In early 2000s, I got hooked into an online MMORPG called Tibia with some friends. At it’s peak it had something like 70k players online. It was cutthroat, if you died you’d lose hours and hours of progress. I was hooked at one point doing 14h days. That experience has been impossible to recreate in adulthood.
For me it would have definitely been an MS-DOS game. Exactly which one is harder to remember since I was a kid, but I do recall playing a lot of an educational game called Operation Neptune.
The first game I ever played was Mario on the NES, but the ones that really got me into gaming were Duke Nukem 3D and Quake on PC. It’s been 27 years and I still enjoy them.
Probably Mario on the first NES system. Then I got a Genesis, and I was constantly playing a little-known number called Ranger-X. THAT game was Dark Souls-hard.
I’d have to go all the way back to pinball, since I’ve always been fascinated with games.
But the very first video game that really sucked me in was Batman on the NES. I’m talking fully immersed; no awareness of my surroundings. Jacked in.
The music paired with the grim visuals was such a vibe. Just playing it made me feel cool. My parents had to drag me away from that birthday party haha.
It wasn’t the first game I played, nor the first I was really drawn in by but Ultima IV on the Master System just seemed like a miracle. There could be an entire world with a rich history, populated by diverse characters where I got to step into the role of the protagonist of a story like in a fantasy novel only I had the freedom to make my own choices about how to respond to the story, the gameplay rewarded careful thinking over twitchy reflexes and the game world was so big it expanded into real world artefacts. I had no idea of the potential of the medium until I encountered that game but it all unfolded before me once I had.
Mario Kart, I was a military brat my dad was kind of a jerk he played to beat me one day I got really good and kept beating him. He quit playing after that. Then he quit with everything else I beat him at.