What's your best PC gaming memories?

What PC gaming memories stick out to you in the back of your mind that gives you that nice nostalgia feeling? here's my list.

• Getting into PC gaming back in 2005 from the game Medal of Honor Allied Assault and playing the MP and eventually joining a clan.
• Playing F.E.A.R. in the Winter of 2006 although I bought it on release day in 05 I never finished it for whatever reason. When I started a new game that Winter it instantly became my favorite FPS of all time and still is today.
• Playing Battlefield 2 with my old clan in the summer of 06 and 2007.
• Receiving my Oculus Rift in 2016 and having my mind blown.
• GTAV finally comes to PC in April of 2015.
• Playing Max Payne 2 on PC and seeing how it's miles better then the PS2 version.
• Discovering MAME and playing Mortal Kombat 2.

1. Playing the original Age of Empires with friends
2. First time playing the Battlefield 1942 wake island demo (blew my mind)
3. Company of Heroes 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 matches. I'm not a big 1v1 player, but playing this with other people is so much fun. It's a proper team game.
4. Mods. Just mods in general make PC 200% more fun.

• Playing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone at Christmas, first time I had a proper game on PC as a kid and completed it.
• Deliberately killing Sims in various different way with my sister.
• Playing Hitman Contracts, my first proper adult game as a child.
• Playing Rollercoaster Tycoon with my sister.
• Playing the Acclaim Batman game on PC, and not being able to get it to run in DOS, or work out the controls.
• Multiplayer Worms games with my mates.

The day skyrim was released.

The first weekend after playing skyrim, my mind was blown.

Sailing in witcher 3 with Fields of Skelling playing.

Playing Fallout 3: that music, the humor in the game, the immersion.

F.E.A.R single player and multi.: both were impressive

the witcher 3, the evil within, xcom 1 & 2,

Deus ex: the original - that story!!!

Serious sam the second encounter: good escapism

Tomb raider: the angel of darkness: I enjoyed it until I got stuck

Fallout new vegas: old world blues was probably the highlight of the whole game

Plenty of older games from the 90's that I enjoyed and bits and pieces from games that might not have been that great on the whole but had some fun moments.

Max Payne 1 and 2

C&C Generals

Half Life 2 (getting out of the train station - WOW)

Fallout 3 (entering Megaton - another WOW moment)

Playing Rally Championship 2000 with my dad

When I was younger, my friends and I would play anything and everything together. RPGs, FPS, RTS we played them all. Made the games a whole lot more fun than playing multiplayer by myself.

Likewise, with another forum I used to frequent, we had arranged a weekly Dawn of War night where a bunch of us would play Dawn of War with each other.

Staying up to 7 in the morning in a marathon game of Battlefield 2 in a LAN with friends.

Winning a local Unreal Tournament... tournament

Learning how to use worldbuilder and other similar mapping tools. I really enjoy making maps :)

The classic pinball game

I didnt start playing PC properly until some 2005-06. Few great memories on the platform. I was mainly PS guy before PC, im still a PS guy haha

• My cousin giving me my first Pentium PC after family moved to Australia so i could play F1 challenge 99-02
• Experiencing F.E.A.R. and its expansions. One of my all time fave single player fps, constantly on edge
• Experiencing beauty and frustration with first two Gothic games
• Driving to Romans apartment at the start of GTA IV. Just felt that grittiness and cold atmosphere straight away
• First car mod i ever installed into San Andreas, after game crashing first few times haha
• Getting out of the sewers in TeS Oblivion

I started PC gaming long before the first item on my list just for the record

• 2000 Sims - what in the world is this? this is awesome!
• 2002 Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights playing for hours multiple days and nights (NwN eventually lead me to programming)
• 2008 Log into the MMO Darkfall and oh my god this is exactly what I felt Morrowind MMO would be like.
• 2011(ish) Wurm..this game looks horrible, is really slow...but i cant stop playing it wow! crafting and building is amazing
• 2013 Kerbal Space Program - oh my god this is intense and exciting AND just happens to not be combat related and science related? totally changed my views on what is possible in video games.
• 2014 loosing my first fort in 7 Days to Die. First time I have ever lost play progress in a destruction and it motivated me more to get it right a second shot.
• 2015 I cant keep up with all the games coming out now that I want to play, why in the world cant AAA titles be this good at making games.
• 2017 I had a cold, was home for a week, freezing outside, played Elite Dangerous every day for a week until it felt like it was all real to me.
• 2018 I had a week off, beautiful cold weather, plenty of time, no 'to dos' and just played My Summer Car for 3 days straight.

1989: First time I played Amiga Falcon MP via modem 1v1 dogfight against a friend at the other side of town. Smooth gameplay too.

1992 First time I played Dune 2 (my first real RTS).

1993 Shareware Doom IPX LAN multiplayer

1993: A bunch of CD-based games (allowed voice-overs and text) such as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

1994 1942: Pacific Air War (first texture-mapped flight sim to me), Steel Panthers, DOTT

1997 Quake MP: Went from SVGA Quake at barely 20 fps to GLQuake at 40-50 fps. F-in A!

1997 Dungeon Keeper, Close Combat 2: A Bridge Too Far

1998 Quake 2, Jane's WW2 Fighters, European Air War, Falcon 4.0

1999 Dungeon Keeper 2, Homeworld

2000 Combat Flight Simulator 2

2003 Homeworld 2

2002 Battlefield 1942 MP and Desert Combat mod.

2005 Battlefield 2 MP.

Yeah, I know. I only play SP games nowadays. But, some of my very best memories were the MP aspect, esp when the concepts were new.

Boot discs

For me it was playing Crysis fully modded out. It was then that I knew PC gaming was for me.

After that it was modded Fallout 3, then modded STALKER, and then modded Skyrim. Each game blew me away in it's own right.

LAN parties.

I remember my first games as a kid. Tarzan and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Also, Escape from Monkey Island 4, which I couldn't progress because I barely understood English at the time.

My godmother got me Pirates of the Caribbean 2003, one of the first RPGs I ever played and still the best pirate game IMO.

And of course, TES IV: Oblivion and the iconic exit from the sewers.

When i played GTA for the first time

When I played mafia 2. Great game

oh man i have loads. in no particular order (and by no means complete)

seeing the intro to freespace and playing it on the PC. holy crap my tiny teenage mind was blown. the game made one hell of an impression.

getting a PC with a GPU (well a 3D accelerator i think it was technically): a 3dFX voodoo 3 (the higher end model i think it was). before that it was all software rendering and blocky. then playing the likes of motorhead, quake 2 and freespace with silky smooth 3D...wow. sometime i would start quake 2 in software mode then switch it over to use the GPU. the 3Dfx logo would appear when switching (kinda like a console boot screen) then BOOM....SMOOOOOTH!!!

getting a top of the line stupid PC. now unless you are really really really into your PC gaming i only recommend you do it once. but just once do get a stupid PC...stupendously powerful. makes a mockery of anything you can throw at it. and get the nice additions: good monitor, nice keyboard, great mouse and so on. treat yourself. at the time, for me, it was a core 2 quad qX 6700 with 2GB of ram (or was it 4? maybe 4) and an 8800GTX. nothing really gave it any trouble until crysis and even with crysis, at 1280X1024 it still ran it pretty well. i also got quite a good monitor (at the time 1280X1024 was pretty good but the monitor also was fast and had nice image quality for the time), a great mouse (that i still use today: the legendary logitech MX518).

bullet time in max payne for the first time. it was long in development. was hyped to hell. bullet time looked really cool. turns out it also was really cool. then the matrix mod for max payne. fun times :).

walking into unatco headquarters in deus ex. i dont know why but it put a big supid smile on my face. deus ex is my fav game of all time but first impressions are not great. i thought i bought a bit of a dud (in my defence it came in a shiny box). i was sneaking along in the hallway to the entrance to unatco thinking this was just level 2 in a FPS and there would be more bleh shooting. then i saw my reticule turn green on the guy at the enterance and he said hi........teeny teenage mind blown!

ah i could go on and on.

One of my first memory with PC gaming was when one of my closest friends who lived across the street from me let me borrow Warcraft III. Man...what a game. I was completely hooked and it is my favorite RTS game of all time. The campaign, the online play, and especially the custom games. I remember my Birthday was coming up in October so I was with my mom at Wal-Mart when I was a kid and she bought me the Warcraft Battle Chest. I remember at the time it was $39.99 and I would be on the toilet reading through hefty booklets that would come for the game and just completely engross my self with Warcraft III & The Frozen Throne. I was introduced to Dota as well and I completely lost it...lmao. I was addicted.

World of Warcraft.

That’s about it.

early 80s I had an atari 2600 then shortly discovered the commodore 64, blown away that you could actually write your own games which I did ...loved track and field. Later on around 2000 playing quake III team arena, MAX PAYNE, then UT 2004 then half life 2... I actually built a computer specifically for doom 3 which was coming out around the same time so half life 2 blew me away and loved it but hated doom 3.....My all time favorite moments is when I tried battlefield 2 demo in 2005, instantly hooked and to this day is my favorite game and still play it in single player mode. My favorite time in gaming history would be 1997- 2007 , I still have alot of those games installed ....alot of the franchises today have been milked dry for me, burned out. My fav modern game would be skyrim, hated it at first then forced myself to keep playing it and now think it's a masterpiece ( Im not really into role playing type games).

Oh man - too many to count. I've been on PC since it was born. I think highlights for me have included

X-Wing Star Wars + Tie Fighter

Diablo

The first time I fired up AoE

The first time I fired up AoE2

Warcraft2

Starcraft

Civ series

Original Colonization

Xcom

Morrowind

Planescape Torment

And Thief. Of so much Thief.

I also remember the experience of transitioning to our first discrete graphics accelerator. What a time to be alive and gaming, to see thise kinds if changes

• Exploring the island of Vvardenfell for the first time in Morrowind.
• Early LAN parties with friends
• Playing Team Fortress Classic on dial-up
• Playing Team Fortress Classic on DSL :)
• My first game of Civ on the computer in Middle School
• BF1942 and Desert Combat mod with friends
• Setting up Unreal Tournament '99 on the computers in the High School networking lab and getting the whole class in on it - including the teacher.
• Programming Tetris for the first time
• Half-Life exploding my brain and showing me what a game could be.
• Exploring the subways of FO3
• Building my first super awesome PC in the modern age of PC building (2007) and then playing BioShock on it.
• Playing Total Annihilation for the first time

Gotta be CS ! Played it for yrs

Playing FEAR Combat with only a mouse because my parents took it, I was still pwning the matches :D

I actually loved Sims Online back in the day when I was a kid.

A wedding with my girlfriend in Lineage Classic. We met each other on Skelth and got married in-game.

Same for me honestly MP gaming back then was so much better we got dedicated servers and better support from companies back then no MP game will ever top my Battlefield 2 memories such good times.

When I was a kid, there was the Reksio series. It's a pretty obscure series. Educational point and click adventures starring Reksio the Brave Dog and his animal friends who go on all kinds of crazy adventures, from travelling into space and more or less ripping off Star Wars to travelling to a magical world and surprisingly not ripping off Harry Potter to travelling through time. It was made in Poland and never translated into English, but I'm glad it was translated into Romanian. But the thing is, while it was translated, it wasn't very well adapted here and there. Characters would sometimes say complete nonsense that you can't even decypher with the help of the context and I still wonder what they were actually supposed to say.

Another obscure one, even more so than the previous one, is Magic World. This one was made in Romania and never released outside of it. To put it simply, it's another one of those educational games for kids, this time mixed with a bare-bones RPG system. It had generic fantasy elements as well as elements fron Romanian fairytales, mythology and folklore. The story is the generic "main character goes on a quest to save the land from the evil ruler". But I liked it anyway. It's really fun to play when you're bored, even if you're not a kid. What made me the most excited about this game as a kid was that it was supposed to have not one, but two sequels (and a board game based on the third one, but I didn't really care about it). Even the ending made the way for a sequel, with the villain giving the good old "you have defeated me now, but I will get my revenge" speech, followed by a message saying that we would find out what happens next in the sequel. So I waited and, sadly, no sequel ever came out. Turns out, the game wasn's very successful, so the company that developed it never spoke about it again.

And now for something a little better known: Guild Wars. I got it from a friend. This was around 2007, back when Internet access in Romania wasn't the norm. This friend of mine didn't have an Internet connection. He had initially bought the gane for himself, but didn't know it was online, so he gave it to me instead. This was my first MMORPG, the game that got me into MMORPGs in general and the game that showed me the concept of an MMO was even possible.

Been playing games since I was a wee nipper back in 1985 on my brother's Commodore 64. Then I transitioned to a games console, then a Commodore Amiga. My first experience of PC games was in late 1993 when my school friend showed me his 386 PC and Star Wars X-Wing. I was blown away! I mean the Amiga had some 3D games, but this PC seemed to handle all those 3D polygon graphics effortlessly compared to my lowly Amiga 500+.

Got my first PC in the summer of 1996, a Cyrix 586 100Mhz machine with 16 MB RAM and a huge - for the time - 1 GB hard drive. Good times indeed, but running games from DOS with a command prompt and then having to modify the 'Config.sys' and the 'Autoexe.bat' was a real pain in the posterior. Although I'm told it was all part of the fun back then!

Bought my first pc a gateway 450 in 99. The next day bought my first pc game called halflife. The opening scene when you are traveling into black masa in the rail cart was damn near a spiritual experience. I have been gaming ever since.

I played this for the first time back in late 2012 and it really left an impression on me. Fantastic FPS; in fact lately I've been putting it above HL2 (which is a bit of a hot take, I admit). I'm sure I will do a couple more playthroughs before I'm done with it.

Some of the best experiences I've had on PC have been mods. Deus Ex mods are probably my most memorable experience. If you ever get into this game (ensure you use the CD version as it's a tonne easier to mod) try out The Nameless Mod and 2027. Just super super quality single player mods, with unique assets and writing.

I read a review for 'Liberation' on the Amiga in this old Computer and Video Games magazine. There's footage of it on youtube. Did you ever play it? I've been meaning to try and get some emulator going in Windows but never got around to it.

As for myself...well there are too many to think of on the spot. One of my first memories on the PC is watching my siblings, particularly my brother, play while I sat behind him. Many a classic PC titles was played as I watched, fascinated. This was obviously a formative experience which fostered my fascination with PC games.

I think some of the best memories were the ones where the games just hooked me and I was stuck in it for hours upon hours without break. This doesn't really happen any more as I am grown up and have a more analytical and fussy view towards what I'm playing. I remember when I was younger sometimes I would be stuck in front of the CRT for so long I would get red cheeks and bloodshot eyes - a sign I had thoroughly enjoyed myself, I suppose. This happened to me with Morrowind in 2008 (I was 14). Just absolutely hooked for like 7-8 hours straight the first time I played it.

I have played a bit of competitive Quake, at an intermediate level. Some of those intense matches online, and some of them over LAN, were very exciting. The most fulfilling thing though was seeing myself improve gradually over the years that I played it regularly.

F.E.A.R. is right up there with Half Life 2 I actually like it more.

Circa 2004, IL2 online via Hyperlobby.

Was ground-pounding in the titular IL2, or at least was on my way to. There were 7 of us IL2s with a fighter escort of 5 I-16s. We took off, took on formation and headed out.

About 20 minutes in we are intercepted by some Messerschmitts. We broke formation and I pulled away to loop back around so I could gain some altitude, but it was too late...I hate a hater on my six and he was shooting me to pieces.

The thing about those IL2s...they can take some damage, especially from behind. That bastard shot me till I had NO control surfaces...no rudder, no aileron, no elevator...nothing. The stick and rudders did not move the plane at all.

Fortunately he apparently ran out of ammo, because he broke off and headed away from the fight. But there I was...leaking oil, flying level and nothing to do.

I throttled up and noticed my plane went nose-up and to the left. Throttling down, it went nose-down and to the right. With nothing left to do, I decided to play it out.

Slowly I worked the plane around to the proper heading. I steadied the throttle and let the plane settle to a level attitude. The surviving members of my flight caught up and passed me on their way home. I couldn't throttle up too much or the plane would take off for the stars. So, I sat and just let it crawl across the sky.

Finally catching site of the airfield, it was off to the left at 10 O'clock and about 15 miles out. I throttled up a bit to make the turn, and once I was relatively lined up with the runway, I set the throttle so the plane just below level and slowly losing altitude. At this point the engine was really grinding due to oil loss, and I knew I only had a minute and maybe a few more maneuvers on the throttle before it seized up entirely.

Flapless and carefully working the throttle, I brought the plane in close to the runway. I still had to nose down via low throttle to lose altitude, so right before I hit the ground I gave it full throttle to jerk the nose up. The nose went up, the engine seized and stalled, and all three wheels hit the ground simultaneously: no bounce, no skid.

The most perfect landing I had EVAR made.

I was literally shaking and sweating after that. Like seriously, I had to go shower. Mad respects to the men who actually lived it.

@worldofghouls: it is a common case for L2 weirdos... I remember how my guild farmed Zaken at 5 am. For 8 hours straight.

Unreal Tournament on the Facing Worlds level. People still play it online.

I've probably had the game almost 20 years, and I still play it myself sometimes.

UT is an amazing FPS. It is up there with Halo, Half-Life, Goldeneye 64, etc.

You know the game is good when you're still playing it basically 20 years later.

@qx0d: I'm still playing the single player. Just getting through a Godlike campaign right now. Occasionally play monsterhunt on NA servers too.

• When my brother brought home Warlords 2
• First time playing Age of empires at a friends house
• Discovering Baldurs Gate & Planescape Torment