This one’s been going around a bit.
The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Twelve videogames you’ve played that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what games my friends choose.
- Tunnels of Doom
- We played this on our old TI-99/4A, the first computer I ever used. It supported four characters, and there were three of us brothers at the time—with our father, it was perfect. Then later there were four of us who could play (really, the baby sat and gurgled while we played for him…).
- Dark Castle
- Dad got us a copy of this game for our old Macintosh Plus and we played and played and played it, no doubt to his infinite chagrin. A few years back my brother Stephen spent Christmas vacation playing a reissue for modern Macs—it was very cool to hear the old noises again that we’d had imprinted on our brains nearly thirty years ago.
- Gato
- This was another black-and-white Mac game Dad got for us. You got to play a Second World War sub skipper in the Pacific, sinking Japs and trying not to get sunk by them—and not to sink your own ships. It was great fun!
- Cap’n Magneto
- This was an odd shareware game I could never win because of the nag screens and bugs. It taught me the virtues of free software and bugfixing.
- Moria
- This was the first inkling I had that games didn’t need flashy graphics; that a simple character-cell roguelike could be complex and tough. It began a quarter-century love/hate relationship with roguelikes: love because they’re fun; hate because I have never actually beaten one.
- Bolo
- This…this was a great game. Chris—my best friend in Virginia—and I would play this all day long. My brothers and I would play it. My cousins and I would play it. One could play it across the internet.
- It rocked.
- Crossfire
- Ah, Crossfire, my old nemesis. It’s the first game (and really last) which majorly hurt my grades. It was just too addictive, too fun. It was massively multiplayer before the term had even been invented. It was full-color. It ran on Sun workstations. It was wonderful.
- Doom
- This was the first first-person-shooter I ever saw, and it blew me away. I spent many happy hours playing it in the engineering lab at DU.
- Descent
- And then there was Descent, which knocked Doom into a cocked hat. Doom was flat 2D; Descent was in full, glorious 3D. Doom aimed on one axis; Descent in all three. It was a revelation.
- Command and Conquer
- This was one that we played and played my freshman year of college. I didn’t have a Windows box, so I didn’t play it all that much—but it was still definitely the social high point of that year.
- Marathon
- And then there was Marathon, proving that Macs could out-do Windows once again. They had Doom; we had Marathon. Doom was a mindless shoot-em-up; Marathon had a plot, even a story. It didn’t have the full 3D maps of Descent, but it had more depth than Doom. And the graphics and gameplay were better.
- Dragon Age: Origins
- This was fun because it was basically first-person interactive fiction. That is, while it still had the fighting actual of a normal FPS, it also had some plot—and that plot was affected by the character’s actions. Also, I got to spend time with a good friend playing it.
An honorable mention goes to Pac-Man, which may have been the first video game I was ever aware of, but which wasn’t really a life-changing video game.
