Keen 1 and Wolfenstein 3D where the first games I ever played on a DOS machine. That machine was our first home computer, a second hand Tulip Vision Line 386SX 16 with 4 MB of RAM, a 120MB HDD and sound came out of the PC speaker.

Some time later I got a shareware version of Electroman and was surprised by the smoothness of the game and sound effects that came out of the 'beeper', how was that possible?!

Hmmm, probably playing Duke Nukem 2 on an IBM P70 386

The Sierra games. SQ, QFG, LSL, and KQ. Those showed me the potential of PC gaming and hardware. I did get into W3D and DOOM, but they didn't have the same effect on me, as those Sierra games did.

I would have to say Dangerous Dave and the original CD-MAN shareware release with the pacman graphics

On my 8088 @ 8mhz, 512kb ram, CGA - It was games like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago, BattleTech: The Cresent Hawks Inception, Life and Death, SimCity, Prince of Persia, and Wheel of Fortune.

On my 486sx-33->dx4-100- It was games like Wolf3d, Willy Beamish, King Quest 4/5, Space Quest 4/5, Wing Commander, Hardball 5, SimCity 2000, Doom1/2, Duke3D, Blood, Descent1/2

PD2JK wrote on Today, 14:24:

Keen 1 and Wolfenstein 3D where the first games I ever played on a DOS machine. That machine was our first home computer, a second hand Tulip Vision Line 386SX 16 with 4 MB of RAM, a 120MB HDD and sound came out of the PC speaker.

Some time later I got a shareware version of Electroman and was surprised by the smoothness of the game and sound effects that came out of the 'beeper', how was that possible?!

Nice, my first Keen version was 4.
My first own machine was an IBM PS/1 2021 386sx 20 2mb ram, upgraded it to 6mb to be able to run Doom. But it was no fun running on a 386a 😀

It's not so much that a game got me "in love". It's just that as a kid - DOS games were about 90% of what I saw, with consoles being the other 10%, most of them bootleg "Famiclones". So to me, DOS gaming had always been the mainstream.