What game had the biggest impact on your life?

[+Random Terrain]

I can't think of one first big thing. Video games just kind of crept up on me. The first things to have an impact were various pinball games and other mechanical-type arcade games, then computer graphics started to sneak in. Games similar to the following got me interested in whole thing:

 

http://marvin3m.com/arcade/rapidfi.htm

http://marvin3m.com/arcade/divebom.htm

http://marvin3m.com/arcade/minvade.htm

http://marvin3m.com/arcade/shark.htm

http://marvin3m.com/arcade/seadevi.htm

http://marvin3m.com/arcade/chopper.htm

http://marvin3m.com/arcade/ssonar.htm

http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter...=O&game_id=9459

 

Playing Boot Hill at King's Dominion was the first time I actually noticed that more games were starting to switch to computer graphics:

http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter...=O&game_id=7193

 

 

My first "console" was an Odyssey 400 that played a few variations of Pong:

http://www.pong-story.com/odyssey_other.htm

 

It was for 2 players only, but I never had anyone to play it with me, so I had to try to find ways to play it by myself. I can't say that Pong made a big impact. I guess the Atari 2600 made the biggest impact on my life, but not a certain game for it. It would be hard to pin down a specific game since there were so many games over the years for various systems that made me say, "holy crap!"

[liquid_sky]

the first sim city. I was amazed.. my own little world with its own problems to try to fix

[Atariboy]

NASCAR Racing 4, NASCAR Racing 2002 Season, and NASCAR Racing 2003 Season are all much better than NASCAR Heat and NASCAR Thunder.

 

Better graphics, more realistic physics, support for 43 people to race online, etc. NASCAR Heat was decent and could compete with NASCAR Racing 3 back in 2000, but it doesn't hold up as well now. NASCAR Thunder always sucked on the PC though, but its decent on game consoles if you don't mind arcade style physics and not so accurate tracks.

 

But if you want a challenging and as realistic as possible NASCAR sim experiance, the Papyrus games are the way to go.

[compacho]

SMB. It is probably the most recognizeable game there is. Someone hums 'Dun dun dun, dun dun dun dun, dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun' you know its mario.

 

Lol. you sure that's the mario theme and not the last part of the simpson's theme song?

 

anyways, for me I'm gonna say Ghosts N Goblins had some sort of impact on my life. Saying that a game had a BIG impact on your life is too geeky and a lil pathetic. Thanks to GnG, most of my game library consists of retro and/or hard games such as Ikaruga and F-Zero GX.

[raindog]

I think that at 34, I might be the oldest person here who can't remember a time when there were no videogames: my parents got the original Odyssey the year it came out, and I have memories of playing those games with the overlays taped up to the TV way back before my dad died, earlier than any of my memories about watching TV shows. So I guess that makes Odyssey a life-shaping videogame for me. (Hey Paul, the Odyssey double-paddle controllers would make a really cool Marble Craze controller if they could be adapted to the 2600... and if they weren't as rare as they are )

 

I don't think I can really pick one game from the late 70's through the mid-80's because it was like a string of constant improvements, but rather than contributing to my truancy or whatever, I think the net effect was to provide motivation for me to get my first paper route (so I'd have a never-ending supply of quarters ) and then my first job (to finance the phone line for my little Commodore BBS through which I got the 1980's equivalent of terabytes of pirated games.) Those games included Asteroids, Galaxian, Tron, Pac-Man, Space Duel, Tempest, Bag-man, Donkey Kong (actually the bootleg "Congorilla"), Reactor.... and those were just a sampling of the ones within walking distance from my house during that period.

 

Late 80's to early 90's games seemed like less of a constant improvement and certainly none of them were life-altering, though I played a lot of Super Mario Bros., Sonic, Rampart, Ataxx, Gain Ground, etc. until arcades got taken over by Street Fighter II and I lost interest. The NES and SNES always seemed kind of lame, the Genesis impressed me but not enough to ever buy one (though I bought a Game Gear so I could play Mappy again.) One house I lived in had a Defender machine in its living room (some frat house had left it on the curb, and my electrical engineer roommates took it upon themselves to fix it and set it on free play) and so for a while I was very, very good at that. The most important game to me during that period was probably Menace on the Amiga, but again, while I spent days and days at it, I wouldn't call it life-altering as I probably would have just played a different game if it weren't that one.

 

As far as modern games go, though, as long as we're hanging out in the Modern Gaming forum, there can be only one: Super Mario Sunshine. I had long ago decided that all modern games were just big piles of 3D crap with no playability and hyper-realistic depictions of really boring brown-grey environments. It wasn't me, but my partner who discovered SMS while I was shopping in Toys'r'Us for one GBA oldies collection or another, and I bought the Gamecube just to play it. Now I play videogames again on a regular basis, not the way I did 20 years ago, but I realize the better game designers have come up with gameplay that works as well in 3D as the Atari, Namco, Midway, Williams, etc. guys did back then in 2D. While there's a certain sameness to a lot of these games (explore this world freely in 3D! Collect this, this and this item while defeating computer-controlled enemies! You only get one life, but you can expand how much damage you can take!) many of them have the kind of depth that computer games didn't even have till recently, and some of them (like Ocarina of Time) make some of my favorite old games look like minigames. Had a non-gamer not demonstrated to me that the new games are playable by someone who has a job and a life, I would have gone on dissing the current bunch of consoles and pining for more games like the ones I played when I was a kid.

[Malix]

I would say the arcade version of SMB. I can still remember going to the new arcade near my house and seeing the older kids playing this game for hours on end.

 

When I finally got a chance to play I put my money in and was dead in like 5 minutes. This made me bug my dad to get me an NES and replace the old games like pitfall and Yars. I was never the same again.

[kisrael]

CASH MAN was the first multiplayer I had with an explorable environment - me and my brother loved that game.

What system was CASH MAN on? I haven't heard of it, but I love hearing about interesting early multiplayer...

[kisrael]

Hrrm....

 

Arcade----

Gauntlet 4 players, just generally amazing

Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road Just something about those little trucks bouncing around...plus the difficulty was geared nicely, I could get pretty far.

 

2600----

Frogger my first home console game. So I guess it was my gateway drug that turned me into the junkie I am today.

Warlords my first exposure to terrific multiplayer

Tron Deadly Discs showed me how cool it was when computer controlled players seemed to have the same abilities as the player

Battlezone just astounding. A 3D world. Plus Chris Crawfords' The Art of Computer Game Design showed how the UFO was a lovely bit of misdirection in the arcade original.

 

C64----

Elite So this is what a universe-in-a-game looks like...but really I was in it for the spaceship fights

Archon There's just something so pure about this game.

 

PC----

Wing Commander 1+2 Why I got a PC, truth be told, senior year of highschool. Such amazing graphics, such solid gameplay, such a cool WW2-in-the-future scenario...

Star Control 1 + 2 the original was great combat, Space War on steroids...the second added in a brilliant adventure to it

DOOM some of the most fear-in-your-gut action I've ever played, plus everyone's introduction to deathmatch

 

N64----

Star Fox 64 Why I bought this system...but then the system turns out to be THE multiplayer system to have, and I just happened to move in with a small group of gamers...

Mario Kart 64 ...and this is what we played.

Mario 64 A new type of gaming

 

PS2----

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City really changed how I think about gaming, the amazing power of missions overlayed on a multipurpose world, not a world that feels like it was laid out just for the story.

 

 

Heh, it's funny, but my favorite systems all in all are the newer ones, but really, they've stopped 'changing my life'...

[Eduardo]

Asteroids Coin-Op, That's where it all began for me.

2600-Chopper Command, spent hundreds of hours playing it. Turmoil, Centipede and Galaxian were pretty addictive too.

Sierra Games for the PC (Larry Laffer, King's Quest, Space Quest) those just seemed so "intelligent" back then.

Test Drive for the PC, it was as close as you could get to the real thing.

SMB3 for the NES-Awesome graphics for its time.

Street Fighter II Coin-Op got me into Fighting games.

Wolfenstein & Doom series for the PC forced me to upgrade hardware several times just to play it at full speed.

[kisrael]

Asteroids Coin-Op, That's where it all began for me.

.

Heh, I read that too quickly and thought it said "Asteroids Co-op"...I thought I had missed a 2 player version somewhere?

 

Though I guess that's what Atari's Space Duel essentially is.

 

What computer is the code in your .sig file for?

[Eduardo]

What computer is the code in your .sig file for?

 

GWBasic for PCs (MS-DOS v3.3)

[kisrael]

Heh, works in QuickBasic 4.5 as well I think. What's it for?

[Eduardo]

Try it!

 

it's just a silly graphic (a Boat!) with a few notes, I used to impress some newbies back in the day with this short program I learned from the great Larry Goldstein's Basic for the IBM PC book (late 80s) it's just part of a lesson teaching how to draw crude graphics using the venerable GWBasic. It was quite impressive back in the day tho. I still keep this book to this day

[kisrael]

Try it!    

I did! That's how I know it worked w/ QB4.5

it's just a silly graphic (a Boat!) with a few notes, I used to impress some newbies back in the day with this short program I learned from the great Larry Goldstein's Basic for the IBM PC book (late 80s) it's just part of a lesson teaching how to draw crude graphics using the venerable GWBasic. It was quite impressive back in the day tho. I still keep this book to this day

Heh. I would impress newbies by writing a paint program in VB3 in literally 2 lines of code. (You have a window, on mouse down do line(x,y)-(x,y), on mouse drag do line -(x,y) -- it remembers where you last drew. )

 

I kind of liked playing with GW-/Q- BASIC's music and drawing strings. I actually had little Bezerk-like robots running around the screen at one point.

 

Best programming book of all time: (bringing this back on topic to the site, if not the thread): "Dr. C. Wacko's Miracle Guide to Designing and Programming Your Own Atari Computer Arcade Games". Lots of funny cartoons on the side, and solid programming teaching presented in the form of whimsical games.