My "road to Damascus" moment was decades ago shortly after I first got to use a computer. It was a 486SX2 66MHz beast with a whopping 4MB EDO RAM running Windows 3.1.

CD-ROMs contained what was considered insane amounts of storage and I was excited to try out the hundreds of shareware titles packed into one of those cheap shareware compilation discs. However, I had no idea what I was doing and tried to 'play' the disc using the audio CD player in Windows.

I must have hit that 'play' button a hundred times, feeling confused and disappointed each time as nothing happened. Where were the games?? All those screenshots and game art printed on the cover and I'm getting absolutely nothing. I wanted so badly to blast some imps in Doom, pop some Nazis in Wolf3d and try to see more of that provocative babe in the Slipstream 5000 screenshot.

Since no one else in my family knew much about computers either, it would be weeks later when I was over at a friend's house and I finally saw someone put in a CD, pull up a DOS prompt, type "D:" and press enter.

It finally clicked!! I was doing it wrong all this time!

The first thing I did when I got home was boot up the computer and shove the disc into the drive. With my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears, I typed in the magical "D:" command followed by "DIR".

There they all were...those beautiful sub-directories filled with SETUP.EXE installers that beeped the PC speaker which then gave me access to magical worlds filled with wonder, excitement and software registration nag screens. Ah, those glorious gaming times...I was finally a proud gamer starting on my lifelong gaming journey.

Here's to decades more of fun and games with GOG! Thanks, guys!

The proudest moment ever on gaming to me perhaps when I managed to defeat the Dark Lord of Terror or Diablo himself on Diablo 1. It's way back around my early years on college. I didn't have anything fancy to play with. Just a desktop PC with a Pentium MMX processor running on 233 MHz clock. I can't count how many hours I've sunk myself in the game. After finishing it, I was about to play the Hellfire expansion when I lost the CD. Now, that I have snagged a copy of Diablo on GOG, I'm super excited to embark the journey on Hellfire expansion!

Thank you GOG :-)

This isn't so so much as a proud moment as a stand out moment...

Way back in Battlefield 1942 with the Desert Combat mod on the Stalingrad map. I forget which building it is (south I think) but there's a ladder on one side that goes up to the 3rd floor. I ran up there and into the room to begin my flag capture and as I did I caught something out of the corner of my eye. So, I backed up. It turns out I ran right between two opposing team members. They tried to light me up but I guess they weren't expecting me to backup so they ended up killing each other, lol :-)

I have lots of proud moments, though - in FPS games, my aim isn't that great which results in a somewhat low K2D ratio (some rounds I'm on fire and I get top 3 on a 64p server by firearm but that's rare). So, I usually play support roles such as medic or anti-tank. I think some of my best scores have been as medic - keeping my team/squad mates in the fight is really fun for me.

Also, when I used to play ArmA 3, if there were enough people I would just ferry people from the main base to frontlines - something I was perfectly happy to do as well.

Hmmm, that reminds me - in ArmA 2 there was a firing range mod one could use to learn to shoot all of the soldier-based weapons. I got quite good at anti-tank from a distance (BF doesn't really take gravity into account but ArmA does). I received quite a few "how'd you do that" comments, lol (for far away targets you have to aim really high so you're firing blind).

When I was about 7 I played through Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on the PC. I got all the way to Voldemort, but was too scared to even give it an attempt. I asked my brother to do it for me and he reluctantly gave it a few shots. After about 3 attempts he gave up since he didn't really wanna do it to begin with. I decided to actually give it a try. Beat him on the first try without taking any damage. My brother resented me a little bit after that, but I remember him being a bit proud as well. I certainly was.

I was playing Counter-Strike 1.6 back in college, and I was pretty darn good if I might say so. Hopped on a random server and joined a game in progress. It was about 15 vs. 15. I was assigned the counter terrorist team and entered to find the last of my team apart from myself...all dead. So it was me against the ENTIRE terrorist team. It was the map CS_Assault in which you had to infiltrate a large warehousey-garage structure. I had played this map a million times, usually on the terrorist side, so I was aware of all the good hiding places. Went in the back, picked them off one by one - from behind the door to hiding in the vent, everyone was sitting in a spot I had at one time used, myself. I took out the ENTIRE team with 12 health to spare, won the match for my team, excitedly yelled at the chat that they'd all been owned by a girl.... and proceeded to get a map ban for "cheating." I'd never been so amused to have been accused of cheating in my life.


Runner up moments: Earning Demon's Souls platinum trophy, getting the Cowbear in Katamari Forever, and beating the Pitioss dungeon in FF15 on my own.

My proudest gaming moment was finishing Red dead redemption 2 with full honour. I refuse to let Micah shoot me.

This might sound silly to many, but my proudest gaming moment has to be finally being able to get over the gap in E1M2: Underhalls, a level of the game Doom 2, the section I'm talking about is right outside of the brown outpost with the red key.
To give a little more context you have to understand that this all happened around Christmas of 1999 on my first computer just gifted to me by an uncle, at the age of 11, without knowing a single word of English and having never played a PC game before, I didn't know about keyboard controls, menus and stuff like that, I was just shown how to launch the game on that Windows 95 ancient machine and that was it.
You can't imagine how long it took me to be able to get past that damned gap, several weeks minimum, I thought I was missing something, but one day out of sheer desperation I decided to just press random buttons on the keyboard and, lo and behold, sprint! I had discovered that the shift key made you run faster and I could finally get in the outpost, pick up the red key and continue on with the rest of the game.

I could extend that to this situation: beating an adventure game in the pre-Internet era, solving each of the puzzles with no walkthroughs, sometimes getting the eureka moment after days or weeks of being stuck on one problem. That was horrible but very satisfying in the end.

The first thing that comes to my mind is beating the first Big Daddy in "Bioshock" after several brutally failed tries.

But that's not very unique so I'm going to go with a rather silly but still somewhat memorable example of my stubborness: In "Silent Hill: The Room" there's a boss monster you have to beat in the subway. Unfortunately I mostly ran out of munition before and so there was absolutely no chance to beat the monster with the few remaining bullets. Using the savegame was also useless because I had "lost" most of my munition by then already.

So I had three options: To restart the game (I believe using an earlier save wasn't an option because of the saving system), to quit the game out of frustration or to try killing the freaking monster with a pipe (I think; maybe it was a knife)! Stubborn as I am I decided to try the last option for which - as I realized after dying a few times - you had to position yourself in the exact correct spot and than to hit the monster (which disappeared for a while after each attack) at the exact right time. So I hit ... and waited ... and hit ... and waited ... and, unfortunately I don't know anymore how long it was exactly, but I'm pretty sure this routine went on for at least 30 minutes until the monster finally died and I felt that sweet emotion of triumph!

Yes, I know; it wasn't a triumph of skill, but of pure stubborness. But somehow, I'm still proud of it. :-)

My proudest gaming moment was partly learn how to drive in arcade-sim racers - particularly GRID and Need for Speed: Shift. They gave me a brief understanding of how car works in real life and since then I've never drive a car in a video game like before.

Thanks for the contest!

My proudest gaming moment was when I finally, finally managed to not only get past Elaine's poodles, but also knew how I'd done so.

The timeline of it all is pretty hazy to me, but sometime when I was ... ten? my father brought home The Secret of Monkey Island, and I was allowed to play it every so often. With my grasp of English limited to a few phrases I'd picked up from children's shows which were only subbed instead of dubbed, this game was quite a challenge. The verbs I figured out swiftly enough, but most of the dialog was beyond me, and although most of the objects in the game were pretty easy to understand, the adjectives that accompanied them were a big mystery. Most of the puzzles in the game easily fell to a brute-force approach of trying to combine everything with everything, where I tag-teamed with my younger brother and we shared all our discoveries, but I was stuck for what feels like literal years at trying to enter the Governor's mansion. At one point, through sheer dumb luck, I did manage to get past there, with an epic cut scene as a result, but I'm guessing the save system was pretty limited back then (maybe not even existing at all?) - as I recall not being able to just continue, nor being able to repeat it, and taking frustrating turns with my brother, trying to get there again. We now knew it was possible, but whatever hint there was in the description of the flowers which would tell someone who actually understood the language that of course you'd want to combine those with the meat... I never picked up on it.

The game lingered unplayed for a while, until one summer vacation I gave it another try, once again fruitlessly tossing the meat to the poodles without any effect, going back to get more meat, and then, finally having the clarity of mind, the right ingredients in my inventory, and a stretch of inattentiveness from my parents to really be able to spend the time behind the computer - to brute force combine thing with meat, toss meat to poodle to see that hey, these flowers are the secret ingredient we were missing!

The game after that point must've been relatively easy, with us probably finishing it in weeks, as I can clearly recall vast stretches of the game up to that point, but very little from what came next. What I most clearly remember, though, was how proud I felt being able to tell my brother not just that I'd gotten past the poodles, but that I could tell him exactly what he'd need to do to be able to do so himself.

When I managed to beat the racing level in Mafia 1, after being stuck for months. I was so into the story and I wanted to see what happens next.

Thank cutscene where Tommy crosses the finish line and everyone is cheering was really something special.

Are you serious or just making fun of me?
In the case you are serious: I was still young and games didn't become cheap so fast so I bought less and had to get as much out of every game I had.
In the case you are making fun: What could I say? I'm a professional...

In recent memory, my proudest gaming moment is when I beat the final boss in Darkest Dungeon in one go. No walkthroughs and guides whatsoever. My plan was to send in a sacrificial party just to see what I will be dealing with and adjust my main party appropriately. I was trying so hard to survive so I can go as far as I can to get as much info as I can. Surprisingly, I beat the final boss with my scrappy adventurers. It was epic, to say the least. I was down to 2 members with just a few hitpoints left and bleeding their asses off. Then I managed to do a massive crit that killed the boss in one turn. If it didn't, I was sure that my adventurers would be dead on the next turn. Breathed a sigh of relief and enjoyed the end game cut scene.

What made me even prouder is that it happened on my very first playthrough and on the difficulty level the developers intended the game to be. And it was a blind playthrough on top of that.