A long time ago, I wanted to play Rayman Origins with my old friend on the same pc. The only way we could make it work was to literally plug in a second keyboard and play with two keyboards on the same pc. There was barely room enough on my desk for it all to fit. It was as stupid and hilarious as it sounds but it did work.

Serious answer, the first time I felt the crisp strike of an NES controller bouncing off of my head after dunking on a buddy of mine during a game of Double Dribble.

Oh, the memories! :D

Top 3 games I fondly remember playing when I was younger are:

Twinsen's Odyssey (a.k.a. Little Big Adventure 2). Mostly I remember that sense of exploration when I go back and listen to the soundtrack, which is surprisingly more often than I ever expected. I really wish I could replay this in widescreen.

Video (skip the intro to see the gameplay): https://youtu.be/z6Ls3HKnBZM


Quake. It's one of the few games where I can enter that perfect state of flow. It's even better now playing it with a source port.

Video: https://youtu.be/-zPvs0Qz_NI


Lode Runner (DOS). I first played it on the Apple II, but the DOS version is the best. I've never found a game that had the same feel. N+ came close, but was too difficult to really be fun.

Video: https://youtu.be/hkeuplIny28

Also playing Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple //e. (Not Liebfraumilch! That's not going to help when the SS are on my tail!)

Earliest one would be playing Golden Axe with my cousins

Also,
- Half-life deathmatch at lan parties, specifically the Crossfire map
- Exploring Elwynn Forest for the first time in wow
- Discovering Warcraft 1 for the first time
- Finally being able to play Warcraft 2 for the first time after I got my Creative Sound Blaster 16
- Landing on Mun for the first time in Kerbal Space Program
- Killing Shredder with my last turtle, and only a few health bars left, in tmnt3 on the nes

I will take this thread as the 3 furthest gaming memories I can remember.

1)
First, I remember playing a 2D game with snake based gameplay. But you controlled a train and had to collect all things in the level without running into a wall or your wagons. The wagon (segment) would look differently based on what you picked up. This might be the first game I have ever played. The game was made by a Czech guy and was called simply "Vlak" (Train in english). And I have no idea how old I was but it was most likely before I was 6.

2)
Probably playing Duke Nukem 3D demo (first episode) when on visits to my uncle at his PC. I was around 6 or 7 years old I think.

3)
Playing and watching my older cousin play Doom 2 and Carmaggeddon when I was about 8. I also remember playing Rayman 2 and getting stuck because I didn't know I had to go back to one of the earlier level and get an elixir for Clark (I didn't know much if any english back then).

Bonus:
I still remember my mother confiscating the GTA2 CD when she found out that I had been playing it. I still have no idea where the CD ended up :D.
That made me laugh out loud. :D Have a +.

Sid meiers colonization. Loved the music, the management of settlers. No other civ game seemed to have this personal touch.

Panzer General 94, finally got into it around 2007. Went nuts on the wikipedia on tanks, fighter aircraft, suddenly spent ages reading ww2 in greater depth for years after.

Early 80s, complex fighter pilot simulator, called fighter pilot. Learning to take off and land was a pain. Dog fighting was painful, after hours we managed to shoot down 1 enemy. 1 point.

We burst out laughing. All that effort just to score 1 point.

And Civilization II. All night. Sunrise. Just one more turn. What — afternoon? But I'm just about to start the space race…!

Agreed. Quake 2 is too slow, Q3A deathmatch works too.

This reminds me, the company my dad used to work for had a nice administrator guy, and one day I was there helping him out with a little coding. After everyone was gone about 6pm we got ourselves some beer and got Q2 to run on the company network (NT4 machines, software rendering of course...). We ended up playing 1 vs 1 all night, and since he was a very inexperienced player we had scores like 1000:40 on a single round... at 3-4am we got something to eat (Berlin, alright...) and continued until about 7, when we called it a night. Great fun (although I would have preferred Q1).

It's probably stupid, but one of the gaming memories I cherish the most is riding the cable car up to Mt. Chimney in Pokemon Sapphire. It has been 16 years and, I don't know why, but it's still really vivid in my mind the sense of wonder i felt while playing that game.

It's a nice transition, it's an exotic thing really. Around that point, the games really do start to find their groove.

Fondest gaming memories...

- First is playing chess on my Atari800, specifically playing a game and looking and realizing all i had to do was NOT interrupt the computer who would make this next move, then i could checkmate them. So i found the least important pawn and moved it 1 space, then checkmated the computer. It was the first (and only) time i ever beat that AI. I wrote down the entire game (30 moves?) in a booklet.

- Duke Nukem 3D. I remember for a 6 player LAN game we had downloaded some maps, one was Alcatraz. The others sent a 'spy' to watch me, literally calling out where i was and what i was doing so they could try and ambush me. So it went something like this. 'He's on the wall, he's in the water, he's in the courtyard, he's in the water, he's behind you! BOOM'. I had twice as many kills as everyone else combined. That was fun.

- Phantasy Star 4, the game that got me into RPGs. Perhaps moreso because it has images it would cinematically show during major story points. Which reminds me of how good some videos games from the consoles looked when you interlaced them with black, your brain fills in the details making it higher detail than it really is.

- Tyrian, this is before it was free, it was a shareware and demo. Beat the same Episode 1 over and over again, restarting in a NG+ style and getting stronger and higher bonuses, stronger than you had any right to be, and then playing with those special cheat it told you so you could play as a U fighter or a banana ship. And of course getting to play it with my brother in one of the few multiplayer games on the same computer.