I am curious to read about your personal experiences of having been left with lasting memories of a computer game, be it the whole game or some aspect of the game. (It can be recent if you like (but there’s no way of knowing if the memory will last if it is a recent game)
For me, one lasting memory is from ‘Freelancer’ - Namely the musical score. I think it perfectly captured the serenity and vastness of the inhabited universe in the game. The music made me feel like I was actually in a world where the galaxy had been colonised.
I think the computer game industry is some way from seeing its artistic peak, and that will be long after it has seen its technological peak, because there will need to be a period in which developers tire of the novelty of the maximum technological level they have achieved and start concentrating (again) on how good the game is, not how showy it is. When all the memorable aspects of a game are combined into one game we will be close.
I was practically raised on videogames, so I have fond memories of many.
Mario games - my first game ever all the way to the greatness that is Mario Galaxy.
Sonic games - I love the Dragon Ball Z connections.
Donkey Kong Country - Solid platformer and one of the first games to use 3D CG.
Zelda games - All of them (on Nintendo systems) have been phenomenal.
Final Fantasy games, especially 11 - Best and worst of times on the MMORPG.
Game-wise, IV 6 and 12 are my favorites.
Metroid games - Samus is hot. Also great games.
Toejam and Earl - No other game quite like it. Makes an excellent drinking game.
Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo, and other Blizzard games - This was high school and early college. Great memories with my fellow Dark Legion clanmates. We were the first battle.net guild to harness the power of the internet.
Smash Brothers 1,2, and 3 - My main characters are Zelda, Dr. Mario, and Lucas.
Goldeneye - Late middle school, early high school. One of my best memories ever is pwning my best friend in this game in an intense 1v1 in Complex. I was sweating by the end.
Street Fighter - Hadouken!
Mortal Kombat - Finish him!
One of the first computer games I bought was Red Baron - a WWI aerial combat game. My brother and I played it extensively.
I also remember Maniac Mansion, although my brother got into that more than I did.
Interesting topic, as TV was to the generation before us, so computer games are likely to be to my generation (I’m 35). I can chart my life in computer games.
My folks work in academia, so I got an early start on computer gaming. Afterschool childcare being almost non existant in Ireland at the time I often found myself left to my own devices in my mum or dad’s office in front of a VT-100 playing Zork or adventure on a VAX. Although I got nowhere with the games ( I was 7, gimme a break). Their sense of humour has stayed with me and I still have a great love of the genre and style of these games.
Later on, while I was still young, the PC entered the frame, and I learnt to play rogue. A game whose spiritual successor nethack I still play to this day.
Once I entered secondary school (11-17 for those from foreign parts) the school had a few old BBC micros that I was able to sit around and play games on with the other nerds. It was around this time that i began to realise that games were a huge part of my like. I got a copy of the D&D red books and was well on my way to a lifetime as a self identified ‘gamer’
College belongs to LPMUD (several of which I wrote large portions of the codebase for)and to a lesser extent netrek (one of the fore-runners of lan gaming and way ahead of its time conceptually iif not graphically).
Since college I’ve played and enjoyed a great many games, but they’ve never really made the same impression on me as those early experiences until my recent MMO binge.
-SimEarth (first computer upgrade where you bought the ram chips and put them on the board)
-Maniac Mansion
-Oregon Trail (had to buy a CGA emulator to get it to run on a hercules monitor).
Of course Doom (trying to play online), Quake (CTF - hooray for college interwebs), Diablo.
Descent was the first non-text game I played over the Internet. I actually had to get the guy who created Kali, a very early TCP/IP-IPX interface, to help me configure my box. Turned out the guy I was going through for Internet access was doing some funny proxying which made me change ISP’s to one that offered direct shell access. I also designed levels for it and one of mine is in a Descent expansion pack.
I recall being impressed by Dragon’s Lair. How little I knew. Of course that newer game Cliffhanger had much better animation. Once again, how little I knew; Cliffhanger was created using scenes from master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s first film Castle of Cagliostro. Not that it was a good game, of course, since it was Dragon’s Lair but back then everyone was impressed at the idea of watching the video as a game.
I recall being eaten by a dragon while holding the sword in adventure, then killing the dragon from the inside which doesn’t really help. To add insult to injury this is the point at which the bat picks up the dead dragon containing me and my sword and hauls us all over the map.
SimCity on the SNES holds strong memories for me. On weekend nights, I’d stay up until the wee hours playing it. The music was definitely one of my favorite things about the game. I even use one of the songs as the ring tone for my cell phone. Another cool feature was the way the game mimics the seasons by changing the color of the grass and the leaves on the trees. I used to imagine myself in the city I’d created and felt a tiny twinge of dread when August in the game rolled around and all the little sim-kids were starting back to school.
Another more recent one is the Shadows of Luclin expansion for EverQuest. The expansion takes place on a moon of the planet in the main game. In outdoor areas, a quarter of the sky is filled with a view of the home planet. I found it to be extremely surreal. I spent hours in these zones usually with a radio playing. Now, all it takes sometimes is for me to hear one of the songs that was popular around that time and it brings back memories of the giant planet in the sky.
Willy Beamish, Kings Quest series, Sonic, and Contra (this should be on everyone’s list)
In high school I downloaded a bunch of roms for SNES and NES. My favorite was Bubble Bobble. (I know, what was the point?) I played it for hours in my room with the radio on. There are certain songs that can come on and I get the same feeling.
Me and my dad used to love playing Oregon Trail “against” each other. We competed in the high score page and we were dead serious about it. We had the best time at it. I don’t think he’s ever played a computer game other than Solitaire before or since.
Remember how those buffalo were the fastest damned quadrupeds around sometimes, and you’d shoot one but only carry 100 pounds back?
Oregon Trail. I remember playing the first version of it (I.e. the one where hunting involved pressing the space bar as frame-animated deer ran by and a handful of shot (5 bullets, IIRC) would appear from the bottom of the screen and if you timed it right you would kill the deer (there was none of the “maximum 100 lbs” stuff from the later game)) on the Apple II in fourth grade. That was probably the first computer game I ever played. (My first exposure to computers was the Logo “programming” language in first grade.)
But by far, my all time favorite game was Wasteland. One of the pioneering computer RPG’s, it allowed you to fully customize a party of 5 PC’s. The post nuclear apocalypse atmosphere was well-done. The storyline was phenomenal. The game play was great. The paragraphed encounters were well written (and the fake ones were amusing).
Fallout (the spiritual successor to Wasteland, since EA owned the Wasteland name–though Interplay owned everything else Wasteland related, including the source code–and wouldn’t surrender it to Interplay without an insane amount of money) was probably the best modern CRPG, but nothing has ever equaled the overall awesomeness of Wasteland.
I remember being creeped out a bit by the castle music at the end of each Super Mario Bros. level. My heart was pounding trying to get Bowser to fall into the lava. Only to find out that the damn princess is in yet another castle.
It’s funny how all of those NES “boss battles” affected me. I would get so worked up trying to defeat them, and I felt almost like the fate of the world really did rest on my shoulders. Some games pissed me off with their difficulty. Ninja Gaiden is the first one to come to mind in that regard. When I retire some day, I will put that game on my NES-a-day challenge list.
I beat Mike Tyson and felt like I could do anything. I must not have touched any steps as I ran down the stairs to tell everyone. So what if they didn’t care or get to see me do it, my brother was a witness.
In college, it was DOOM and all of the DOOM clones. My favorites were Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D. I remember that level in Duke Nukem where a giant monster came bursting through the doors and Duke said, “I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck!” I thought it was very bold of him to be so aggressive to such a giant, menacing, scary creature, but…
…after killing the creature, he pulls its head off, drops his pants, sits on its neck, and starts reading the newspaper while whistling the game music. God, I loved that bit.
I also spent a lot of my college days hacking games. Need for Speed was a good one for that because you could make an impossibly fast car that the cops could never catch.
My first years in the real world left me with fond memories of Motor City Online. That was my first interactive online gaming experience, even though you could only communicate with other players, using text, only between races.
I downloaded the PC demo for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. That was a lot of fun. It also only had text communication. I actually enjoyed being a medic because it was nice being so appreciated. There was a key you could press to make your guy say, “Medic!” and I remember hearing that constantly.
I was a beta tester for Xbox Live. I really enjoyed a little R/C car racing game called Re-Volt. The game was never released, but it was all there was for us beta testers for a few months, other than a football game that I never played.
I really miss Tech TV. Extended Play was so cool when it was still called Extended Play and was actually about games.
I spent soooo much time about 10 years ago playing Worms 2. Just an amazing game, similar to Scorched Earth, which I played in about 1992. There have been quite a few updated versions of Worms, but Worms 2 was the best.
Also fell deep into a Diablo 2 black hole for about 3 years.
Joe
Goldeneye for the N64. Every Friday night, my brother, two of my friends and I would play for hours. This went on for years. Occasionally we’d branch out into Mario Kart and other games, but Goldeneye deatmatch was our bread-and-butter.
Jet Set Willy II on the Amstrad CPC. I played it again recently on an emulator and 'twas a blast from the past. I recall playing it with my brother back over twenty years ago.
Ultima IV on the old Commodore 64. It just had a charm all its own despite the very primitive graphics, and being an exploration hound I definitely enjoyed just sailing around (shooting pirates with my guns) and yes even delving into some dungeons.
The old first person shooter PO’d comes to mind. The viewpoint character was the lone survivor on a military ship and the cook, which is why he started out with a frying pan as a weapon. Then the was the butcher’s cleaver, a drill ( which splattered blood on the screen and a hand wiped it away when you stopped ), “meat seeker” bouncing balls, a camera missile, and others. It was the first game I played with such a large and odd assortment of weapons.
Killing Time was another; it had lots of atmosphere, in a haunted mansion with killer clowns and ghost gangsters and such.
Dungeon Master. I especially liked the magic system, where you cast spells by stringing together runes. I also recall the first time I fell into the dragon’s chamber, and found these little piles of ash everywhere - rather ominous.
Sun Dog; an interesting game that combined trading and combat. It had neat details like having to swap out damaged or inferior ship components for new or improved ones, meeting people in bars for underhanded deals, and so on.
Star Control II. It’s atmosphere and feel of history are pretty unique.
King’s Field and sequels; one thing I liked was that with the right item you could see a background for virtually everything in the game. It gave a real feeling of their being a history behind everything.
I also remember playing those old Sierra games - Quest for Glory, King’s Quest 5 and 6, etc. Those are the last games that I remember playing and replaying and replaying, knowing by heart how to get 100%, etc. And unforgiving! If you go out in that desert in KQ5 not knowing where the screens with stuff on them are, your ass is dead. Dead as a doornail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. If you don’t pick up the thing you need at the beginning (with no prompting) and don’t have it when you need it, fuck you.
Never was that more true than in some Piers Anthony adventure game - there was no reason to get the mustard out of the fridge in the very beginning except that you’ve played this kind of game before and you take anything that’s not nailed down, right? There’s no indication you should even open the fridge, let alone grab the mustard. But there’s a point at least halfway through the game, probably further, where if you don’t have that mustard there is no going forward for you. That’s it. You’re done.
As a kid, my friend and I used to spend long days playing Utopia for the Intellivision. Even given its very narrow scope, it was addicting and I can remember my nine year old self cursing at the cruel computer God who’d send a hurricane at my expensive hospital.
Ooooh, where to start!
I grew up on the Sierra games, namely Kings Quest and Space Quest. I loved them but they were fiendishly hard, and made all the more difficult by the numerous fatalities you’d suffer along the way. For that reason I tended to enjoy the Lucasfilm games when they came out (especially the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max hit the road), as they had a “no death” policy in their games (apart from the Indiana Jones ones, you could die plenty ways in those).
Once the adventure genre had begun to die I switched onto strategy games, in particular Civ and Master of Orion and their respective successors (I still cry tears of rage and frustration over the mangled corpse of MOO3). Many hours of my secondary school time were lost playing those.
More recently games that really stick in my memory as being particularly good:
Planescape Torment - possibly the best story in a computer game. Sure there was more text in the game than the entire works of JR Tolkien but it was a fantastic game world and the way the story was presented (with you playing an amnesiac immortal) meant that your experience of the game mirrored his experience of the world. Totally immersive, multi branched and full of depth.
Morrowind - I was quite skeptical of this game to start with but once I’d got into it I could stop playing. Massive game world that you actually feel you’re living in with a huge backstory and mythos within it and a cracking story to boot. It’s a shame that the sequel, Oblivion, wasn’t as good.
Pharoah/Zeus/Rise of the Middle Kingdom - city building at it’s best, Impressions Games knew how to make them. I spent hours on these games trying to make sure my economy was working, the gods were appeased, I wasn’t at risk of being invaded, I had enough food to feed everyone etc etc. And then a fire would break out and burn down a couple of farms and the whole thing would fall apart (cue me weeping into my keyboard). Unfortunatley city building games nowadays don’t seem to be as good, I’m currently playing Caesar IV by Tilted Mill (the company that the Impressions crew set up when the company folded) and it’s good but not great.
Warcraft 3 - man did I love that game, mainly for the visuals and the story which rocked. I played it pretty obsessively when it came up but haven’t touched it much since (although I’m still partial to a go on the tower defense mini-game in Frozen Throne).