What was the first game you saw that made you go "This is the future of games right here"

millennial here, so feel free to dunk on me for this but for me it was The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Seeing gameplay of that blew my mind, and I knew I had to play it. It just looked incredible for the time, and for me felt like a true upgrade to the previous generation's graphics.

That and seeing an RE4 preview in Game Informer talking about the village. At 12-13 years old it was a bit of a revelation.

I can remember a couple:

• Return to Zork - My first CD-ROM game. I think the game itself was pretty mediocre but it was my first experience with heavy FMV.
• Battlefield 1942 Wake Island Demo - I put so many hours into that one level trying all the different vehicles. Rolling up in a jeep with buddies to take a checkpoint. Seemed like future space magic at the time.

When you first leave the sewer and enter in that open world I felt like dancing

Others have already mentioned Morrowind but that was certainly an eye opening experience to me. I played the original Xbox version and was unprepared for quite how vast it all was. The scope and scale of everything and the detailed RPG elements were unlike anything I had hitherto seen and despite not knowing half of what was going on was still utter engrossed by it.

Hard to pin down.

I think after watching (and then playing) Gran Turismo - I didn't think that games could look any better or more realistic than they did.

Right!? They stretched it like crazy to fit the whole song in the trailer, but they tell you so little. Which, I mean, is probably as accurate a representation as anything in that trailer... you don't get a hell of a lot more context in the game itself.

Basically "Hey, island has radiation, go find out why in your drone robot thingie. Also, you have two realtime hours to do it. Also also, three quarters of the available choices in movement or action that you have lead to instant death, so good luck ever getting to see those 15 trillion hours of artwork or whatever unless you have supernatural patience and a lot of paper handy, or found a walkthrough somewhere."

Snark aside, that trailer is so delightfully stupid (and the pre-rendered 90s CG so up my alley) that I watch it at least once a year, haha. It's a crime that Maabus is so forgotten, because it truly was a trainwreck to be remembered.

I didn't start following gaming with any seriousness until the 360 era. In terms of gameplay possibilities, it was probably playing Oblivion at a friend's house. I was familiar with the concept of open world games and had played a bit of Morrowind before (on a POS laptop), but there was something about walking out of the Imperial Sewers for the first time on my friend's gigantic TV, seeing the crazy draw distance (by Morrowind standards) and having the "wait, I can go literally anywhere?" realization kick in that just floored me.

However, most of my truly "what the fuck" memories are graphics-based. I think the first time I was completely blown away by a graphical advancement was the Watch_Dogs E3 reveal demo. I still have never played it and probably never will, but damn did it look pretty and innovative at the time! Close follow up was the leap in fidelity between the 360 and next gen versions of GTA V. There was some screenshot of a back alley that I can't seem to find now that was the first time in games I had to do a double take to make sure it wasn't just a real world photograph.

Descent.. and to a lesser degree Terminal Velocity. But games never went in that direction, the latter inspired a few games but not really the way it did.

I felt those games brought something new to interactions. It feels so different, so futuristic, not "realistic" or "here's an illustrated choose your adventure book". It felt beyond the realm.

I think the biggest misstep in games was that developers (still rarely) didn't think vertically, only mostly horizontally or lasagna style (floors but the gameplay is still horizontal). I get why but I always thought games would be more... 3D :)

Yo Overload is a great descent clone btw. :)

I think both graphically and gameplay wise was Uncharted 3. I had just bought a PS3 bundled with the game and it blew me away. Everything from the set piece moments, to the difficult but rewarding combat, to the performances and characters just hit the right chords with me. I so wanted big bombastic cinematic games to keep being a thing.

@gornogorno: I came to say FF8, too. It was the first game that made me feel as if I was playing as a person and not a character. Also the CG cutscenes did things I had never seen before.

I didn't have that feeling with FF8, but i will say that it was my first RPG game and i still love that game and it has left a lasting impression on me. At the same time, i feel betrayed by it being my first RPG and then learning that the whole leveling & grinding stuff only made it harder for me :D

Seeing Call of Duty 2 and Gears of War on Xbox 360 was pretty mindblowing to me. I was a bit too young for earlier generational leaps to have an impact on me so that was the first time I had experienced a noticeable jump in fidelity.

I think multiple times haha. The first time I saw 3d graphics(starfox 64). Of the first time I saw the supersmash melee(that prerendered cutscene). I remember flying around in a helicopter in gta vice city and thinking "wow the sky is the limit! In terms of gameplay freedom".

The people looked like people.

Since I was very young when the SNES released, that system always felt like "this is what video games are, just better" compared to my friend's NES. Each generation since...

Playstation: Final Fantasy VIII. The CGI in FFVII I guess I kind of just bought as a thing because things like Toy Story existed, but the character models in that game were something I used to obsess over. It probably contributed to that having been the game I played from beginning to end the most I will ever play a game in my life.

Nintendo: Mario 64. I imagine any other answer for someone of my age would just be trying to stand out in a crowd.

PC: I have two here, because my family was a Mac household growing up. A friend of mine had a PC and he got ahold of one of those fancy 3D Accelerators I kept seeing advertisements for in EGM and whatnot - the game he got it for was Star Wars Racer, and it was magnificent. I played a ton of it on N64 and was stunned when I saw how different it looked on his PC. Eventually, I convinced my parents to get a PC when they decided it was time to upgrade the home computer, and they agreed since my mom was a teacher and wasn't fond of the brand new, jelly iMacs. They made the mistake of getting a Gateway PC powered by Windows ME, and thus I'm still an avid Apple product consumer to this day, but during those fateful 3 years with a PC I did manage to own a copy of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and as a big fan of FPS games like MoH: Underground and Turok 2 and such at the time, I had a real, "oh, this is why PC gamers make fun of console FPS" moment. I wasn't surprised when I found out the team behind that game was largely responsible for Modern Warfare.

But of course the real answer is Playstation 2, Grand Theft Auto III, because no game other than another Grand Theft Auto felt like it truly mattered for the rest of that generation. I can't think of any other time in my long life of gaming that one single series so entirely encapsulated what the future looked like the way that run of GTA III to GTA IV was.

Gran Turismo, i still dont think it looks all that bad today for a PS1 game.

I'm not sure I've ever thought about it before, but probably Super Mario 64 because when (although I was an unintelligent five-year-old) I saw Mario pop up and I still thought we were watching TV, like Nickelodeon or something. It blew me away at the time.

For some reason Descent comes to mind. It was the first game I saw or played that had completely free and fluid 3D movement. The game didn't feel like a "moving cartoon" like most of the NES games I was used to at the time, but something that resembled how things move in real life.

After that, the PS1 T-Rex demo, MGS2, Halo, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Kameo and Crysis.

@iamdylanwilliam: Oblivion is my answer too.

I played the hell out of Morrowind and I still have a copy of an old gamepro issue with a preview for Oblivion in my parents bathroom lol. Even now if I look at it I'm reminded of how excited I was for it.

I kinda feel like no game will ever quite capture that feeling again but who knows.

As for me, many games cause such emotions. When I started my journey as a gambler, poker was the meaning of my life for me. I liked the feeling of excitement. Recently I got tired and decided that I needed to change my hobby. And I switched to video games. I like Assassins, GTA. Even though these are old games, I really admire them.

Without looking up the actual dates, I can't remember which came first, but the two that came to my mind was Metal Gear Solid 2, and Devil May Cry. I remember thinking "that cut-scene of Solid Snake running away from a gush of water is a great cutscene and all, but what does the game look like" and then I hear Adam Sessler's voice say "and this is all gameplay". That blew my mind. Then, the first time I saw Dante swipe the devil puppet in the air, pull out his guns, and shoot the thing while it hung up in the air, I said to myself, "no game will ever be this badass." I really think that move he does is one of the coolest moves in all of gaming.

Heh. Believe it or not, "Altered Beast" and "Splatterhouse". Back before the Genesis and TG-16 came out, this company came in and showed off the consoles waaaaaaaay ahead of release at my local mall. I was like 8 or 9 and it blew my mind.

Used to play a lot of door games like Legend of the Red Dragon as a kid, so I had been used to multiplayer games where someone messed your stuff up while you weren't around. But...

Doom.

Calling my friend's modem line and suddenly, we were playing Doom together from across town while being on the phone on the other line. "I just killed that zombie." "I KNOW I SAW!!!"

And a recent one:

Half Life Alyx. I got my Quest working wirelessly connected to my desktop and cleared a 20x30' play area in my basement. Once you're not having to worry about tripping over a cable or running into a wall, VR becomes something else.

Seeing games like Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear and Quake 3 on PC played over LAN was definitely something where I felt I was seeing the future- no lag, quicker loading times, just had to get everyone and their PCs under the same roof. The first LAN party I attended I came away feeling like I had to raise some money to get something called a video acceleration card at Staples like yesterday.

GTA 3 was the console game that made me take consoles seriously at the time- an open world at that scale was just insane. I still remember the night it came out because my friend bought it at wal mart at midnight and brought it over like he was video game Jesus. For sure the first midnight release I remember. We were up all night stealing different cars, going on crime sprees and passing the sticks when we died.

When my friend with an Xbox figured out how to tunnel Halo through the internet I'd like to say we were all talking about how this was going to be the future but with the lag and nothing resembling matchmaking, none of us could really imagine something like Xbox Live.

When Morrowind hit, I'll agree with someone else in this thread, that game truly had to be seen to be believed. My guy with the Xbox would tell us about the game, but only after playing it could I understand the depth. I saw it played on his Xbox before I ever gave the game a chance- I'd never heard of Elder Scrolls and I honestly did not believe the kind of stories he was telling about what he was doing in there. I don't think it was 24 hours after seeing it played I had it installed on my PC to spend hours and hours in there. It was a running joke that I was just missing from social life- didnt matter who you were, boss, girlfriend, best friend, I was more interested in Morrowind.

Well I remember walking into rental store month before Dreamcast launch and they had a unit on display and my friend and I thought it was tv but was nfl 2k. We both ended up buying a DC and it continues to be one of my fav. Systems.

I got a Philips CD-I when they were new and I was convinced Burn Cycle was the way of the future, for about 2 hours.