I wasted years of my life on MMORPGs... Lineage 2 was one of them. I played the classic version too a few years ago before the server died.

I hope I never get stuck in one again..

Dead MMORPGs are sad. All that time and money... gone.

One nice thing about WoW is that it's never going to go offline. There are just too many players.

+ for a lot of the games above, from 8-bit up. But an important game for me personally is the original FarCry which got back into gaming after years of no interest. Also Gothic II, which opened my eyes to the joys of open world RPGs.

🤣 pso2 made me get sucked back into mmos 🙁

digger wrote on 2021-08-14, 15:42:

the Oregon Trail Generation, because many Xennials in this country were exposed to the game Oregon Trail, since it was a popular educational game that was installed on many computers in school labs at the time. The fact that this game was so prevalent and familiar to so many people that an entire (sub)generation was named after it would definitely make this game worth mentioning in this topic, wouldn't you agree?

Oregon Trail.... Wow, what memories. I played this on an Apple II in Integer Basic about 1977 or 1978, and those versions were all without graphics of any kind. You had to type "BANG" or "POW" to hunt, and messages like "Rugged Mountains, the going is slow" and "BRRR! You have enough clothes to keep you warm" were the rule of the day. Then, in 1980 MECC released a version of the game with primitive graphics (a deer going across the screen which you had to hit by pressing SPACE BAR and timing the hit to coinicide with hitting the deep=r sprite), and a primitive (monochromatic 280x192 USA map, with date and distance displayed at the bottom, with your Prairie schooner wagon moving across).

The version which most probably remember today is the 1987 or 1992 MECC versions which were released for the PC. I think those were the "official" v. 1.0 and 2.0 versions of the game, but the history of Oregon Trail goes far back to the early '70s to the mainframe era, when those text-only versions were written in CP/M and I think, even COBOL and played via timesharing on PDP-8 systems.

Impossible Mission
I played this on my uncle's C64 and immediately knew I had to get a C64 for myself. This is doubly important for me, because the C64 was my first computer (besides a hand me down Atari 800 XL I barely ever touched)... and also my introduction to computer role playing games (I had played only console rpgs up until then), which is my favorite genre to this day.

Ultima VI
I played this on a friend's PC clone, and knew that it was time to get a PC. The graphics and music blew me away. I wouldn't get a PC for a couple years, but I was excited one day to find Ultima VI for the C64 at the local software shop. I figured it would tide me over til I could get a PC... but sadly it's a very disappointing port, though quite impressive in how much they were actually able to get into the game.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
This got me back into computer gaming many years back. I liked it so much that I went on to complete the series from W1-3&5, then started playing through all the older crpgs I'd missed or not completed, such as The Bard's Tale 1-3, Wasteland, AD&D Pool of Radiance, and most recently Ultima III.

Moon Patrol, was one of the few games I enjoyed on our Apple IIe and first game I ever finished (not counting Carmen Sandiego)
Raptor Call of the Shadows, Shareware version came on our PC and was the first game I really got into and first full version game I purchased.
C&C, This got me into RTS's still my favourite genre. Also the first I use mod tools on like extracting the hidden music or creating maps.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-08-14, 09:08:

[*]World War III: Black Gold - Not my first RTS, neither the best, but kickstarted my RTS phase in the noughties

Love this game, especially the Russian campaign where you can send units home to carry onto to the next level. Shame its overlooked

Ah yeah C&C.. Red Alert was the game that made me realize Swedish television was boring in the mid 90s. Was probably the first PC game I played seriously. Multiplayer was cool too and we rocked that game way into the late 90s on our coaxial network.

There are a lot of games I can think of for this, but to focus one part of my life I'll talk about the ones I remember for the Apple IIGS, which is the first computer my family ever owned.

If we're counting educational games, I think the first game I remember playing was Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? for the Apple IIGS. I was fairly little, and while I was pretty good at the geography part of it I didn't figure out the "gather descriptions of the culprit to create a dossier" aspect right away, and I got pretty frustrated initially because I'd get to the right place at the end of a case only to lose because I had no warrant! I also wasn't really familiar with the concept of "copy protection" at that point, but in hindsight using the enclosed almanac for that purpose was brilliant!

Another formative IIGS title I remember was called Jam Session. Not so much an objective-based game, this let you play along with pre-recorded songs by using your keyboard to trigger notes and preset loops. I don't think I learned much about music theory from this, but I probably did start to develop an ear for musical improvisation that would serve me well when I started playing in jazz bands a half decade after this. The IIGS' sound capabilities were pretty respectable for the time, particularly representing piano and distorted guitar, so all in all the game's audio was enough to impress my impressionable ears.

Finally, it wasn't really a game, but when we got the computer it came with a tutorial disc called Your Tour of the Apple IIGS, which was designed to teach computer novices how to use a mouse, what a spreadsheet looked like and how it worked, and so on. Since I was new to computers and, as previously stated, was just a small kid, I was entertained by this bit of software far longer than its authors had probably intended. I still think of this years later when I'm writing guides and procedures for people and trying to make them as accessible as possible.