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What were your (now retro, but not at the time) gaming wow moments?

I remember a few from various stages of my life (born 1984).

Seeing the demo footage of Sonic 2 in Woolworths and thinking the leaves falling down in Aquatic Ruin zone was so cool and advanced.

The original Sega arcade of Virtua Racing with the moving cars completely blew me away.

I remember my uncle loading up Cannon Fodder on his Amiga, and a REAL song with REAL music came out, along with REAL photos. I was amazed haha.

A few years on I remember a PlayStation demo disc having promo footage of the first Gran Turismo and it looked so real to me, I watched it over and over. The first Driver on PS1 looked absolutely amazing to me also.

Gradually_Adjusting ,
@Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world avatar

Pairing two TVs and two Xbox consoles together for an eight player local Halo death match. Online gaming will never match the energy in that room.

PM_Your_Nudes_Please ,

My buddies and I had easy access to a theater, which had giant curved walls on each side of the stage. We hooked up three projectors to three Xboxes; One projector for the stage, and one for each of the curved walls. Then we ran them into the sound system.

We did it two or three times a week for months.

The funny part is that you could always tell who was screenlooking, because the screens were so big that you had to physically turn your head away from your own screen. And at that point you just die, cuz you start missing the people right in front of you.

Gradually_Adjusting ,
@Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world avatar

Any theatre that doesn’t facilitate this has my express permission to go out of business. That sounds incredible.

ThatRocco ,
@ThatRocco@lemmy.world avatar

Everything about Metroid Prime. Incredible soundtrack, gorgeous scenery, interesting wildlife, challenging bosses/puzzles, and so so so much lore. It’s still probably my all time favorite game. Can’t wait for Prime 4 to come out!

justabaldguy ,

Actually making it to level -1 in SMB after finding out how to do it from the TV show Video Game Power. I needed my NES Advantage to do it reliably, but it blew my mind to learn it was legit.

MrPoopbutt ,

Stepping out of the sewers in Oblivion for the first time. Nothing has really captured that feeling since.

ramblingsteve ,
@ramblingsteve@lemmy.world avatar

Yes! That is a true masterpiece that at the time set a new standard.

NoneYa ,

Oh yeah this is it! Seeing that you could go anywhere in the world was a first for me. I was in awe watching my cousin play on his new Xbox 360 that night. The graphics were astounding and the gameplay was unlike anything I ever saw before.

My brother and I only had the original Xbox at this time but we discovered that Morrowind was available to us for it and so we got that to help the urge we felt.

It wasn’t quite the same hype, but man I’m glad in hindsight so I had more appreciation for the series as a whole. We were still floored away by Morrowind and what we could do.

We were absolutely ready and hyped for 11/11/11. Man that was a night we couldn’t wait for.

HexagonSun OP ,

Just remembered that seeing Doom for the first time is another obvious one. Man that game was incredible when it came out.

EvilBit ,

I remember my brother telling me about Wolfenstein 3D. I insisted that something like that, that moved smoothly at your command in any direction instead of in clunky 90° turns and blockwise steps, was impossible with the current technology.

I was wrong.

Num10ck ,

you were right, the computers couldnt do the math in time. the trick was to precalculate the sin/cos tables for angle steps into tons of lookups instead.

EvilBit ,

It wasn’t just the trig tables, but realtime raycasting altogether felt like sorcery.

Kelly ,

And was re-released last week. I was pleased to see the 2024 console ports still support LAN play.

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

People shit on this stuff like it’s terrible garbage that no one would want to play, but I remember playing Zelda on my friend’s CD-I and being blown away by a video game having fluid animation and voice work. Up till then, I had only experienced NES games, and a few super Nintendo ones. But that shit was amazing to me. The IR remote control, on the other hand, wasn’t.

Then there’s was also virtual boy. I remember trying it out at a Sears and thinking how cool it was.

SurfinBird ,

Those qualities were really impressive back then. I remember being super impressed when games started having cut-scenes.

SendMePhotos ,

I miss demo discs. My favorite one had I think spyro and some snowmobile game on it. Playstation 1…dominos disk?

can ,

I think it was Pizza Hut. I bet it was Reggie Fils-Aimé’s idea.

Lost_My_Mind ,

Oh the irony!

urata ,

The first thing that jumped to my mind was Half Life 2. The facial expressions on the characters, and the physics of objects in the game world.

MermaidsGarden ,
@MermaidsGarden@lemmy.world avatar

I’ll never be able to get over the opening cinematic to the first Kingdom Hearts. Having played mostly Game Boy Color prior to that, I had no idea that graphics could look that good.

ramblingsteve , (edited )
@ramblingsteve@lemmy.world avatar

3 of them:

  • watching an Amiga 500 load from disk having only seen 8bit games on tape. Everything that machine did at the time was like magic.
  • watching the castle fly through intro for Unreal on PC when the first 3D accelerators appeared. Everything changed after that.
  • experiencing the shark diving demo on PlayStation VR. And also how nothing changed after that! xD

And to have been able to experience that evolution from space invaders to cyberpunk in a single life time has been a privilege.

Rhynoplaz ,

We’re the only generation that grew up alongside video games. We watched them grow up into what they are today, and our kids don’t even know of a world without them.

I don’t know what “Age” we’re in right now, but I think 1970-2024+ should be referred to as the Video Game Age.

HexagonSun OP ,

I feel the same way about it being a privilege. I missed the earliest part… but even to have lived through the NES and Master System era through to today has been amazing.

Games will continue getting ever more impressive, but nobody again will witness the kind of seismic leaps in what games could accomplish that people saw between the 70s and 2000s.

kindenough ,

I come from the ZX 81, Spectrum, C64 and Amiga days….I made a lot of music on C64 and Amiga, but for gaming?

Borderlands 2 with 3 friends battling Vermivorous the Invincible, everyone on life support and hanging on to their teeth and after a long struggle defeating it. Once in a lifetime.

Lost_My_Mind ,

Starfox 64. I played it at Toys R Us…oh, uh, kids Toys R Us was a toy store that had been around for like 80 years. And everybody knew it was never going to close, because there was always going to be more kids…and then it closed.

Anyways, they had a demo unit you could play. It reset every 10 minutes. Then Mario would pop up and say “THANK YOU FOR PLAYING NINTENDO 64, WHO’S NEXT???”

And like a stupid teenager, I yelled “I AM!!!” as if it were voice activated. It wasn’t. I was just a dumb teenager telling at a CRT tv.

One time I got so invested in it, that I didn’t even notice a kid was behind me for like 20 minutes. And eventually he said “Excuse me…you went 3 times in a row. Can I try please?”

Man I felt like an ass. He probably felt like I was bullying him out of playing. I was twice his age, twice his size, and even compared to other kids my own age I was always a kid who was at the top of the food chain. I genuinely didn’t see him, and thought I was alone. I let him play all the turns until his family made him leave.

But those visuals…THE RUMBLE PACK!!! OH MY GOD!!! THE CONTROLLER SHAKES WHEN YOUR SHIP GETS DAMAGED!!! And it had 3D space ship flying and voice acting, and oh my god…

It was all very overwelming. I’m not saying Mario 64 is a bad game. I loved it. But Starfox 64 was the game that made me buy a game for a console I didn’t even own. I was THAT sure that I’d have to have an N64 one day…that day was like 6 months later.

Rhynoplaz ,

Playing the Mario 64 Demo at Walmart.

My brain had a hard time trying to navigate in 3D.

chunkystyles ,

That game was so futuristic. It was nuts.

Back then, the camera didn’t feel as shitty as it does today. It was all so fresh and new.

baldingpudenda ,

Playing side scrollers my whole life and seeing Mario64 at a Walmart. Being able to play in actual 3D and thinking at no way they can surpass this.

Skua ,

The moment when you see the first colossus in Shadow of the Colossus. You've watched a contemplative intro movie that sets the stage, been faced with a desolate land that you're seemingly completely alone in, and charged headlong with only the light shining off your sword to guide you. You've seen nothing but you and your horse moving in this place in the half hour or so you've been playing so far. You've done just enough platforming to know that you're a very normal human with no magical abilities, and if you've swung your sword at all you've seen that you have no real skill with it. You just know that you've got to kill these unseen colossi to hold up your end of the deal with the voice in the sky. And then a building shaped like a gorilla walks past you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ckn0mdFyEU

statler_waldorf ,

Tap for spoilerAlso the dawning realization that you’re doing something horrible by killing the colossi

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