What is your "Back in my day" game?

I was wondering this while listening to a podcast recently as they talked about retro gaming.

Obviously everyone's own perception of what is retro is unique to that person, but if you were to talk to kids these days about gaming what examples would you use to illustrate how gaming was when you were young and what got you hooked?

I probably have a few:

• I remember playing the original SimCity on my 486 when I was really young, not the best graphics but great strategy....I even uses X-tree Gold OS to play it
• Console-wise it would probably be Golden-eye on the N64 and playing multi-player with the golden gun or prox mines.
• Lastly as a teenager, Quake II with the grappling hook mod on the local town server or sinking countless hours in to Ultima Online as my first MMORPG experience. Those hours sunk in to UO was what lead to me avoiding Everquest or WoW because I understood what impact it could have on work/study/life.

What's your "back in my day" games?

Weirdly enough, probably playing Nightmare Creatures on my N64. No idea why it's that game.

Streets Of Rage 3; back in my day, the end boss always killed you!

I mean, in this day it'll probably be Black Ops II; back in my day, I got called, "faggot!" every other match and was beaten down by [YOLO] xX WeedmastaKidd13 Xx!

dos stuff. Showing someone dosbox and saying this black screen is the way I used to play my games is great.

@Napalm said:

I mean, in this day it'll probably be Black Ops II; back in my day, I got called, "faggot!" every other match and was beaten down by [YOLO] xX WeedmastaKidd13 Xx!

i feel ya pain

Anyway my back in the day game is super metroid.

Back in my day, we fought as battle hardened toad men. And we called em Battletoads, plain and simple! And sometimes, it was tough as shit.

@TheHT said:

Back in my day, we fought as battle hardened toad men. And we called em Battletoads, plain and simple! And sometimes, it was tough as shit.

Back in my day, I fought as a rock-hard... man...

Command & Conquer Red Alert, Deadly Tide, OoT and probably SSB:M.

@TheHT said:

Back in my day, we fought as battle hardened toad men. And we called em Battletoads, plain and simple! And sometimes, it was tough as shit.

And riding down a sewer on a surf board was a death sentence.

Back in my day games taught me the best way to dispose of a murder weapon was to just toss it into the sewer and you could kill trolls by throwing spears at them until they caught your spear then you should just run away or fart really powerfully. That and they taught me that up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Select, Start is the secret of life.

Duke Nukem 3D, Cruisin' World, Diablo 2, and the Gauntlet/ Hydro Thunder machines at my favorite haunt back in my hometown.

First game that jumped to mind was Raid on Bungeling Bay.

Did a goggle search to check the spelling and turns out it was a early Wil Wright game.

It was a top down helicopter game, which played quite similar to the desert strike games years later.

I think it was due to the fact that compared to other games like maybe 1942, that was just full on attack and then win or lose.

Things could go bad, you could head back to the carrier , refuel hit the enemy somewhere else.

I guess early open world stuff.

Oh, also Moonstone a Hard Days Kight on the amiga.

Whatever it plays like now it was fun being able to play it 4 player.

You had to take turns moving around the map during multiplayer but being able to fuck over your friends during a turn by stealing their equipment was amazing.

Probably Baldur's Gate. It's the game that made the biggest impact on me when I was younger.

Best pack in game ever.

@Napalm said:

I mean, in this day it'll probably be Black Ops II; back in my day, I got called, "faggot!" every other match and was beaten down by [YOLO] xX WeedmastaKidd13 Xx!

i feel ya pain

Anyway my back in the day game is super metroid.

Defender. Shoot all the peoples and watch them aliens FLIP THE FUCK OUT.

Damn kids. Back in my day this way the epitome of gaming.

Now get off my lawn.

The original Call of Duty on PC. Played so much of the multiplayer. Still the best game in the series and one of my favorite games ever made.

There are a lot of games that would fit that category but I think rented games deserve special mention. I have sweet memories of Kirby Tilt n Tumble, Harry Potter, Dragon Quest 7, Breath of Fire IV, Mega Man Legends 2 and a lot more. I think I got a lot out of those games because I knew they were rented so I would try to get the most out of them in the week I had them. Trying to go all the way back to my earliest gaming memories, I would probably have to say NES games like Mario Bros, Ninja Turtles 2+3, Pacman, Ice Climbers and more.

Dark Wizard, Lunar 2 and Planetside.

Planetside just makes me feel nostalgic even though it's not hard retro yet.

@believer258 said:

@living4theday258

@Napalm said:

I mean, in this day it'll probably be Black Ops II; back in my day, I got called, "faggot!" every other match and was beaten down by [YOLO] xX WeedmastaKidd13 Xx!

i feel ya pain

Anyway my back in the day game is super metroid.

You can't name a game that was made before you were born. But back in MY day, it was Super Metroid and DKC and then the PS1

sure you can.

Sonic came out like a month before I was born but that was still my formative video game experience.

Doom 2, back in my day you couldn't look up and down in first person shooters. Happy birthday from Romania!!

I'm still a teenager so this doesn't really apply to me, but I remember playing lots of great retro games like Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Command and Conquer. The game that probably made me a gamer was Halo. I spent every weekend playing that with my friends and family. Man I miss being a kid.

Back in my day? Street Fighter II. When you talked shit, you talked shit to somebody's face (and sometimes had to fight because of said shit talking).

I remember booting this up on my 386. Loved this game. I was so mad that I couldn't play the Doom shareware when it came out because the computer didn't support VGA.

One Must Fall was great too.

When I was in elementary school, the school was using a machintosh and every time my class goes to the comp lab I was looking forward to play Carman Sandiego and Kid Pix Studio.  
 
There was also another game where you play as a kid  who goes to a carnival and some carny tricks you by turning you into a doll. The only way to reverse the curse is to go through mazes while solving puzzles along the way. That game creeped me out yet my curiosity wanted me to keep playing. Anyone know the name of the game i just described?

@Oldirtybearon said:

Back in my day? Street Fighter II. When you talked shit, you talked shit to somebody's face (and sometimes had to fight because of said shit talking).

Man I miss those days, someone was always playing Tekken Tag at our arcade, the best player lost to a scrub one day and got so angry he threw his coke at their face, punched him in the nose and ran off. Ah good times.

Born in 1990. I vaguely remember a lemmings machine my dad had but I was an infant so couldn't really form memories about it.

The Megadrive/Genesis for americans, was my system. Sonic 1 and 2, Michael Jackson's MoonWalker, Soleil, ToeJam & Earl 2, were my massive jams when I was really young. Turned 6 and got a Playstation 1, Jumping Flash, ESPN Extreme Games, Crash Bandicoot, Time Crisis, Worms, International Track & Field, SuperSonic Racers, Loaded and the DieHard Trilogy game. I'm pretty much gone wasted right now and this is bringing up so much lovely nostalgia. I see Star Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace, I didn't even know I owned that game. When I get home from work I am plugging that in and playing that so hard.

Lego Racers 2.

Midtown Madness, the demo of the original.

Tony Hawk

And Crash Effin' Bandicoot.

Some dirt bike game I played using a casette tape on my Commodore. Crazy how games have changed since.

@Animasta said:

@believer258 said:

@living4theday258

@Napalm said:

I mean, in this day it'll probably be Black Ops II; back in my day, I got called, "faggot!" every other match and was beaten down by [YOLO] xX WeedmastaKidd13 Xx!

i feel ya pain

Anyway my back in the day game is super metroid.

You can't name a game that was made before you were born. But back in MY day, it was Super Metroid and DKC and then the PS1

sure you can.

Sonic came out like a month before I was born but that was still my formative video game experience.

...but that still wasn't your day. I'm defining "your day" as "games that were relatively new when you actually played them", not "games that you played as a kid".

Whatever, though.

Wolfenstein 3D. Since shooters and the ESRB weren't a thing back then, I got that game waaaaay before I should have. Fond memories of trying to beat the entire shareware episode solely by stabbing people in the face and neck like "uh uh uh uh uh". It wasn't my first game, but it was my first obsession.

Also, does the concept of shareware compilations count? Three quarters of my obscure game knowledge is directly because of those things.

This thread has led to a forty minute exploration of the Kid Chameleon soundtrack and the realization that this game is probably the reason I ended up being a bass player.

@believer258 said:

@Animasta said:

@believer258 said:

@living4theday258

@Napalm said:

I mean, in this day it'll probably be Black Ops II; back in my day, I got called, "faggot!" every other match and was beaten down by [YOLO] xX WeedmastaKidd13 Xx!

i feel ya pain

Anyway my back in the day game is super metroid.

You can't name a game that was made before you were born. But back in MY day, it was Super Metroid and DKC and then the PS1

sure you can.

Sonic came out like a month before I was born but that was still my formative video game experience.

...but that still wasn't your day. I'm defining "your day" as "games that were relatively new when you actually played them", not "games that you played as a kid".

Whatever, though.

well we were poor, I only got a genesis like when the n64 came out or close to it.

I mean if that's your criteria my day stuff would be PS1 stuff, late era PS1 stuff at that.

Your fonts aren't exactly equipped to handle my examples.

More then any one game what I remember the most fondly about my childhood gaming was being able to rent games and having my only information about gaming being the issue of EGM/PC Gamer that I got once a month- if I was lucky- when I begged my mom to let me buy an issue from the magazine store when we went grocery shopping. That's something any generation going forward is never going to get to experience because of the internet.

There was just something special about not knowing anything about a game but what was on the back of the box and you basically had to decide on a game based on the box art alone. Because there really wasn't any information about games I actually found myself enjoying games that are apparently considered bad. I got maybe 2-3 games a year to own and that was around my Birthday and Christmas time when I got money from people as gifts and I could buy stuff with it. Outside of that I only got to play a game during that magical two days that made up my weekend when I got to go to the video store and rent a game for 2-3 days. The fact that I was getting to play a new game, any new game, made each one feel special and was something I cherished. I honestly wish I could go back to that life style when ti comes to my games, but there's no way I could after being hooked into knowing everything there is to know about what games are coming out.

It's not really "retro," but I recently helped my younger cousin out while he was playing Ocarina of Time 3D. It felt super weird watching him play the game for the first time in 3D on a handheld with better graphics than when I played the original when I was his age. I'm getting old.

If I was talking about my childhood, definitely Super Mario Bros. and the old text-input Sierra adventure games. Those were the games that really got me started on the road to being a gamer, but it wouldn't be until Final Fantasy VII that I was well and truly hooked.

I was playing Contra III on the SNES as a toddler. I got started early and it has stuck with me ever since. Contra was great ...

Back in my day, we had 'point and click adventures', oh wait, there's are still heaps being made today, yay ^__^

I used to play Adventure games on the PC all the time until sometime in my 20's (I can't exactly remember when), I started trying action-oriented games, like First-Person Shooter games, Role-Playing Games.

My all-time favorite game is Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (the first game). I've played it a lot over the years. It was so awesome to sneak around in the darkness, grab someone from behind and then drag them to a shadowy area, and knock them out.

Super Mario Bros. 2, Zelda II, and Adventures of Lolo. That's pretty much the trifecta that got me hooked.

Back in my day, we had two buttons! and the Select button actually did something!

James Bond & Joust for Colecovision, followed by Mail Order Monsters for C64, Archon, Beneath the Root, 7th Guest and finally Master of Magic which basically consumed me until Star Craft

There were just so many back then...

Fallout 1&2, obviously. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Bladerunner, Sim City 2000, X-com, Discworld, Everquest, Starcraft, Xenogears, Star Ocean, Chrono Trigger, Duck Hunt. The list is... extensive.

They were all a big part of my childhood. I know some things are older and some things are newer, but I was born in the 1990 so I ended up having a varied experience. All of these games invoke that kind of

nostalgia in me, though. I don't think I've been truly hooked by a video game in probably the last decade. I'm sure there are hundreds here that I'm leaving out of this example, but these are what have come to mind.

Age of Empires, Stronghold, Monkey Island and Lego Racers I guess. But those games are relatively new....relatively. Fuck, I'm getting old, thanks a lot OP!

I would tend to say:

1. Super Mario Brothers

2. Goldeneye

3. ESPN National Hockey Night (Genesis - not the much later PS2 version)

I did have a NES as well, but I was never super into the few games that were in my library for it.

Early Psygnosis games on the Amiga- Barbarian, Shadow of the Beast, Blood Money, etc.

The magic of Super Mario Bros. 2 , which at the time was positively revolutionary. It looked and played nothing like the game that came before it, but most importantly for me, it was the first game I ever played that allowed the player to choose which character to play as. It was amazing. And the animated dream sequence cutscene at the end was, at the time, the most amazing thing I had ever seen. To this day I consider the overworld music of SMB2 to be the best video game music of all time.