Childhood was almost entirely shareware demo disks, so there are wildly obscure PC games from the mid-90s that have a stranglehold on my consciousness for some reason: weird stuff like a tank game with a midi version of the Blade Runner credits music as background, something like fifty different Moraffware titles (most notably Escapade), a waterslide racing game with (original) animal mascot characters, a snowmobile racing game, Bad Toyz 3D, Jumpin' Oids, STARS! (with the '!'), and so many more things that basically nobody else played. Almost like hunting for treasure when you dig one of these up that you'd forgotten a quarter of a century ago - I actually bought a couple of the disks I remembered having as a kid to see if I could run stuff on a virtual PC, which largely worked better than I remember from the real hardware. Go figure.
Plus there were all the demos/shareware eps for Real Games like Need for Speed, GTA (the original one), Driver, Nitemare 3D, Freespace/Descent, some point-n-clicks (Flight of the Amazon Queen and the Hugo series most notably), and dozens more. Among those, a lot of the same games that I play now: Doom, Mechwarrior, Duke Nukem, and some free fangames - chief among them SRB2. Then there was my collection of NES and Genesis games, though those came later. Actually ended up playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles on PC with the S3K Collection disk before the Genesis game - quite the surprise when I heard the "real" music tracks for the first time.
As for teen years, there's too many to list. Half-Life 1/2/eps and the Orange Box as a whole, Sim City 4, Spore, Alien vs. Predator 1/2, Unreal Tournament, and basically every emulator that I could get working on my PC at the time - at that point, I had a few N64 games I could run, but I almost exclusively played SNES since that was the big console I'd largely missed out on, since I lost mine in a fire, along with the two games I owned: the worst Frogger port ever and Super Godzilla.
I remembemred a memory of a particular childhood experience rather than a game.
We owned a computer with a good old CRT in the 90's. And the CRT's color control broke at some point. I was left with a eye-bleeding MAGENTA screen as the green component was broken.
I endured gaming in eye bleeding conditions for a few months of my precious childhood until my dad bought a replacement CRT (which was also supported an amazing 1024x768 pixels, boy that felt huge)
I particularly remember that I was discovering emulator games at that age, and I recall how beautiful harvest moon actually looked like without all the magenta.
Funnily enough, I had a very similar issue with mine, though it ended up being a problem with the VGA port on the motherboard, which wouldn't output a red signal - basically played through quite a few years with only blue and green coming through. Plus my sound didn't work. So when I finally got a new computer, it was like a revelation to me.
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Topic: Iconic games of your childhood/teenage years (Read 4773 times)