What were your (now retro, but not at the time) gaming wow moments?
I remember a few from various stages of my life (born 1984).
Seeing the demo footage of Sonic 2 in Woolworths and thinking the leaves falling down in Aquatic Ruin zone was so cool and advanced.
The original Sega arcade of Virtua Racing with the moving cars completely blew me away.
I remember my uncle loading up Cannon Fodder on his Amiga, and a REAL song with REAL music came out, along with REAL photos. I was amazed haha.
A few years on I remember a PlayStation demo disc having promo footage of the first Gran Turismo and it looked so real to me, I watched it over and over. The first Driver on PS1 looked absolutely amazing to me also.
Pairing two TVs and two Xbox consoles together for an eight player local Halo death match. Online gaming will never match the energy in that room.
My buddies and I had easy access to a theater, which had giant curved walls on each side of the stage. We hooked up three projectors to three Xboxes; One projector for the stage, and one for each of the curved walls. Then we ran them into the sound system.
We did it two or three times a week for months.
The funny part is that you could always tell who was screenlooking, because the screens were so big that you had to physically turn your head away from your own screen. And at that point you just die, cuz you start missing the people right in front of you.
Any theatre that doesn't facilitate this has my express permission to go out of business. That sounds incredible.
Starfox 64. I played it at Toys R Us......oh, uh, kids Toys R Us was a toy store that had been around for like 80 years. And everybody knew it was never going to close, because there was always going to be more kids.......and then it closed.
Anyways, they had a demo unit you could play. It reset every 10 minutes. Then Mario would pop up and say "THANK YOU FOR PLAYING NINTENDO 64, WHO'S NEXT???"
And like a stupid teenager, I yelled "I AM!!!" as if it were voice activated. It wasn't. I was just a dumb teenager telling at a CRT tv.
One time I got so invested in it, that I didn't even notice a kid was behind me for like 20 minutes. And eventually he said "Excuse me.....you went 3 times in a row. Can I try please?"
Man I felt like an ass. He probably felt like I was bullying him out of playing. I was twice his age, twice his size, and even compared to other kids my own age I was always a kid who was at the top of the food chain. I genuinely didn't see him, and thought I was alone. I let him play all the turns until his family made him leave.
But those visuals.....THE RUMBLE PACK???!!! OH MY GOD!!! THE CONTROLLER SHAKES WHEN YOUR SHIP GETS DAMAGED!!! And it had 3D space ship flying and voice acting, and oh my god.....
It was all very overwelming. I'm not saying Mario 64 is a bad game. I loved it. But Starfox 64 was the game that made me buy a game for a console I didn't even own. I was THAT sure that I'd have to have an N64 one day.......that day was like 6 months later.
There are some very memorable games.
No game has ever matched the freedom of Morrowind. You are only limited by yourself. Even Oblivion and Skyrim feel restricted by the game itself.
Half-Life 2 interacting with the environment. I must have played with the can for hours the first time.
Final Fantasy VIII though was the single most impressive game for the hardware it came out on. The character models being actual human proportion, the summons looking like actual monsters, and the FMVs where people look like damn people in a movie.
In the same vein, FFX being described as looking like FFVIII's FMVs but all the time. And then living up to the hype.
Morrowind mentioned, based comment.
Final Fantasy 6, the three mechs marching through the snow in 3d.. followed by the emotional impact of the game elevated gaming to another level I had never before seen
Yes. One of my moments is a certain event late in the game where the world map music changes after pounding the player with an oppressive atmosphere and some very low lows for a couple of hours. It's amazing how well a 16-bit game was able to make it so cathartic.
Boomer take, but going from NES to the SNES and seeing the advances in sprites and animations in Nintendo games like Donkey Kong Country, Link to the Past, Yoshi's Island, and Super Metroid was really mind blowing.
Also seeing the early days of more cinematic approaches to storytelling in SquareSoft games like FF IV, VI, and Chrono Trigger. Those really forshadowed how games would mature into a serious storytelling medium for me. FF IV's opening scene on the airship and the music is still burned into my brain.
The transition to 3D the following generation was also insanely impressive obviously, but none of those games have aged half as well as the 32 bit era.
3 of them:
watching an Amiga 500 load from disk having only seen 8bit games on tape. Everything that machine did at the time was like magic.
watching the castle fly through intro for Unreal on PC when the first 3D accelerators appeared. Everything changed after that.
experiencing the shark diving demo on PlayStation VR. And also how nothing changed after that! xD
And to have been able to experience that evolution from space invaders to cyberpunk in a single life time has been a privilege.
We're the only generation that grew up alongside video games. We watched them grow up into what they are today, and our kids don't even know of a world without them.
I don't know what "Age" we're in right now, but I think 1970-2024+ should be referred to as the Video Game Age.
I feel the same way about it being a privilege. I missed the earliest part… but even to have lived through the NES and Master System era through to today has been amazing.
Games will continue getting ever more impressive, but nobody again will witness the kind of seismic leaps in what games could accomplish that people saw between the 70s and 2000s.
Just remembered that seeing Doom for the first time is another obvious one. Man that game was incredible when it came out.
I remember my brother telling me about Wolfenstein 3D. I insisted that something like that, that moved smoothly at your command in any direction instead of in clunky 90° turns and blockwise steps, was impossible with the current technology.
I was wrong.
you were right, the computers couldnt do the math in time. the trick was to precalculate the sin/cos tables for angle steps into tons of lookups instead.
It wasn’t just the trig tables, but realtime raycasting altogether felt like sorcery.
And was re-released last week. I was pleased to see the 2024 console ports still support LAN play.
The beginning of Link to the Past, with the rain, thunder and lightning. LttP took it to another level coming from NES games and even most PC games at the time, setting a mood and atmosphere I had never experienced in gaming before.
When you could walk up to the strippers in Duke Nukem 3D and they would flash their titties at you.
Shake it baby!
Stepping out of the sewers in Oblivion for the first time. Nothing has really captured that feeling since.
Oh yeah this is it! Seeing that you could go anywhere in the world was a first for me. I was in awe watching my cousin play on his new Xbox 360 that night. The graphics were astounding and the gameplay was unlike anything I ever saw before.
My brother and I only had the original Xbox at this time but we discovered that Morrowind was available to us for it and so we got that to help the urge we felt.
It wasn’t quite the same hype, but man I’m glad in hindsight so I had more appreciation for the series as a whole. We were still floored away by Morrowind and what we could do.
We were absolutely ready and hyped for 11/11/11. Man that was a night we couldn’t wait for.
Yes! That is a true masterpiece that at the time set a new standard.
Everything about Metroid Prime. Incredible soundtrack, gorgeous scenery, interesting wildlife, challenging bosses/puzzles, and so so so much lore. It's still probably my all time favorite game. Can't wait for Prime 4 to come out!
Getting into Hyrule field for the first time in Ocarina of Time after being stuck in the forest for months or years. I got promptly destroyed by a pineapple.
I don't remember much from my childhood, but that stuck with me.
The first thing that jumped to my mind was Half Life 2. The facial expressions on the characters, and the physics of objects in the game world.
Playing the Mario 64 Demo at Walmart.
My brain had a hard time trying to navigate in 3D.
That game was so futuristic. It was nuts.
Back then, the camera didn't feel as shitty as it does today. It was all so fresh and new.
Playing Mario Kart DS with people I did not know.
The DS was my entry to the beautiful world of online gaming (it was free, can you believe it?).
And now I see this world kinda meh, perhaps I play (or not) the wrong games, but nothing can beat a perfect 1 player game.
Funny you say that. Mario Kart DS was peak offline social gaming for me. Back when it came out, lots of kids at my high school carried their DS on them and lunch was nothing but Mario Kart. At least it was among marching band nerds. And if someone happened to have a DS but not Mario Kart, we'd just do Download Play so they can at least join us in a limited capacity.
Ahh... I also wanted to live that... But I was the only dude that had a DS in my classroom... Heck, I dare to say all classrooms of my age lol.
The moment when you see the first colossus in Shadow of the Colossus. You've watched a contemplative intro movie that sets the stage, been faced with a desolate land that you're seemingly completely alone in, and charged headlong with only the light shining off your sword to guide you. You've seen nothing but you and your horse moving in this place in the half hour or so you've been playing so far. You've done just enough platforming to know that you're a very normal human with no magical abilities, and if you've swung your sword at all you've seen that you have no real skill with it. You just know that you've got to kill these unseen colossi to hold up your end of the deal with the voice in the sky. And then a building shaped like a gorilla walks past you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ckn0mdFyEU
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler Also the dawning realization that you're doing something horrible by killing the colossi :::
::: spoiler spoiler I'm not sure you are doing something horrible. Destroying somrthing majestic and, in several cases, benign, certainly. But you're doing it with the express consent of the greater consciousness that makes up those things. Like you're destroying a prison with particularly beautiful art on all the walls to let the prisoner out. Dormin actually holds up their end of the bargain the whole way through, and we don't know for sure if they did anything bad to make the priest's society bind them. Hell all we know about the priest's society is that it does human sacrifice, if anything I'm leaning pro-Dormin here. There was clearly once a thriving society in the Forbidden Lands and the priest's society broke a seemingly honest god into a bunch of monsters and shut the door on the place. :::
Playing side scrollers my whole life and seeing Mario64 at a Walmart. Being able to play in actual 3D and thinking at no way they can surpass this.
Born in 1980. Seeing the original Mortal Kombat arcade for the first time at a smoke-filled bowling alley that when I was in 7th grade was pretty awe inspiring.
Aside from that playing Wolfenstein 3d for the first time was really trippy.
Yeah, I very nearly added seeing the Mortal Kombat arcade to my original post but decided maybe I was writing too much!
Loading into World of War craft for the first time back in 2005 is probably the biggest.
Seeing all the people running around and doing their thing was incredible. It made me super excited to go explore the world.
Final boss fight of Portal 2 - one of my favorite and most satisfying gaming moments.
I still remember the headache from trying out the Nintendo Virtual boy at Toys R Us for just a few minutes.
Sonic the Hedgehog's impossibly sparkly invincibility, with the show-off music that sped up to show off that there wasn't any lag at all from the particle effect graphic. Really everything about Sonic when he first arrived. That's the best 16 bits ever looked and sounded... Except...
Star Fox. See the other post about Star Fox 64. Star Fox (original) felt the same. Nothing before it looked or played that way. (No offense to Stellar 7's many previous attempts.)
Actually making it to level -1 in SMB after finding out how to do it from the TV show Video Game Power. I needed my NES Advantage to do it reliably, but it blew my mind to learn it was legit.
Oh boy I have a few:
PC
Another Lifeless Planet (and me with no beer) was fantastic for a text adventure.
Testdrive pushed graphics hard
Wolfenstein 3D was incredible at the time being surpassed by Doom then Quake.
Day of the Tentacle for its high quality cartoon animation opening sequence.
Unreal on a Voodoo graphics card was something else.
HL2 of course with its physics (ragdoll) engine and jump in polygons.
Doom 3 for its advance in polygon count again.
NES
Super Mario 3 was a leap believe it or not. Blew people away back then.
Battletoads had huge sprites which wasn’t a NES thing until they did it.
SNES
Fzero and Mode-7 graphics
Donkey Kong Country, its CG was nuts at the time
FFVI’s snowfield theatrics
Starfox
Sega
Earthworm Jim had a great art style and pushed edgy games
Another World/Out of this World for that opening and style was amazing and still holds up!
N64
Super Mario 64 Japanese demo at Babbages in a mall before the US demos came out. That was mind blowingly smooth.
Waverace 64 for its water effects.
Ocarina of Time for its cinematic 3D story telling and fun gameplay.
Neogeo
Metal Slug was incredible in the arcade for all the sprites moving on screen and action. So much fun still to this day.
PlayStation
Resident Evil was incredible for the atmosphere.
Tomb Raider for more detailed 3D environments.
Warhawk also stood out for its great use of the analog dual joysticks.
FFVII for its cinematic story telling and FMVs.
Wipeout for its fast paced racing and great OST.
Grand Turismo for its photo realism simulation and physics.
Dreamcast
Seeing the demo of Sonic Adventure blew my mind since it was so fast and colorful. The whale jumping after Sonic as you raced away was burned into my brain.
Gamecube
Wind Waker, still love that art style and loved the exploration that was enabled by sailing the sea. Didn’t feel that again till BoTW.
Wii
Super Mario Galaxy for its outstanding OST and gameplay.
Playstation 2
Grand Turismo 3
Little Big Planet had incredible art direction and unique play style
Wii U/Switch
Breath of the Wild. What an intro to a new world! They absolutely pushed the hardware to the limits on the Wii U.
For me it was the jump to 3D in the 32 bit era. We already had some games in 3D prior to that, but with the arrival of Playstation and Saturn the landscape changed forever.
For me it was the original Resident Evil on the Playstation.
It was the first time I saw live-action digitized full-motion video on a gaming system. I know there were a lot of FMV (Full Motion Video) games in that era on other systems, but I didn't own those other systems and I didn't know anybody who did. So, it was all new to me once I played a Playstation.
Resident Evil was also the first time a video game had ever given me a jump scare. Early in the game a zombie doberman bursts through a window unexpectedly and I was hooked! I loved introducing my friends to the game, specifically so I could see their reaction when the dog shows up. So much fun.
Honestly seeing and hearing Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo was kind of wow, too. The graphics boost compared to the 8-bit systems I was used to was incredible. And the sound quality compared to the other 16-bit systems I'd played (Genesis and TG-16) was a leap above. The experience probably pales in comparison to modern games, but back then there was wow factor to it.
To young me, Street Fighter 2 Turbo was pretty wow as well. It was "literally" the same as the arcade version to child me. I could not believe the home version was so close to the real thing, because prior generations of game systems like the NES couldn't come close to that level of performance.
Yeah, playing Resident Evil for the first time was something incredibly atmospheric and special. I rented it from Blockbuster and knew straight away I had to buy it.
Before it released my friend and I used to speed-run the Resident Evil 2 demo which let you play as far as you could get into the full game, but with an 8 minute time limit.
I’ll never be able to get over the opening cinematic to the first Kingdom Hearts. Having played mostly Game Boy Color prior to that, I had no idea that graphics could look that good.
Final Fantasy X blew my mind in pretty much every way possible. Never had I seen such amazing graphics, heard such great video game music, been immersed in such a gripping story in a game.
Honestly I think I may have been chasing that high ever since.
3D graphics on a mobile device (Gameboy Advance)
I don't think I even enjoyed many of the games I played on GBA, just that I was obsessed with seeing how far the graphics could be pushed.
007 Nightfire Lego Drome Racers Medal of Honor
To name a few
Storming the beach for the first time in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault back in 2002.
Even though the graphics haven't aged well (of course), the sound design, the vibration of the controller, the beats in the pacing as you are tossed around in the boat and then thrown overboard. It was all so well done. It was also the first time (that I could recall) where you began the game and had a moment to just "look around" while the boat was heading to the shore but before you had the ability to move.
You look behind you and you see other soldiers, some puking. Someone yells, and you look up as a fighter/bomber screams over you. The controller rumbles as it drops it's load on the landing craft next to yours, tossing you around. The game took a few moments to let you immerse yourself in the situation before the action started, which I think was an amazing choice.
Anyway, that's my answer. And yes, I'm old.
Art direction in Comix Zone for Sega Genesis. After static cartoonish games it's unbeliveable you can pull it off on the same hardware. The animated intro, the hand painting enemies as you go and these transitions between scenes were very impressive.
The first time I saw gameplay footage of the original Doom, I thought it looked almost photorealistic. I must've been like 6 or 7 at the time.
I miss demo discs. My favorite one had I think spyro and some snowmobile game on it. Playstation 1...dominos disk?
I think it was Pizza Hut. I bet it was Reggie Fils-Aimé's idea.
Oh the irony!
Star Control 2 on the 3DO.
It was my first CD console (never got into PC gaming back then), so while I had games like Donkey Kong Country and Sonic & Knuckles, the 3DO could do things that the 16-bit consoles just couldn't.
The opening cutscene…voiced. The graphics blew my mind wide open, and the virtually fully-voiced adventure sucked me in for a long time.
People shit on this stuff like it's terrible garbage that no one would want to play, but I remember playing Zelda on my friend's CD-I and being blown away by a video game having fluid animation and voice work. Up till then, I had only experienced NES games, and a few super Nintendo ones. But that shit was amazing to me. The IR remote control, on the other hand, wasn't.
Then there's was also virtual boy. I remember trying it out at a Sears and thinking how cool it was.
Those qualities were really impressive back then. I remember being super impressed when games started having cut-scenes.
So many...
UT2004
Booting up Mario Kart DS and seeing 3D on a portable game system. For years it was 2d portables, 3D consoles. But now both had 3D. My mind would have exploded if I ever saw the steam deck or switch.
Playing Air Warrior II on Windows 95 in 1997. My dad and uncle lived in another state and we’d hop on AOL at a specified time and join a game. It was my first ever online game experience. I was 13. I hope kids today can still feel that total world-changing excitement that I did back then.
EverQuest, playing a 3d online fantasy game with some sim elements with other people, was something very new and felt like the future. Limiting fast travel to specific places and classes made the world feel huge. Stumbling across the weird stuff like giant chess boards or a whole underwater dungeon made it feel unique.
I come from the ZX 81, Spectrum, C64 and Amiga days….I made a lot of music on C64 and Amiga, but for gaming?
Borderlands 2 with 3 friends battling Vermivorous the Invincible, everyone on life support and hanging on to their teeth and after a long struggle defeating it. Once in a lifetime.
But of an odd one, but who remembers the dos installer for the original command & conquer?
First time I played Myst in 93, that was mind blowing. I didn’t see that level of graphics for a long time after that.
Also a friend let me play Half-life Alyx when it first released and it seemed to be a monumental shift in what gaming would become….. it wasn’t or hasn’t yet, but it blew my mind at the time.
Yeah, Myst was definitely something else when it came out
In the original release of Myst you weren't necessarily prevented from stumbling upon things you would find as you follow the progression. My parents got me the game and i ended up clicking on everything and found the last room where the whole story comes full circle....well before i hit up the individual book worlds.
Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64. The running animation was mind blowing for the time
Mario 3 unveiled in The Wizard.
Beating the first Baldur's Gate after numerous (hundreds?) attempts over the years when I was 19-ish (ca. 2009). I recall actually tearing up quite heavily 😂. Even after all these years, still my absolute favourite game for replay (when I get the chance!).
I remember being in like a GameStop or whatever the store was prior to that in my area. The tvs in the store were playing a teaser for the new Zelda game that was going to be coming out. I think this might have been like very early concept of windwaker before they went with the cartoon cell shaded style. I remember there was a sword fight between I think Link and Ganon. I remember thinking that games had peaked at that point. Of course we didn't end up getting exactly that, but the memory remains.
Biggest for me would be going online with the Dreamcast. At home I was online with the DC before we had a PC so used it quite a lot.
I probably spent to much time on Dreamarena chat rooms and playing PSO with randoms.
Playing Call of Duty World at War for the first time, if that counts as retro. I had always played co-op games with my brother, and when he was gone for a weekend, I decided to try and play for myself. Spent countless hours replaying missions until I finally beat the campaign. And if I remember correctly, it drops you straight into zombies with no warning. I remember it being way past my bedtime, sitting alone in the dark. I was absolutely terrified because I was genuinely shocked by the premise and maybe too young for something so scary. Didn't sleep at all that night.
Pitfall on Atari 2600
Becaise I'm old, I guess. Pacman, too, but pitfall seemed more advanced.
I was always more of a retro gamer even back in the day. 80s and 90s playing MUDs or Atari and getting an SNES late to the game. My computers were always hand me downs from my parents so i never really got into the best games when i was a kid.
But when i got that issue of PC Gamer with the demo of what Halo was going to be like, with the dinosaurs and cut scenes built into the engagement with your targets...wow i wanted to play that.
My cousin rented Megaman 2 and I spent at least an hour in awe of the fact that he could get hit more than twice because he had an energy bar. Then he switched weapons and threw a saw blade and I had to go sit down and think about it for a while.