What's your favorite personal gaming memory?

There's dozens of "wow!" moments for me, but one of my all time favourite memories was about 25 or so years ago huddled around a 21" CRT in my best friend's living room playing Goldeneye 007 with his two brothers.

We were playing rockets only (honour system) with max health on Facility, ensuring you basically had to get a direct hit to kill each other. I forget the win condition - but it was tense in these moments. There was lots of yelling and shrieking, frantic jumping, cursing when parents weren't within earshot, all around hilarity for early adolescence boys. Since we all suspected each other of screen cheating, we aimed our cameras up at the ceiling or down at the floor and navigated mostly blindly. Suddenly all four of us turned a corner at the same time (well three technically, one was just down the hall) and all screamed as we launched multiple rockets into each other's faces and/or feet. The orange pixelated glow of explosions filled each player square on the CRT and... stayed there with a horrid crunching coming out of the tinny TV speakers.

That was the day we learned the N64 can crash. After we calmed down from that intense screamfest, we went outside and threw rocks at trees or something. Core memory right there.

Stepping out of the crashed evac pod onto Halo for the first time. Something about that vista -- not just the Halo ring arcing into the sky, but the incredibly sparkly and shimmery quality of the water -- was so visually striking and unlike any of the older games I had played to that point, even on a mediocre CRT monitor.

After I graduated from college, I was thrust into a down job market. I moved back in with my parents as I searched. I would spend my days scouring job boards and managing applications (and the odd interview when it would pop up). At night I was working a retail job at minimum wage. It was a pretty stressful and uncertain time.

Meanwhile, my little brother was going through a pretty tough pre-med program. It was a lot of studying/learning/tests and the campus was a couple hours away from the comfort of our parents' house where he had spent all of his high school years. He would study hard during the week, and then make the trek to our parents' house for weekends and any other breaks that would come up.

We bonded a lot during this time of uncertainty. Lots of anime binge watching and game playing. By far the most memorable, though, was our play through of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I had a fully decked out GameCube with all of the accessories, so we would connect my GBA via link cable so that my brother could be player 2. Player 2 in this case amounted to him taking control of the Tingle character, which was pretty hilarious in and of itself. But it actually had some interesting utility that made some of the sea combat and treasure finding easier and more fun. We would play in the evenings, and it was a great way to relax and explore the seas of a sunken Hyrule.

Anyway, we beat the game together, and I eventually found a great job that carried me well into my adult life. I moved to my own place, and started my own family. My brother finished his program, became a doctor, and established himself in a different part of the country. We keep in touch, but have never again been as close as we were during that strange time in our lives. I've since finished Wind Waker several more times. Most recently I played it with my kids and had a great time showing them the Zelda game that carried me through my young adult life. Every time I play though, I find myself in that strange nostalgic calm that I experienced years ago. ❤️

Man, I've got a lot I can think of. I've been writing a review of Melee for Backloggd, so I'm gonna post the first half of it because that game is my fucking moment generator for decades.

Some others I can think of:

I'm gonna cheat and name two from the PS2 era. I played video games as a kid but I'd never ventured much beyond the occasional N64 titles with friends. When I was a started university in 2006, I decided to treat myself to a console and bought a used PS2 with a handful of games off Craigslist

Final Fantasy X - Yuna dancing on the water
I had rented a copy of the original Final Fantasy on NES a few times (still havent beaten that one), so I figured I'd give it a shot. I had no idea what I was in for. The opening scene with Sin attacking Zanarkand was something but the scene that completely blew my mind is when Yuna is asked to send souls to the Farplane. This isn't gameplay, it's a cut scene but the animation and presentation level were so far beyond anything I had ever experienced in a vaideo game, it may as well have been from another dimension. The scene is beautifully animated with a classic theme by Nobuo Uematsu and, while it may sound crazy, I think it validated for me the idea of video games as an art form. "People die and Yuna dances" is one of the lines I immediately think of whenever that game comes up

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - Crazy Colonel
While I was playing FFX, I was also playing MGS2. I had watched my friend play MGS1 on PSX and didnt really get the story but the Psycho Mantis battle always stuck out. There are so many amazing part to this game but the Colonel and his crazy codecs is my pick for the most memorable. It's a meme now but how many of us shut off the console mid-game and lost progress? How many people tried to decipher the Colonels mostly meaningless jibberish? It took a game that felt mostly serious in tone and completely flipped it into that Kojima level of absurdity that was completely alien to me. All of Arsenal Gear is kinda crazy like that. The replacement radar screens, Fission Mailed....all of it blends into an unforgettable gaming experience that I wish I could play again for the first time

Both of these experiences made me realize how much gaming had changed from when I was a kid. Before all that, I might occasionally pick up a controller at a friends house. After ,I started buying my own systems, researching my own purchases and curating my own collection

One of my earliest memories, playing (rented) Powerblade on NES. I was probably 10. I yelled at the TV, "I'll get you, you bastards!" My mom calmly walked over to the TV, turned it off, and asked me where I had heard that word, and what I thought it meant. I had read it in a Star Trek novel, and I thought it just meant a bad person.

My favorite moment of any game though would be 30 years later, playing Control after Epic released to as a free giveaway. When you go into the ashtray maze and the death metal starts playing. Fortunately I was wearing headphones. It was such an immersive, surreal experience. I don't think I've ever felt quite like that, before or since. The whole game is amazing, but that scene is the pinnacle.

FFXI was my first MMORPG, and just plain experiencing the world is so memorable. First loading into the game and exploring the starting city of San d'Oria (with heavy overlap of Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream, as I got both the game and that CD for Christmas that year); first time exiting the city and killing mobs; getting a group together to make the impossible trek to Jeuno; taking an airship to Kazham; getting to Sky; so on and so forth. Every new area was just so special and came with it's own hardships to conquer.

There was also then having awesome accomplishments in the game; I joined the top NA guild of the server (and one of the top in the world) and eventually became the main tank as a Warrior - which was considering the worst class at the time, but then us OGs showed how it was actually one of the best because it could be a tank taking barely any damage (using Ninja as a sub) with comparable damage output to the DPSes (previously the meta focused on Paladin's being pure meat shields, which meant harder to keep alive, taking longer to the kill HNMs [more likely to wipe], and harder to keep hate). Was also a huge deal when I got all the rarest equipment in the game, though that was really the start of me falling out of love for the game - had nothing else to strive for, and in the end getting the rare stuff didn't really change anything.

The world was just so big and so cool, and just such an amazing place to escape too. And the fact you couldn't do anything by yourself, everything had to be done with a party, meant there was such a heavy social aspect to the game. I understand why the WoW model changed things, but I do think there was a lot benefits to the old MMORPG style of needing other people to do even simple things. Though what the WoW model DEFINITELY got right was instances, holy shit having to wait around in a 6 hour window waiting for a mob to spawn was so dumb in retrospect. But then again, going back to the social aspect, it's hard to call it a waste of time...it was hanging out with friends for hours on end.

I can't ever play a MMORPG again - I only found it fun as an escape, and now can't help but feel it's wasted time. But it was still special. Not just gaming wise, life wise. Definitely a reason MMORPGs lead to so many of people favorite memories of gaming lol

I've spoken before about playing Pokémon Moon and how it became my most personal journey in a game thanks to Mulaku, my Muk. I'm a lifelong Pokémon fan and been playing since Gen 2 (and Gen 1, because I did get those games after Gold/Silver), but Pokémon Moon remains the most personal experience—the one time I felt like it was my journey, not some character I was playing—because the developers decided to make Grimer happy about getting any single touch in Pokémon Refresh.

...But since I've told that story before, I'll tell about another fun memories: basically, the entirety of my time playing Mitadake/Pyrce/Misuterii High on BYOND.

Mitadake High is an anime-inspired multiplayer game that looks like an RPG Maker game where up to 16 players are trapped in a school, with one of them being a killer. Your goal is to either survive for twelve in-game hours (with hosts setting hours to usually be 5 or 8 minutes), or to kill everyone if you're the killer. And of course, LOTS of role-playing. It had a normal mode, a Death Note mode, and a "Nanaya" mode based off the Tsukihime visual novel series (which... typically just served as a free-for-all).

Pyrce High and Misuterii High were spiritual successors that expanded on it, with the admins/devs adding more modes and character sprites. And man, was it fun. I wrote up a bunch of guides for the new modes as they were implemented, and remember our excitement the first time players successfully killed a witch in the mode based off Umineko. We had a lot of good times. (I still laugh remembering the line "Drugs lead to cannibalism" after one particular RP.)

Probably my favorite memory of those games came when we were testing out Zombie mode, which was fairly buggy. I think that, at least at the start, the first zombie would be an AI-driven one that would constantly walk towards players and bite them to infect them. Simple but highly effective since ranged attacks weren't really a thing. The very first attempt had a hilarious bug where the initial zombie was just automatically spamming empty text, so we had to quickly end the round since "Zombie says ' '" popped up in bold every three seconds.

In one of the next rounds, I roleplayed a girl who was very early in her pregnancy just to add some drama. So after a point I and the other few survivors (all male) holed up in a classroom, and had been blocking the door with desks when a zombie opened the door and stepped inside with another zombie directly behind it. The desks and door only let it get inside on one tile, so the guys cautiously attacked the zombie from below with hit-and-run tactics while I hung back as the Vulnerable Pregnant Girl who Must Be Protected.

And at this point, for whatever reason the zombie stopped responding. Best we figured, the player must have disconnected, but disconnecting doesn't kill you. So the zombie just stayed there. With another non-responsive zombie directly behind it. Blocking the only entrance.

The position of the zombie and the open door meant we could only interact with them from below or in front of them. While there's a push command that I think works on players, the door and the second zombie blocked off the two directions we could have shoved them. You can also forcibly move players by killing or knocking them out and dragging their bodies, but for whatever reason, the attacks weren't doing either. And the zombie behind them must have been the AI one, because it was not moving or doing anything.

As the guys cycled through attacking the zombie with no response, we quickly realized that the player was offline. The positioning of the two non-responsive zombies created a weird softlock, as even other zombie players couldn't do anything thanks to the AI zombie standing in the door and blocking the other zombie. And sure, the game's all about roleplaying, but there's not much fun in just being stuck in a single room.

We all talked in the meta-chat about the admins possibly force-ending the round while continuing to attack, hoping the player would either come back online or we'd damage them enough to drag their body. The game has stamina/energy so they'd basically take turns attacking the zombie while waiting for the energy to refill.

As the guys cycled through rounds of futile attacks, I was getting a bit bored just standing around, but the Vulnerable Pregnant Girl wouldn't want to risk her and her baby's safety needlessly. And then I got a brilliant stroke of inspiration on how to join in while staying in-character.

"Wait a minute... THAT ZOMBIE LOOKS LIKE THE ASSHOLE THAT GOT ME PREGNANT!"

If we had voice chat, I'm sure the others would have been howling as I charged forward to take my turn attacking the zombie, ranting about him being a good-for-nothing deadbeat who left me behind and had the nerve to then get zombified. I know I was laughing pretty hard, and there were plenty of people laughing over text in the meta chat and cheering me on.

In the end an admin shut down the round because it was deadlocked, but it still stands out as one of the most fun rounds I remember. Makes me sad that the heyday has long passed and the game will likely never achieve that same sort of activity again.

I had a friend whose family moved out of state during his senior year of high school but didn't want to move him away from all of his friends that last year so they left him living in their old house with the plan to sell it after he graduated.

Another friend and I over the previous year had got our whole group to move to PC gaming, and we started having regular LAN parties at his house on weekends. After the first couple of LANs we started leaving the tables we brought over there and only taking them out when one of our families needed them for something. My Dad would do some computer repair work on the side and had plenty of extra stuff, so we had a small minecraft server running on a desktop in the corner and extra peripherals and cables in case anyone forgot something. Some of my friends who weren't involved in extracurriculars would sometimes stay at his house on weekdays as well, so the LAN felt like it was never really ending.

So many amazing memories:

• Staying up late most nights gaming until the morning, a lot of the time bundled up in blankets as the heater in his house had issues during the winter and would cut out randomly
• Playing League of Legends together, with 5 v 5 matches when we had enough people
• Weekend long Civ games, with at least one guy always cheesing Mongolia
• Counter Strike lobbies and playing other random FPS games together
• Having one person play a horror game on the TV while we had all the lights turned off in the house
• Someone bringing over their Xbox 360 and playing through split screen Halo co-op
• Nights when we'd have ~6-10 guys doing homework and playing random games while chatting
• Late night pizza/burrito/snack runs

Besides one guy leaving the group for reasons, we've all remained in contact and I still hop on their Discord occasionally to chat as my morning is their post work hangout time. We have done a few LANs post graudation from high school. Some during college, others post graduation from college. We had a final one before my oldest was born and I moved abroad as a pre "responsibilities"/send off. When I next come to the US we're going to try and get everyone together, even the guys who have moved out of state.

One in the last 10 years is the feeling of awe is seeing my first walking mausoleum in Elden Ring. Leading up to it I could hear the foreboding bell chime and was thinking, "What the hell is this going to be?" I stood there for a while just taking it in. That game in general is the first one since the original Legend of Zelda that has given me such a feeling.

I don't really have just one game that stands out in memory but I do attribute a lot of my happy gaming memories to peak 2000s Nintendo with the DS and Wii. I was fortunate enough that my parents bought both and that I was able to share the gaming with my siblings. So many great games like the Gen 4 Pokemon games on the DS, New Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart DS/Wii, Super Mario Galaxy, Wii Sports/Resort.

Even today I very much find myself as a Nintendo adult, basically playing the sequels of the games I played as a kid. There's just something about how Nintendo designs their games for casual couch potatoes like myself that keep me drawn to them. I've dabbled with the Playstation 4/5 and also have some fond memories of the Xbox and Xbox 360, but Nintendo's consoles and games just stick out more in my memory.

Having gamed from a young age, I have generated quite a few of these. I think it's more prudent to set these into categories of what was most impactful.

Game Completion goes to Nier Automata. There are many games that I've beaten and enjoyed, but very few give me goosebumps thinking about the ending even years later. With this game, IYKYK Runner up: Persona 3, I think I have a "type" for a game story

Competitive Glory has plenty of fun hacking accusations and leader board triumphs, but my favorite by far is from FFXIV. They released a minigame called Lords of Verminion that used the little minion characters that follow your player character as game pieces in an RTS arena. The game itself was pretty solid but I was an RTS/MOBA vet coming into an environment where people were nowhere near as experienced. I was a big fish in a small pond. What makes "beating up on noobs" memorable? It wasn't the wins. I was just playing to have fun. It was the fact that I could see in public chat when I was in the room and people were wanting to play for achievements or just not get their face kicked in, they would shout "Oh no, Nono is here!" and then "Oh, he's in a match! Queue now so you don't get him". It was purely memorable for having literally everyone else organize around not having to play you. Runner up: Making day 2 on my first Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix. Quickly washed out, never got that far again.... also getting banned from using Jigglypuff in Smash Bros Melee in college

Finally, to keep this relatively short, I can't go without meeting my wife in FFXIV, that's my favorite memory :)

• Playing multiplayer Doom, in like 1996, at home. We had a home computer, and my dad had a laptop (!) from his job. Both computers were connected with a coaxial cable running through the house, from the living room to the backyard. That is one happy memory.
• Getting up early and walking to the closest toys store to buy the original Pokémon Silver on release day. Said store did not have it yet, so walking to an even further store (and buying it, yay!).
• Split-screen matches of Perfect Dark, throwing proximity mines directly on other players or sniping them through the level with the FarSight.
• Secretly buying an N64 controller and hiding it in my room, because our parents took the other controllers with them during weekdays.
• Discovering World of Warcraft, stepping inside Brill tavern, and hearing this music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5rZEpb3nwY
• Still in WoW, participating in a hours-long open PvP battle of Southshore vs. Tarren Mill. I think all the server joined that battle. I sucked, I was low level, I was getting killed non-stop, but it was absolutely awesome and the pinnacle of what were Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs. A very prominent French site (judgehype) even published an article of this battle at the time, and we could see my character's body in one of the screenshots.
• Playing Breath of the Wild while my newborn was sleeping on my chest.
• That "last run" in The Outer Wilds, once everything clicks, and you know exactly where to go and what to do. The music also played a huge part.

2 events come mind there:

1. Nier Automata

I've been playing games for a long time then, but the first time getting to the amusement park just blew my mind like never before. Coming out of the sewer to be faced with this grandious spectacle, paired with the wonderful music...
I was so enraptured with it that I went right into massacering every enemy there was. I've only noticed their unwillingness to fight me on the last few stragglers, where it dawned on me what a monster I was. Killing them just because I was used to others of their kind being hostile... Truly my most treasured and impactful experience in a game!

2. Control

You might have guessed it: the ashtray maze. Everything in there is perfectly aligned: the enemy spawns, the platforming and most of all the music. Just a perfected last stand to finish the game. The song is still in my main playlist.

I'm really enjoying everyone's memories and is so great to group of people that grew up gaming through the 90s and 2000's all in one place, yey tildes. For myself, I was completely hooked on warcraft 2 over kali (program that allowed IPX lan only games to be played over TCP/IP). It was the Internet AND internet gaming arriving all at once to a 14 year old me and I was so sucked into another world. t is cool to know a few gaming terms were invented there like smurfing and 'rushing' from a grunt rush that was an all in strategy on medium resources and see them kicked around to this day.

I have some strong memories of great games from back then still to this day, but one acutal IRL match stood out. My school had gotten a computer lab and as we as kids made sure we were able to sneak on games and play them in free periods. Another kid had brought in warcraft 2 and started talking shit about how great him and his friend were. I was trying to be sort of humbling and say hey we should play, but he started shit talking me even harder. Now, at this point I'm 2 years into an online warcraft 2 gaming addiction where most of these people didn't even know what the internet was, let alone internet gaming. I'm sure some people remember how capitol b Bad people were at playing games in general back then, now a days there is some broad applicable gaming skill everywhere, but back then, oh boy. And that new skill vs hardened internet skill...

Finally needing to make a point I was like ok 2v1, he wanted GOW high and said 'oh you cant attack till we are at ogres' already making the fake rules. I said ok. Game start I walked center on GOW which had 4 gold mines, then proceeded to take over the whole map. Now, I had done plenty of 2/3 on 1's back in the day, used to go onto new platforms and dominate like the MS Zone or TEN. I actually have a screenshot still from a 3 on 1 with them being totally shocked as they all died one by one. But this, this was IRL. Behind me as I built I had all my friends and onlookers in pure shock while they witnessed competative gaming for the first in their lives. I was like 5x faster than them making dragons while I waited for the greenlight to attack from them. They were utterly demolished and humiliated and it was a really peak moment for me. I had spent so much time being ashamed of being a 'computer nerd' and gaming and was suddenly getting positive social feedback for doing something I loved.

I would have a lot to write about early MMOs but I think it is really covered well in the thread. It'll be hard to go back to that time when the concept of MMOs were so novel. The games were not strip mined of information before release, so there was mystery and rumor aplenty. Game design was non existant, for good and ill, people wanted to make worlds, not games. Pair that with the free time of youth, the internet still a novelty, the dream of a virtual world, it was un paralleled. I think it's hard to feel that again, despite the modern MMO being so much more well-designed with so much more content and gameplay that is MILES ahead of the crap EQ was putting out back then. But still, yeah its midnight and your corpse is stuck under monsters and your gear going to rot when that high level guy jogs by to save the day. Wonderful moments.

But the last gaming period to surprised me was in my 30s. I had pretty much assumed I was done doing the multiplayer online life thing. I was married, had a nice friend group and just had two young kids when this little indie game mount & blade I loved to death suddenly said they were going to make a multiplayer beta. Holy shit, over the moon, I need it yesterday. I finally got a beta key and bam, immediatly hooked again, like nothing else. I guess I had dreams of being a medieval warrior that I didn't know about, but makes sense given how much I grew up pc gaming and reading tons of fantasy novels. But it was awsome to crash into a feeling I thought long dead at this point.

What was different about this game too is it still had the small, server based communities (too small honestly), so I got to know a people just through playing. I never joined any of the community guilds or anything because I felt on average about 5 to 10 years older than most people and honesty I have some bad social anxiety and the age of voice made it much harder for me to take a random voice invite or even talk. In hindsight I think I liked abstractly communicating to people through gamelay rather than talking, then maybe text and then later voice. It's alimited vocabulary that is easy to engage in due to the gameplay driving it. I ended up getting incredibly into dualing one on one and got sucked further into the melee gameplay. It was hard on the NA servers to get a duel going as the game servers just had a deathmatch mode to support it, you had to get people collaborating to dual, and eventually enough randoms would join so the dualing rings always got broken up unless you could find a corner to hide in. But this gentlemen's agreement to play duals let me start to meet a buch more people on the regular and I got to talking to a few of them in chat.

One of them was so god damn good at the game and he was a very driven and serious in his approach. Up until this point I liked learning games mechanics and getting better at games but always took a 'it's a big joke' approach. I think as an adult I can admit that I was protecting my ego from loss by telling myself 'i wasn't really trying'. In any event, given how addicted I was to the game, and given how honestly amazing this guy was at the game (he was constantly votekicked from public servers for "cheating" because he was insane at the game, like score board him 120-2 , next guy like 30 and 15). We got to talking about a lot of stuff and got to know one another and ended up spending a lot of time dualing on a server I'd just set up on my machine. We ended up talking endlessly about the game, talking about styles, tricks, and whole bunch of other stuff. He'd have new tech all the time to try out on him, he wanted to get better so he would show me things and I'd learn it and try to weave it in to use against him so he could figure out how to beat it. He was a methodical terror.

On the side too I had gone off on the forums and decided to write a huge beginner guide to the game. This was an indie game and many of the mechanics were hidden with no way to learn. I wanted more people to see how amazing the game was and honestly I just was thinking about it all day so it was easy to info dump. That guide ended up being the default go to link for every new warband player that came through, and honestly almost everytime I logged in as Reapy I got a few people saying thanks and that it got them into the game and helped them early on. I think it racked up almost 300k views before it got folded in and they moved the forums over, which I guess is small potoatoes but I still am overwhelmed thinking of that number. I eventually made a youtube version of the video and that also grabbed about 110k views and I still get peole driving by every few months to leave a comment when they have some wrband nastalgia, which ends up taking me back too. It was an amazing feeling to just keep hearing that my writing hooked people the same way I was on the game. Some people over the years I played I would see them start as beginners and get harder and harder to dual. Then a weird moment where they start SEEing the game, and now all my weird shit I did would break their brains, and they were like nubs again. Then like 2 weeks later I can't touch them and start trying to borrow stuff they are doing to me in duals.

It doesn't much feel like there is space for guide writing. Nowhere to dump text, which I still like, and there are always youtubers and streamers that understand the game way better due to having so much time to lay with millions of views, it feels like I don't have much more to offer up anymore.

But this all resulted in me trying to be the best I could at the game. I learned so much about myself during this time because I wasn't taking 'no i'm not trying' as an excuse, I was asking myself why I wasn't trying or why I couldn't push on and be consitent, and no brain, don't quit. I learned where my limits are, I learned that I can only focus for very short bursts of time where I feel invicible, but those close down and are periods of almost not even being able to do the most basic of things. The person I dualed with pointed out a lot of insights into how I played and approached dualing. The amazing part is I have been able to apply these lessons to everything else I do in life and achieved a much greater undestanding of myself. I guess actually sitting down to do everything I could to be great at something is humbling and insightful all at the same time. I really owe my dualing partner a lot for showing me another way of gaming, pursueing growth and skills. I never liked scoreboards and swore off playing hard because I didn't want to be the scoreboard guy, but I learned that you can play hard and still not get mad about the outcome, just take everything as a new leson.

The two best memories for me both invovled playing with my dualing partner. We were doing our normal playing where he would beat me 3 to 1 on my good days and 5 to 1 on my bad days. Well, for some reason the dominos person on the phone made me incredibly angry when ordering dinner. I don't know what it was but I felt like I could life and throw a car kinda mad. I got right back into the duals and I was like another animal, so agressive, everything he did was too slow, my character, the game, slow motion. I beat the living hell out of him for like 5 minutes until I calmed down. He immediatly noticed like WTF was that, do more of that, hes like you were like a sith lord I could feel your hatred. It's amazing what adrenaline does, it was like activating god mode for a few minuts. Never got that back, and honstly probably glad.

But the strongest memory was a random pub match where I was playing with my dualing partner on the same team. Usually he would go to the other team so he could go up against me but not today. It was just myself and him when we were basically jumpped by like 10 other people from some bad pathing into the deathball for that round. I was honestly not very good at staying alive, I lose focus very easily and die to random things all the time. . But for some reason I was very fired up and we both just sprung into action and suddenly the game turned into a ballad of death. We had dualed for hours on end we just understood insticutally how we were going to move and attack and I was so locked into seeing the matrix.

I distinctly remeber feeling like knew exactly where his weapon weapon, my weapon, and everyone around me in range's was in space. Reading the blocking and attacking windows perfectly. Things like like facing down one enemy, blocking him, knowing that as soon as I block the guy my partner is on is free and spinning to hit him, but then like whoosh he has also done the same thing as me and is slamming into the guy I was fighting. It was a perfect dance of swapping opponens tandom strikes, like one person controlling 2 players just doing everything perfect. We decimated the huge mob of players immediatly, it was pure instinct. We both were like holy shit after it without even saying anything we both just sensed the pefect sync. That never realy happened again after that but god damn that was probalby 16 years ago now I can still freshly remember it.

Alright that was pretty epic dump, this is what you guys get for bringing out old school gaming memories ;)

Playing Doom Eternal for the first time blew my balls clean off.

If we are speaking about the gamenitself, then it is the ending sequence of Final Fantasy X. The closing of the story is... It is perfect, it is superbly executed. To this day I haven't experienced better story.

Phew, time to move on.

I remember when I first defeated Diablo. My mom helped me in one of tbe last levels where I had to step around the corner to get bombarded by blood wings (or what the name was). I needed my mom to administer drinking mana potion while I killed them. And Diablo was actually quite easy. I have never finished the game again.

I also remember meeting the tank for the first time in Jagged Alliance 2. I couldn't believe there are actual tanks in the game!

I also remember playing the Hidden & Dangerous 2 on hardest difficulty and lone wolf at once. The fourth mission where you bave to get to the enemy submarine... I had to replay it again and again and again (they shot me at the submarine many many times) - I simply knew where and when will each enemy show up and how to deal with them. While going very slow for the first time, I simply went through the whole map in five minutes when I finally finished this mission.

I ahve very fond memories of Earth 2140 multiplayer over serial cable. We enjoyed the game with my friend a lot back in the days and played coop multiplayer only to desync in very late stage in the game and then wiping each others base and then watching it still standing on the other PC. Tbis happened every single time and we had so much fun doing it.

I also remember how I played Baldur's Gate and got to the final battle. It was hard to get there. But it was even harder to admit to myself that I cannot win it with the party I had. I have never finished the game (yet). It's stranve to say, but Baldur's Gate 2 was much easier, including final battle, which was kinda joke, to be honest. Well there is around 15-20 years in between those two battles. I will return to BG1 and I will emerge victorious! One day...

There are too many, so I'm going to answer a bit tongue in cheek, but...

...beating Bubsy. As a child. Have you any idea how long that took? How much effort? The sweat? The tears? The pain? Get absolutely fucked, Bubsy! You lose, my brother and I win!

I think it has to be the flight into Anor Londo when playing Dark Souls for the first time. I'd played Demon's Souls before that of course, and that had some spectacle, but that Anor Londo flight will stay with me for ever.

I love watching first playthroughs of Dark Souls on YouTube still, just so I can vicariously experience it for the first time again.

Oh man, what an excellent question.

It's really tough for me to pick out just one. Among my earliest memories, is playing Mario World on NES with my dad. I couldn't have been older than 5. Years later, we played Goldeneye on N64 together.

Halo was such an impactful game for my late adolescent and early teenage years. It cemented my interest in space games, science fiction, and first person shooters. Then my friends and I would have sleepovers at a friend's house who had Ethernet drops and multiple TV's, we would do 4v4 over LAN, for hours on hours at a time. I think those "middle school" years may not hold many great memories for most, but those were definitely great memories for mine.

Most recently, I'd save the now dead game Evolve. It was an asymmetric 4v1 "monster hunter" game. The 4 were kitted up sci fi humans in first person POV's (Assault, Medic, Trapper (think tracking skills), Support (buffs and offsets)). The 1 was a giant monster with a third person POV who got a 30 second head start in the match. The monster would (typically) try and sneak around the map, hunting wildlife to "Evolve" and gain more armor/HP/abilities. No two matches were ever the same, it was such a dynamic game and my friends and I were hooked. Not only that, but when we partied up, we were good. We put many, many hours into that game, having a blast along the way.

The Evolve teaser, and launch trailer, for anyone who cares.

Idk if it's my favorite, but it's definitely one of my most memorable.

It took place in Planetside 2, many years ago. On Indar, one of the continents the game takes place on, there's a base in the very middle of the map: The Crown. It's located on a high-up plateau, and back then, was very much a natural fortress. It's been through at least few iterations over the years, so these days, it's a lot more attackable and less defensible than it used to be.

The faction who controlled it (there are three opposing factions) basically had control of the most defensible hex on the entire map. They controlled the airspace in much of the middle of the map because it was an air tower as well (could deploy air vehicles from it). And players could even "snipe" from the Crown with sniper rifles, anti-vehicle weaponry, and sometimes even tanks themselves, towards the surrounding bases and hexes (territorial units). Which were largely wide open spaces. There was no hiding from The Crown.

Anyway, like I said, back then, it was very difficult to take the Crown. There were only two or three approaches to the base. And they all sucked if you were in one of the factions trying to take it (and sometimes all three factions would be vying for control). It could be a serious meat grinder. These were often massive battles, too. A couple hundred players versus a couple hundred players versus another couple hundred players sometimes. Or more.

The battles there could rage for hours. Sometimes even days. And I mean actual, real time hours and days. Which is highly unusual in Planetside. Territories and bases can trade hands multiple times per day. But not The Crown. Because of how important it was. People would drop everything else to control or attempt to control it.

Hopefully you can see why it was called The Crown.

Anyway, one evening while I was playing, the faction I was in, the Vanu Sovereignty, had control of it. So I ended up fighting there. And it was getting attacked pretty hard. I don't remember which faction was attacking or if both of the others were. There was a lot of enemy air hitting the base. So a bunch of players donned Burster MAXs, which are just small mechsuits fitted with AA flak guns, and posted up on top of the landing pads of the air tower to deter and destroy enemy air.

However, MAXs can be a bit squishy when fighting air and ground vehicles. And they can run out of ammo pretty quick. So a group of us went in as the Engineer class to provide ammo and repairs to the Burster MAXs. Or as medics to revive dead MAXs and Engis. Us engineers and medics were mostly inside the safe are within the tower. If MAXs needed repairs, they came back inside, and we repped them and gave them ammo and they went back out. But sometimes they didn't come back to us for ammo and reps. Or a MAX would die on the pad. There were limited respawns with MAX suits, so it was better to revive them if possible. So we had to run out there among all missiles and bullets raining down upon us to service them. Kinda like that scene in Matrix Revolutions where the Zion's dock was being besieged. I think I was there for at least two hours. Which is a long-ass play session for Planetside.

Now Planetside also has an in-game day-night cycle. Which is cool, because you can get some really neat night battles. And I think a full in-game day lasts about two hours. So this battle started during in-game during the day, then went to dusk, then into evening and into the night.

After about two hours, the battle started to die down. And it seemed we would be emerging victorious. I stepped out onto the air pads, since the air had been "cleansed,"...and the sun was rising over Indar. People on in-game voice comms and text chat were cheering. We fought the enemy "all day" and "all night," and we had won. We had survived he onslaught. We maintained our hold on The Crown. It was such a cool sight to see. In the moment, I felt like I had been in some real life battle and could finally breathe.

The other thing I liked was that none of this was necessarily organized. Maybe some were, but not most. Some players realized we needed AA, so they went up there with AA. Others saw and joined. People like me realized they needed support, so we went up to support them. And we kept each other alive and stocked over the next two hours. As others left the battled, logged-off or just got tired, others came into replace them. Totally organic.

I stopped playing a couple years ago, after playing straight for over a decade. But that will always be the coolest fight I've been in Planetside 2.

16-player Halo 2/3 LAN parties - the confluence of hanging out with friends, a wonderful sandbox that can churn out unique scenarios, competition and teamwork. And pizza.

Introducing Duck Game to my sister's kids. Press B to quack.

Story moment: Bioshock's "Would you kindly?"

Challenging moment: Beating Celeste's 7C. I could say beating Farewell but I knew that there was still the moon berry to collect, and when I did that I felt more frustrated than euphoric. 7C sticks more to the core mechanics of the game, the backdrop is beautiful, and I just felt so locked in.

I feel like I would be remiss to not mention Magic: the Gathering, but it's harder for me to pick out a single memory. I'll go with the time my friends and I played our own format where we got to ban the winners' cards every week. One memorable game where a friend put together the Assault Swans combo and I was able to survive by plowing my own Centaur Healer.

Oh man, I'll have to think on this one (plus I'm on the way to work so I'll try and add more later). One that instantly comes to mind is the first time I beat Genichiro in Sekiro. At the time, he seemed so difficult but I kept going at it and the rush that I got after beating him was unlike anything else.

Between ages 5 and 11 I had a friend from elementary class which I would visit near-daily to just hangout and play video games with. The amount of games we've played and explored was wonderful, from Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit to Rollercoaster Tycoon and ATV Simulator on the C64, Skyroads and Fuzzy's World of Miniature Space Golf just to name a few.

Fond memories <3

I used to record game soundtracks off of my TV speaker then listen to them on recorded tapes when I was super young, so I'd say that reliving Chrono Trigger,Phantasy Star IV and Thunder Force soundtracks over and over was mine.

The other kids probably thought I was listening to the Beastie Boys -- jokes on them! I'm weeping internally to To Far Away Times!

Our latchkey group cleared Super Bubble Bobble and got the true ending by pooling our 15 minute chunks of game time over the course of a school year.

A recent one that really stuck was the wrap up of Tears of the Kingdom. A journey dozens of hours long, the musical score so artfully composed and delivered, even working in the UI for completing that quest that'd been in your log the entire game, to save Zelda. I felt elated as I finally did so. I'd planned on going back and doing more stuff after, but I just couldn't.

Downloading minecraft in the State Library of Queensland as a kid, slowly as hell on their wifi haha.
That, or getting my Playstation Vita in grade 7, coming home, finding it delivered, and loving it.

There were many games that left me feeling “wow” at certain points or after I finished them, too many to list honestly, but surprisingly, as a die-hard Nintendo fan, there is only one memory from a video that burned into my brain, and it’s not from a Nintendo game:

Spiritfarer.

I cried multiple times throughout the game, cried a lot just before it ended, and cried for the entire duration of the staff roll. It took me a while to calm down. Few games have brought me to tears, let alone make ball my eyes out. I got really invested in the characters.

How have they not released a Nintendo Switch 2 edition of this game yet!?!?!?

Battlezone '98 LAN party.

The game was a cold-war hovertank first-person RTS. It had a mechanic where if a player's tank was destroyed, they would eject and then "parachute" back to the ground.

The last match of the morning was a three-player map, evenly balanced. The two other players rushed me, wiped my fortifications and NPC units, and popped my tank. No fun at all.

They then proceeded to have an amazing toe-to-toe slugfest... ending with a 1v1 where the Soviet player narrowly defeated the American... and then suddenly died.

When they'd rushed my base, they killed everyone except me. I parachuted behind cover, and from my corner of the room, I shut up, moved across the map under cover while they duked it out, and set up with the antitank sniper weapon to wait for the endgame.

Martin, wherever you are, your "Oh my fuckin' God!" remains the best thing I've ever heard while gaming.

The first time I got to the Minecraft end credits was on a friend's server and we faught fought the ender dragon as a team. It was so high-adrenaline, and in the comedown from it having such a surreal "ending" to the game felt so impactful. It was (and this feels silly, but whatever) almost a spiritual event for me.

It seems that for many people, their MMORPG has a lot of very personal story. Here's my story in Guild Wars 2 over a decade ago.

I got into Guild Wars 2 because it was on sale for $10. It's a no brainer to buy it, but I didn't play it. At some point I thought I might as well try it to see if it works. What intended to be "fire the game up, walk around and quit that night" got me hooked for a few days. Then I tell myself "I'll 100% map completion and quit".

At that time the PvM end game contents of Guild Wars 2 base game are basically: grind daily dungeons for money or fractal of the mist (random dungeon slices with random effects, which I don't like). There are also some one time higher end content, like the Aetherblade Dungeon that are 2 hours long. Then I looked into the achievement and it seems that in the world boss category there are two hard bosses. Tequatl, and Triple Trouble. These bosses are map-wide event that spawns at a specific times only - for me it is 7.30am, 10.30am, 2.30pm, 6pm and 3am iirc.

Tequatl is easy in a mass, which happen at every spawn at most maps. You just need 2-3 people who know how to operate the turrets (click the head and press 2, basically. The rest like cleanse are helpful but optional), then the rest of the mob just keep DPSing.

Triple Trouble on the other hand is very complicated unlike any other content in the game at that time. You need to escort the 3 NPC separately to each corner of the map, and if any one of them died the boss will not spawn (it's not hard but you need 3 groups). Then the 3 bosses spawn at the same time, but is invuln. You'll need to do its mechanics (which are different for all 3 of them) before it is vulnerable for just under a minute, so you need 3 groups of people who can do the mechanics and has good DPS. To add to the difficulty., the boss can spawn two types of mobs infinitely until the event timer runs out. The first type are larvae which spit acid. If you're in meta zerker gear you'll drop immediately. The other type are abomination which can explode, and is tanky against direct damage. Keep in mind that most other content in the game you can use zerker gear to clear, these abominations you'll need to use damage over time (conditions).

Finally, if you kill one boss the other will despawn in a minute. So you need to get all of them low but not kill them, then do one final mechanics to kill them at the same time hoping that the others will not fuck up their mechanics. And that is just phase 1. The second phase the bosses will charge around the arena and you just need to pass the DPS check within time limit, but the charges can still one shot people in full zerker. Generally people just stack at a cliff face so that the boss cannot charge you.

Obviously this boss requires very good coordination. In the NA server there are only a few guilds that can do this content, even if it is otherwise a public, uninstanced world boss. And only one of them are doing public run, TTS. Since I was looking to get the achievement I start joining TTS runs, but they only run at 10.30am and 6pm, and only one map (iirc a map can fit about 200 people, divide that to three teams)

The strategy used by TTS is to have 3 commanders who communicate in TeamSpeak. One of the feature of TeamSpeak that Discord doesn't have is you can have multiple push-to-talk button that only speak to ranks. So if you're leading a group you're expected to be able to communicate in English (which is not my native language), explain the mechanics of the current head to the team, tell everyone what they should be doing and tell/listen to the other commanders when to go for a kill.

The second role is the reflector. The reflectors will stand inside the boss model and use projectile reflection skills when the boss is spawning larvae to prevent them from spawning at all. The abomination projectiles cannot be reflected. TTS use a team of 5, but you could have done it with 1 if you never miss. Keep in mind that you have about 0.6s window to press reflect when you see the animation, and in some classes you have one reflection so if you misread the animation, your reflect will be on cooldown when the real one comes. The boss also do some melee attacks that reflectors will dodge, so a caller on Teamspeak will call the animation "large spin, dodge.", although if you're good you don't need that.

The last role is the condition team, who pulls and use condition builds to deal with the abomination away from the main group. They use 5 people but there are 3 spawns so one should be experienced.

Once I got a few kills under my belt, I decided to make myself useful and join one of the team. Elementalist (my main class) only has one reflect, and I'm bad at reading animations so reflection is out of my game. I joined the condition team and later on I even stepped up to be commanders.

Now on days I'm not running the show, I wonder if people are doing this boss and using the LFG tool I found people publicly offering party to the map they're supposedly running the show. I joined some that seems organized and it was a guild I never know about called EVOS. They had good runs, but without Teamspeak and that TTS mindset of "if you're not in TTS you're not coming in this map" you get random people with random gear and they never passed the DPS check.

Still, it was a good practice, so I joined EVOS. They're basically anti-TTS. They don't have a public Teamspeak (a month or two later I learned that there is a Teamspeak, but it is just a hangout for officers and I hang there A LOT). EVOS does everything using map chat. You don't get reflect calls here. If you're commandeering, you type the guide out in local chat during downtime (of course you can just cut and paste). Coordination are done in map chat (the game show HP for all 3, so once the boss is low they say "amber decap" and the rest will continue the mechanics). Their idealogy is that the boss should be open and doable by anyone because you don't need external tools anymore.

EVOS were formed by a group of people who also try for low man world record of world bosses, but day-to-day operations were not done by them. I think I very rarely get to talk with them.

Now there was one of the founder I believe that told me there is a secret method to do this boss. He sent me a link on Guild Wars 2 official wiki from the user page of one of the guild's founder.

Remember that I said that Abominations are not reflectable? But they are blockable. Now you just rendered the role of condition team extinct.

To do this, however, is very hard. To block a projectile, you need to spawn in the path of the projectile and go invulnerable. This also means that there is no AoE like reflection, you need to know where the game will spawn the projectiles and stand exactly on that spot. Plus, Elementalist has two invulns, so in total you have one reflect for eggs, one invuln for the husks and one for backup (or for the long range acid fields). Note that the invulns last exactly the same as the boss' cast, so you need to be very precise.

I realize, this is the EVOS dream! But this is asking a lot. So I started practicing all day all night. I tricked people to spawn the 7.30am one so that I can practice blocking on the real one. I camp at one of the environmental random for hours just to test blocking one spit. Some people told me that it is not an intended mechanics of the boss (why does the projectile spawn on the floor when the boss is meters high) and could get me banned. TTS also tried to censor me from even hinting about the possibility (Even as an EVOS officer I still take on event roles at TTS sometimes)

I can't remember the time it took me to perfect the blocking. Probably 2-3 months of hard work, considering that I started from not even able to dodge the normal spins at all. But I was proud - I'm probably the best active person in the game at solo perfect blocking (of course the owners are probably better than me, but they don't show up at PUG runs so that doesn't count).

I started blocking at EVOS runs, against the instructions of the more highly ranked people in the guild. I insist that this will achieve our goals, but they were worried that I'm leading people to the banhammer. This created a rift in the guild - what are we going to do with condi now that they're out of jobs. Some people say it's still optional to block, which I think was not a good idea - what if nobody show up in condi gear and there is no bank in the map? Eventually, I got burned out and quit a short time after the expansion (Hearts of Thorns) came out.

There are other reasons I quit. One of them was that it's not good for my real life as well. The 10.30am spawn is basically while I have class. I was leading a raid in class, several times at that. My grade did not suffer for it, some professor didn't care as well. I also block my own schedule at those times every day including weekends that I will have to be there on my PC/laptop. Like, if I need to go out for a dinner it needs to be after 7pm which is not good if you're going with other people.

Around the time I quit, my friend who I found in EVOS condi (and now an IRL close friend) also learned blocking. Two other people, one from condi and one from reflect also learned blocking. They started organizing the 7.30am runs that nobody has run before, this time without a guild (the EVOS dream) and with full blocking. I believe they too, like EVOS, eventually got a guild sponsor who bring members with the DPS and eventually it is a regular "guildless" run by the regular people. I heard that my friend and the reflect guy left EVOS and was making their own guilds but I didn't know what happened to them. Eventually they disagreed and my friend left that new guild too. One of the EVOS officer posted for clarification on the forum. A month later, it was officially confirmed that blocking is allowed. Last I heard TTS know about it but still discourage the use of it. I also heard from my friend that EU guilds regularly used it, perhaps even before I did it, but since you need another account to access EU servers we never learned about it.

Quoting my reply from an older, very similar thread:

I'd never been interested in FPS games because I thought they were all about walking backwards in narrow corridors shooting demons with shotguns, which never looked fun. When my brother's friend brought over Halo and we played through the first level together, it was immediately different for me with its larger environments and varied gameplay. I'd had some great moments after that, but walking outside at this point during the assault on the control room and seeing a full-pitched battle going on between the marines and the covenant without me was definitely a "Holy shit!" moment. It made the game feel so much bigger than just me.

Lots of people mentioning MMOs in this thread, and I've got a few MMO related memories to share:

Fond memories of being in my early teens and my mom going away to cottage for a long weekend in the summer while school was out, calling my friend over, he brought his dad's laptop and we set up in the living room for 3 days playing RuneScape. This of course would've been in the RS2 days, and I played the game on and off until Evolution of Combat pushed me away from the game. In recent years I've dabbled with OSRS but never been too committed.

Guild Wars 1 was kind of my first time being an "endgamer" in an MMO or MMO-like game (there's some categorization debate for GW1 I don't want to get into) which held my first exposure to an early form of today's instance-based raiding, GW1's Elite Missions. Did em all, Fissure of Woe, Underworld, The Deep, Urgoz's Warren, Domain of Anguish, all the EotN dungeons including Slavers' Exile. Really fun stuff. I remember when the game was popular, huge mega guilds made up of like 10 population capped guilds all linked in an alliance with a shared chat that would be popping any hour of the day. I remember this was kinda before livestreaming, but there was stuff like Winamp Shoutcast radio stations dedicated to the game: I recall "Blade Radio" taking requests, holding events in the game, giving away in-game items and real life stuff like GPUs. Something about this game had a really strong sense of community. I ended up in GW1 which released at a similar time to WoW because I couldn't pay WoW's subscription in my youth but GW1 expansions were easy pickups with birthday/christmas money, and while it does sometimes suck to not be able to share in the overall gamer cultural phenomenon of having nostalgic vanilla WoW memories, because that's something you can connect with so many more people over, I don't regret being in the GW1 camp for even one second instead, and it makes finding fellow GW1ers that much more special.

In the case of Guild Wars 2, my relationship with this game since launch and even until today turned out very fraught, and my fondest memories of its earliest days aren't dungeons or world bosses but instead breaking out of bounds. Back then, the game didn't have mounts, so a lot of this stuff is unremarkable today with the gryphon and skyscale, but back then it used to be that if you could find a way out of bounds, you could also often find a way to clip downwards into, usually, a pool of water below the terrain. Then you could swim to your desired XY coordinates, and upon relogging your Z would be reset to something in-bounds at the same XY, so you could use this to get on top of very high structures and stuff that otherwise had no way to get there. Most memorable to me were getting on top of the glass dome over the garden in the center of Divinity's Reach and getting on top of structures on the old version of Lion's Arch.

Lastly, of course, I am very dedicated FFXIV player today, been around since Heavensward and over the last decade I've had many special memories, whether that's clearing my first Ultimate raid (I've done all 6 now and am prepping for the incoming release of the 7th soon, but clearing one for the first time is truly special), or the experiences with many groups over the course of many Savage raid tiers, or the MSQ's huge moments. One of the most completely captivating and hyped times in the game's recent history though was late in Shadowbringers, right before Endwalker came out, and then the month or so after, up until a couple weeks after Asphodelos Savage was out. The atmosphere in the community was electric, the hype nearly dangerous, but my god it was so much fun to be around at that time!