Refugees from other social media platforms, talking about games and geekery.
What do you consider to be your "formative game"?
For as long as you've been gaming, which title from your past can you point to and say "this game is what made me love this specific [genre]/[play style]/[art style]/[etc]"?
I'm sure that everyone can point to more than one, especially as we get older and experience different games that interest us in different "silos", but if you had to pick just one, which one would it be?




ADVENT, AKA Colossal Cave Adventures. Sparked my love for RPGs and that led to everything else.
For me, it would be a game by SSI that I played on the C64 called Phantasie. I don't know that there's anything stellar to recommend it these days. It wasn't as full-featured as Ultima, or as in-depth as The Bard's Tale, but I played that game into the ground, and I credit it with sticking with RPGs over most other kinds of games over the years.
I played all of those. I remember that it was just kinda sold at the grocery store for some reason, so we bought them as they came out.
Hmm, pointing to a specific genre, I guess I'd say Star Raiders on the Atari 8 bit machines. I'd been a big strtrk fan played on a PDP-10 via paper teletype, but Star Raiders had graphics, though still felt kind of similar. That led to a long love of space sims, probably culminating in the Wing Commander series, but I also played text-based space MMOs like Mega Wars.
But I can clearly remember the day I was walking down a street in Southampton and I went past a shop that had a TV I the window and Star Raiders was running in demo mode. Right then and there I decided that I had to scrape up the $$ to buy my first personal computer, an Atari 400.
Yes! I had to look it up to be sure, but I remember we had that on the 2600, and it came with a dedicated control pad that used a cardboard overly. I seem to remember that we never got that thing to work correctly with the game for some reason...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders
If my avatar didn't give it away, I have a soft spot for the Commander Keen series.
Chrono Trigger was my first introduction to RPGs. Although I never finished it, I watched my cousin play it for hours on end. When I was travelling a lot, I picked up a GameBoy Advance and played the Final Fantasy games a bunch too. Nothing like a forced 3 hour international layover to make you play through a game a few times over.
Dragon Warrior for the NES is the first time I remember really being enthralled by a game and playing it until I just passed out from exhaustion. It really began my love for RPG's, and then later when the Willow game and Final Fantasy came out I was completely and hopelessly hooked.
I would say deus x or devil may cry
A triple whammy ensured that I will always love RPGs.
Before then, I was a platformer, thanks to Commander Keen and Prince of Persia.
Final Fantasy VII introduced me to the idea that I could actually save my game, and that role-playing games existed in non-tabletop form, and that I didn't need to have gaming friends to enjoy role-playing...
Sure, I played Mario and Contra and bootleg Street fighter, but yeah... FFVII was the beginning of my gamerdom.
Oh wow that's actually hard. My first game was Super Mario bros and I loved Sonic as a kid but now I really am not a fan of platformers.
Meanwhile I didn't like rpgs and now they're my favorite genre.
I think the first rpg I seriously played was FFVIII. I still have a soft spot for Squall and his ridiculous gun sword. One of my most favorite RPGs is Lunar, though, and I think my desire for a great story and great cut scenes to help tell it stems a lot from that.