS. I spent so many hours playing, it was so addictive, and even bought a steering wheel / gas setup just to play this game. Screamer for DOS was great as well, released the same year, 1995, as NFS. Road Rash released the next year was similar, but it was only for Win 95.

I think I missed the NFS games but I was into destruction derby, I think it came with my family's PC, a cyrix 133 or something. It was very hard though..

for me it's :

Alone in the Dark
Gobliins 2
Eye of the Beholder 2

The Sierra graphics adventure games with text command input, starting with King's Quest I, really did wonders for my English language skills, back when I was a kid.

Some notable cases I remember:

• Wanting to climb the tree in King's Quest I, but constantly failing, since I wasn't aware that there was a near-silent 'b' at the end of the word "climb". So I tried things like "clime tree", but it wouldn't work. Then, finally, when I had an uncle from the US visiting us, he set down to play a bit of the game together with me. I still remember the feeling of enlightenment when I saw him enter "climb tree" at the keyboard, and Sir Graham immediately proceeded to climb the tree. "Ah, so that's how it's spelled!" 😅
• Trying to decode the hard-to-read hand-writing-like font of the (*ahem*, photo-copied) game manual of King's Quest III, specifically the spells that you had to utter (enter as commands in the game) sentence by sentence, exactly as they were written in the manual, as a form of copy protection. The one that kept confounding me was this one word during one of the spells. What as that word that was hard to read? "Soponfic"? I had no idea what it meant. If the word doesn't even look familiar, how could I even look it up in a dictionary to check if I misspelled it? (This was back around 1990, long before the age of the Internet, in which a single misspelled Google search would yield a helpful "Did you mean x" suggestion at the top of the search results.) Eventually, I don't exactly remember how, I figured out that the word was supposed to be "soporophic", which I still had never heard of, and to this day, have never heard anyone utter in a sentence, and frankly never even seen used in any text I've read in the decades since, whether in print or on-line. Obviously, I felt quite clever, having eventually figured that one out.
• In Space Quest II, during the dark cave ladder climbing sequence, a message is shown about a terrifying sound reverberating through the cave, ending with the snarky remark "The only thing you do know for sure is that you've just soiled your undergarment." Back then, being a Dutch 11- or 12-year-old, the meaning of "soiled your undergarment" completely puzzled me, and I didn't even know how the word "undergarment" was supposed to be pronounced. It wasn't until much later that I remembered that sentence, understood it, and got the typical Space Quest humor of it.
• In Police Quest I, in the jail scene, I just couldn't figure out how to recruit Marie for an undercover operation. I believe eventually a classmate of mine gave me some complex command like "Ask help for mission bla bla" that worked. Later on, I would have a real "D'oh!" moment when another classmate dryly remarked that the simple command "ask for for help" would have worked as well. Why did I never try that one? 🤣
  
  Yeah, those adventure games, particularly the ones from Sierra, had quite eloquent wording and obviously catered to grown-up native English speakers. But it was this high bar, combined with how fun and captivating those games were to play, that made them so educational. I remember excelling in English class in high school, my highest grades on my report cards and my diploma of all subjects being English. Part of it was thanks to the non-translated American Saturday Morning cartoons on a then-popular international commercial TV station called Sky Channel, another part was the fact that every few years, we would go on vacation to visit relatives in the US, but a third factor for me was definitely the stuff I learned from playing and experimenting with our PC at home, particularly those Sierra adventures.
  
  In retrospect, I'm really glad that Sierra didn't immediately adopt point-and-click, like Lucasfilm/LucasArts did, even with their earliest games. Even though point-and-click games would still require you to understand the text that you would see in response to your actions, having to figure out how to communicate your intent in English sentences, even though brief and simple ones, was much more educational. I guess one exception to that would be the absolutely brilliant Sword-fighting Insults sequence in Monkey Island 1. You had to understand the puns and double entendres in those sentences in order to pick the correct ones. But since I was a few years older by the time I was playing Monkey Island 1, compared to my King's Quest I and Space Quest II days, it came easier to me.

The beauty of learning excess vocabulary is that you can call dopey f****rs, soporific copulators to their face. 🤣

Then I guess be grateful that it wasn't a Northern English lad who wrote Space Quest, you might have been trying to figure out "cacked your kecks" ... though that might have scandinavian or germanic roots that actually make it easier for some.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-14, 12:43:

The beauty of learning excess vocabulary is that you can call dopey f****rs, soporific copulators to their face. 🤣

Then I guess be grateful that it wasn't a Northern English lad who wrote Space Quest, you might have been trying to figure out "cacked your kecks" ... though that might have scandinavian or germanic roots that actually make it easier for some.

Assuming that "cacked" means the same as the Dutch word "gekakt", I guess it would indeed have been more of a hint to me at the time.

But I guess the more eloquent wording they went with was the only way for the TGfA to get this literal potty humor past the approval process. I don't think Ken Williams would have signed off on any of their adventure games other than LSL containing language like "you just crapped your pants". 😁

(By the way, that part of the game was actually the scariest part of any Sierra game that I have ever played, so the message was almost apt.)