For me it was definitely DOOM 2! Miles ahead of anything else I had played before.
Chuck Yeager Air Combat…there were torque curves and stall vector charts for all the aircraft and I had no idea what those stupid lines meant…it was amazing lol!
The first 3d(not top down) GTA game…the freedom to explore was epic
Has to be The Sims. I remember going into Toys R Us with my best friend and we each picked up copies of the base game with the Livin Large expansion (remember toy stores and when you had to go and pick up physical copies of games?!)
Say what you will about The Sims but it was my first real exposure to just how expansive, creative, and immersive games could be. The possibilities felt endless!
Sim City - I loved that on my Amiga and played it to death.
Also Secret of Monkey Island, first game that was fun and funny - opened my eyes.
Deus Ex. I was 14, didn’t really play or like first person shooters and only played it because it was in the pile of old games someone essentially dropped off on me. But I understood rather quickly that this game was something special, especially with the player’s choices actually making a difference. I remember a moment when I was playing around with cheats and at one point spawned a Paul Denton next to his dead body in the lab under UNATCO just to be funny and when he started talking to me as if he hadn’t died, a quick online search revealed that I didn’t even know how deep your influence truly went.
I still don’t really like or play first person shooters, but that’s now mostly because Deus Ex has set my standards very, very high!
Half Life
This is the right answer. Half-Life 2 literally blew my mind when I first played it. It still holds up to a lot of similar games nearly 20 years later
Recently just played through most of it again with the HL2VR mod and it was amazing
Maybe too retro for “PC” gaming, but Ultima III on the C-64. To have a huge explorable world full of details and people to talk to sucked me right in. Others did a better job later in graphics, size, and details, but Ultima was the first.
For RPGs for me it was Ultima VII - it was the first truly open world game I’d come across, with freedom and so much to do (for the time). I still think it’s a great game to play even now.
Unreal. At the time Quake II was the most popular FPS and the colors and atmosphere of Unreal really were a new experience. I remember the graphics card wars at the time too. Really fun times for computer tech.
I remember playing online on Unreal Tournament on the first iMac. it was a blast.
I had to stop playing for my parent to make a phone call tho.
