What nostalgic games did you grow up with?

[DannyMan]

I grew up with flash games and old iOS games.

[PKr]

Tbh I feel zero nostalgia towards the games I have grown up with... In fact even hearing their soundtracks alone can make me sick for the most part. That is if the game had a soundtrack at all (like Circus Charlie or something) and not just some beeping sounds representing nothing like Pac-Man. I am glad I had an opportunity to experience the time frame in which games had evolved from a moving yellow circle to complex 3D games with complex reactive gameplay systems, but that's about it. Ok, maybe there are a few rare games out there that I could stomach playing nowadays (like Super Mario Bros), but for the most part I feel a relief knowing that there are much better games out there that I can play today and not some crap we had back then.

 

Just look at this shit (and listen to it):

 

...no wonder me and my friends had a better time digging the mud in the backyard with sticks. Sure we played this dizzy crap because there weren't better options. But that's not a nostalgic thing to remember.

 

The mid 90s and early 2000s, now that's the worthy time frame to be nostalgic about. So many amazing games came out around this time - one game better than the other.

Edited November 14, 2022 by PKr

[leejacksonaudio]

The first ones I remember that qualify as "nostalgic" are arcade games. I remember one day seeing a crowd around a console that was making the weirdest noises. I got as close as I could to it and saw it was a game called "Pac-Man." It was hard to follow at first - for just a few seconds - but then I caught on and figured out what they were doing. Cool stuff. I was in a rush and had to leave, otherwise I'd have put my quarter in line to play it.

 

Another that falls in line is "Tempest." I was at the center of this one. This was 1981. I was with the University of Texas Longhorn Band, on a trip to a game in Fayetteville, Arkansas. We had an overnight stop at a large motel in Muskogee, Oklahoma. I scoped out the lobby and found the lone video game - Tempest - and found not many people around it. Those who were weren't having much luck with it. I jumped on it and gave it a go. I managed to get pretty far with it - don't remember how far, but it was enough to draw a crowd of people going "ooh" and 'aah" - until I lost my lives. By that time, I guess I'd shilled up enough interest in the machine that it had a pretty long line, and there wasn't much chance of me getting back on it any time soon. Oh, well - end of story.

 

My last one was "Asteroids." Back this one up to before I graduated from high school, but still in 1981. No crowds this time. I used to stop at a 7-Eleven on the way home from afterschool work at a Whataburger, get a drink, something sweet, and play the Asteroids machine. I wasn't much good at it, but I persisted. :) I used to think about how to beat the machine when I would lie in bed awake at night, trying to go to sleep. Didn't help much.

[TheDamnPuppySteve]

As a Chinese early zoomer, the nostalgic game me grow up with were:
Starcraft

Warcraft 3

Red Alert 2

Heroes of Might and Magic 3

Need For Speed:Underground2 / Most Wanted (NFS3:HP was the first video game in my life, but only watched my dad played it, I had never played that game)

Call of Duty 2

Half Life 1

Serious Sam 1

Super Mario World on GBA

Kirby on GBA

Pokemon on GBA

Ridge Racer on PSP

Raiden the scrolling shotter game

Zuma (often play it with my mom and even her mother)

Alien shooter

Crimsonland

classic Counter Strike and GTA:VC (I put them together because of almost every Chinese early zoomer loves played these two games during their childhood)

 

The reason why Half Life 1 and Serious Sam counted but theres no DOOM is that I had already played these two when I was just a primary schoool kid around the age of 10, but I started played DOOM around 14. At that time I thought I was doing some FPS gaming archaeology lol.

 

There's only PC games and Handheld console ones, because at that era, only the most fucking rich kids can have a home console in China, and China's government had banned foreign video game consoles from 2000 to 2012, only smuggled ones to buy, but so expensive to Chinese family, so we can only play those cheap low-end PCs, the GBA games are also played on a GBA & PSP emulator (My family was poor in my childhood).

[THEBaratusII]

I grew up from playing flash games and numerous game trials (Zone.com, Reflexive Arcade, GameHouse) to discovering Doom, Quake, Warcraft II, etc.

 

And this was on a Pentium III (Dell) System running Windows XP back in 2006/2007.

[Frozen]

I played this game as a kid and after growing up (some, at least) I returned to it and it introduced me to The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which ended up becoming one of my all-time favorite bands:

 

 

Also the game is really fun to play with another person.

[unerxai]

On 11/9/2022 at 7:55 PM, Wyrmwood said:

 

Your lucky you can, most of the games I played as a kid were on ZX Spectrum, tried an emulator years ago and they were universally terrible, some like Elite are incredibly impressive with 48k total memory but you'd have to be a sadist to play it now. Guess you grew up with at least NES, I honestly can't play further back than that these days.

I grew up with DOS games. Since I've been replaying them from time to time as an adult, they don't feel as nostalgic anymore, because they don't "take me back" as much.

[Caffeine Freak]

Here's one:

 

 

Man, this game was a blast. It has everything---zombies, grenades, napalm bombs, rocket bombs, lightning bombs, zombie dogs, zombie birds, zombie fish, destructable environments, buildings that would crumble when damaged enough, enemies that would come at you in cars and boats that you could blow up. You have an actual ammo limit, unlike 95% of arcade rail shooters, so you have to continually keep on the lookout for ammo pickups. You can even find items like flak jackets or medkits to replenish your health. And at the end of the game, it turns out the whole thing was done by ALIENS from OUTER SPAAAAACE. ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ

 

 

Edited November 19, 2022 by Caffeine Freak

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

12 hours ago, THEBaratusII said:

I grew up from playing flash games and numerous game trials (Zone.com, Reflexive Arcade, GameHouse) to discovering Doom, Quake, Warcraft II, etc.

 

And this was on a Pentium III (Dell) System running Windows XP back in 2006/2007.

I loved Reflexive when I was a teenager. I had a keygen that could unlock any of the games (probably about 500 or more) from their website. Considering the fact that I had a $199 PC from Walmart, casual games were usually the order of the day. Or an NES emulator, so I could download another 500+ games for free. Actually, I'm not sure that I ever did anything that wasn't illegal back then.

 

I AM NOT CONDONING PIRACY DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT BANNING ME DOOMKID

[Wyrmwood]

1 hour ago, Caffeine Freak said:

Here's one:

 

 

Man, this game was a blast. It has everything---zombies, grenades, napalm bombs, rocket bombs, lightning bombs, zombie dogs, zombie birds, zombie fish, destructable environments, buildings that would crumble when damaged enough, enemies that would come at you in cars and boats that you could blow up. You have an actual ammo limit, unlike 95% of arcade rail shooters, so you have to continually keep on the lookout for ammo pickups. You can even find items like flak jackets or medkits to replenish your health. And at the end of the game, it turns out the whole thing was done by ALIENS from OUTER SPAAAAACE. ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ

 

 

 

Cool, never played this but I couldn't walk past an Operation Wolf machine without pestering my dad for change, he usually ended up having a go himself. Evolved into a love for House of the Dead in later life, cost me a fortune as I just had to play both players simultaneously, gangsta style.

[taufan99]

27 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

I loved Reflexive when I was a teenager. I had a keygen that could unlock any of the games (probably about 500 or more) from their website. Considering the fact that I had a $199 PC from Walmart, casual games were usually the order of the day. Or an NES emulator, so I could download another 500+ games for free. Actually, I'm not sure that I ever did anything that wasn't illegal back then.

 

I AM NOT CONDONING PIRACY DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT BANNING ME DOOMKID

This is actually also more or less the same way I discovered DOOM back in 2010. I got into emulation back then, originally with GBA stuff, which later evolved into Sega Genesis/32X (my country's internet was still too slow to download any kind of ISOs back then. hence why no Sega CD stuff) interest. Upon looking up 32X ROMs, one of those happened to be that of DOOM. As I was curious of the name, I decided to give it a go and was actually blown up with the game (especially considering that this is on a mid-90's console). I later looked up for more DOOM stuff, at first at the SNES port, and then everywhere else. The rest, as they say, is history.

[indigotyrian]

Childhood/Adolescence Defining Video Games for me, roughly in order of when they came into my life:

 

- Jazz Jackrabbit/Commander Keen/Duke Nukem/Bio Menace/Monster Bash (grouping these all together because I really got into them all at about the same time)

- Tyrian (I honestly credit this as the video game that made me a gamer)

- Wolfenstein 3D (hours of fun with dad and I blasting nazis and playing mods/TCs)

- Theme Park/Theme Hospital (My first taste of strategy/business management/building which remains a favorite genre of mine)

- Doom/Rise of the Triad/Duke Nukem 3D (My first FPS games, again lumped together for their relative timeframe)

- Klik'n'Play/The Games Factory/Macromedia Fusion (My first taste of game design)

- Age of Empires (Dovetailed amazingly with my childhood obsession with ancient history, which I still have)

- Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (My first taste of online gaming, also making levels)

- The Sims (The first game I played with a huge modding community that I got to experience firsthand)

- Roller Coaster Tycoon (Cemented my love of theme parks)

- Battlefield 2142 (My first clan)

- ZSNES (I got to play a shitton of action games and JRPGs this way)

- The Orange Box (The first mature-rated retail video game my parents would allow me to buy with my own money -- I bought it at 16, and Dad made a huge fuss over how he'd rather have bought me a porno mag instead lol)

[xScavengerWolfx]

Oh god now i'm really old, like Alice in chains dirt album old.

 

Joke aside for me i guess it would have to be Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3 (i didn't like 2), tetris, raygar and legend of link for the NES. Never had a SNES but i remember playing Super Mario World and Super ghouls and ghosts. For N64 Mario Kart 64, super smash bros, turok (i don't know if anyone has ever heard of that one), Goldeneye 007 (child hood friend ruining game right there) and too many to count. PSX/PS2 era would be Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, Crash Bandicoot 3, twisted Metal 2, 3 , 4 and black. Crash Team Racing and others i can't think of.

 

And finally Xbox era way way too many to count but i will say that Halo (way before it was total massive pile of dog water), Gears of war, and hate to admit it Call of Duty.

 

Tl;DC: I grew up in the era of games where when you bought a game, you got a game and later on bought a game and got the DLC's later.

[xScavengerWolfx]

On 11/8/2022 at 6:43 AM, Sonikkumania said:

This one game named Doom, might've heard of it?

Didn't that have like a great squeal called Doom 2 and then later it got master levels?

[knifeworld]

A couple of Genesis games i forgort the names of but I remember a fighting game with robots, and one where you threw eyeballs and there was a level in it called The Dragon's Spleen that looked really cool.

I guess Frogger on a ZX spectrum and probably a couple others that I may have blocked out of my mind because of electronic screeching lol.

Tomb Raider 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 + Level Editor

Deus Ex
Duke Nukem 3D
Dark Forces

Sim City 2000
Civilization 3
Red Alert 1 and 2 + Yuri's Revenge expansion thing
Command & Conquer
Emperor Battle for Dune
Tiberian Sun

The House of The Dead

Goldeneye 64
Super Mario 64
an N64 southpark game I forget the name of

Terminal Velocity
Crystal Caves
Halloween Harry/Alien Carnage
Dangerous Dave
Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons
Keen Dreams


I was aware of Doom but just never saw it on sale anywhere and we didn't get the internet until the mid 2000's for me to know anything more about it or about sourceports and whatnot.
A PC repair guy gave me Duke 3D and probably Dark Forces at the same time to install, I remember my mum wasn't particularly impressed when I got to the strip/dance club area in Duke, LOL.

[Dubbag]

This is the first game type thing I played with like in 96

Other favorite games growing up were

-----------------------------------------

Doom 2 and 64

Commando NES

Super Mario SNES

Kid Chameleon Sega

Midnight Resistance Sega

Mario 64

Gex Enter the Gecko

Rampage World Tour

Duke Nukem 64

Army Men 3D and Sarges Heros

Battle Tanx

Unholy War ps1

Resident Evil Remake 2002

Silent Hill 2/3

 

 

[Aaron Blain]

Speaking specifically about nostalgia, Windows 3.x is particularly strong for me. I only discovered the Exile series recently but it evokes deep feelings of childhood.

 

SMB 1 at age 4 was my start, but that's something I've played ever since so it's not nostalgic in the same way.

[MrFlibble]

@Aaron Blain, glad you mentioned Exile. I also discovered this series way after the games were released, sometime in the early 2010s I guess, but I immediately liked the games (although did not play any to completion), even though I did not really play any RPGs in the 90s. I think that part of the effect is that Exile was born out of a certain nostalgia for the early Ultima games, and also there's a lot of depth there as far as I remember (haven't touched these games in a while). I really enjoyed trying out different keywords when talking to NPCs, and the amount of dialogue written for them is really amazing -- I mean, I've played some shoddy 90s shareware RPGs where NPCs wouldn't have any lines beyond the bare essentials the designer wanted the to say, leading to constant embarrassment like characters telling the player they know nothing about themselves, their job, home town, or the very topic they just mentioned to the player as being utterly important. Exile is the very opposite of that, and I found the setting equally interesting as well.

 

There's a different Mac RPG called Realmz that uses art by the same artist as Exile (I mean the updated art, but the original graphics drawn by Jeff Vogel's wife are also nice IMO), but I haven't tried that one.

 

I also enjoyed Nethergate, again, did not play it all (even the shareware version), but that's because it's so huge. 

[Herr Dethnout]

On 11/19/2022 at 6:03 PM, Caffeine Freak said:

Here's one:

 

 

Man, this game was a blast. It has everything---zombies, grenades, napalm bombs, rocket bombs, lightning bombs, zombie dogs, zombie birds, zombie fish, destructable environments, buildings that would crumble when damaged enough, enemies that would come at you in cars and boats that you could blow up. You have an actual ammo limit, unlike 95% of arcade rail shooters, so you have to continually keep on the lookout for ammo pickups. You can even find items like flak jackets or medkits to replenish your health. And at the end of the game, it turns out the whole thing was done by ALIENS from OUTER SPAAAAACE. ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ

 

 

This is the type of game we need to bring back. With this 3D perspective 2d game :P

[Scrabbs]

Galaga, used to play that at the movie theater with my dad. He would control the ship and I’d shoot think the highest level we got to was 16. 

[Kokoro Hane]

Well, what's considered nostalgic probably differs from person to person, but anyway....

 

I first started playing video games when I was around 5 years old, when my dad taught me and my brother how to use the Sega Genesis, which was already a few years old by this point. My brother and I would play Golden Axe 1&2 almost every morning, sometimes whacking each other to get those mounts lol. Clearly we haven't grown up since when we pop that game back in for fun, we don't play much differently xD

 

When I was older, I played games like Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and of course DOOM when I was around 8 years old or so. I also played a lot of Streets of Rage with my dad on the Genesis. Not too long after that, I also played games like Rollercoaster Tycoon. Haa, those were the days. 

[facespkz]

My parents were too busy paying bills to have any taste in video games, so a lot of stuff I found out on my own.
I got all of the good games from my cousins, like Battle for Bikini Bottom, Mario Advance 2, and a couple of sonic games. Some of them are lost to time :P. When I got an Xbox 360, my grades practically tanked. Banjo-Kazooie, Sonic Unleashed, N+, Lego platformers, the Portal demo, arcade games, indie games...

It was a while before I got into PC gaming, and funnily enough I didn't start playing Doom until I was 16. Before that, I was hooked on Minecraft and Gmod, and even Half-Life... It's almost as if I was doing

On 11/16/2022 at 4:56 PM, TheDamnPuppySteve said:

FPS gaming archaeology