So many to share since the time I've started playing games but, in no particular order (or maybe yes):

- Playing educational games (and good ones at that :) ) with my wonderful daughters therefore introducing them to the world of computer gaming (they still play to this day).

- Receiving "Wizard of Oz" and "America's Cup Challenge" as C64 tapes for Christmas and spending my entire holidays trying to figure those out (too young to speak English and the manual was not really useful for America's Cup).

- Buying my Amiga 500 and launching "Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade" on my parents TV. Spent so much time on it this week-end, we went to buy the Commodore monitor the next one :)

- Playing Alien Quake during a LAN at a friend's place around 3AM and screaming like hell because we got scared by the Alien appearing. Turned out it was not the alien but the other players in our team (who screamed too for the same reason) who we succeeded in killing. Anyway, the real winner is the neighbor who came at 3.:05 AM to tell us to s... up.

- A whole day spent on "Track and Field" in an arcade with a single credit and a friend to switch control to every 30 minutes.

- Monkey Island / Shinobi / Silkworm / Rainbow Islands / Law Of The West / Space Taxi / Doom / Life is Strange / Sensible Soccer / Rayman 2 / and so many more... For each one of those I have at least one specific memory of where and whom I played the game with. Some of these people are not there anymore but I can always go back to these memories when I miss them too much.

First time playing the demo of Half-Life back in the day.

Hello!

Here's my contest entry.

My favorite memory is probably going to my best friend's house and playing Oblivion for the first time. It was the first single player game I really got into, and it lead to me playing way more rpgs than I had time for

I am probably late for the contest, but it is never too late to boast about epic feats! XD

Back when I was still playing on my now deceased Xbox 360 I entered a random squad deathmatch in Halo3.
Back then the game gave you “levels” based on your experience; the higher, the more and the better you played.
I had just started playing online so mine was very low, like 3, and the rest of my team (the red one) was more or less the same. Suddenly the blue team appear: they are all over 10. My newfound team mates freak out and leave me alone; thinking “no way I can survive this” I decided to quit myself, but a message from Bungie appeared: “do you really want to flee and throw away your honor”?
The answer was no. I would die like a true samurai and retain my dignity.
As soon as the match starts I am alone against four more experienced players.
They get immediately cocky and think it would be easy to reach the required 25 kills in 20 minutes, so they hop on the Warthog (heavy mounted gun buggy) to chase me. I evade their charge strafing and blow three of them up with a grenade. Then, I go into hiding – there is no way I can kill them 25 times, but I can resist until time's up.
With my ninja abilities, I hide in the shadows or try to climb beams near the ceiling, sticking to high ground and narrow passages when I am forced out the main building. At first I find a shotgun and massacre those that enter, but when I respawn outside I notice that the blues got all the best weapons and spread out the entire map... from shotgun and grenades in corridors I switched to commando style. When you crouch and move slowly the enemy cannot detect you with the movement sensors but only with their own sight, so I crawled, and crawled... and killed them one after another with backstabs or with the only weapon I had available, the basic assault rifle with very few spare bullets.

In the end, I won 17 – 5 against four more experienced guys. Satisfaction! XD
I had the replay video, but it burned with my console. Damn red ring Of Death!

It all started in 92 getting my bottom whopped in Arcade Volleyball by a friend, who was the first to have a PC. Then at some point my mother got a laptop at work on which I remember playing Batman Returns, Prince of Persia, Accolade's Grand Prix Circuit, Wolfenstein 3D and usually not getting very far in those few . I was about 11-12 years old back then. I still fondly remember Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge.
Then at 14 I've got my first PC, a Pentium 150 MHz with a CD-ROM drive. Of course not many people had CDs back then, but we managed to share games with eachother using floppies. I remember the "pain" felt when the 32nd of 36 floppies from Duke Nukem 3D. During this time I remember playing Doom, Duke 3D, Quake, but what I really fell in love with were RPG and strategy games. First came Diablo, then Fallout 1 & 2. Baldur's Gate got me so hooked I barely could do anything else. Civilization II got me banned from the PC for month, then Heroes Of Might and Magic 2, C&C Red Alert, Lords of the Realm 2 and then the awesome Age of Empires. Meanwhile I also got my hands on a few adventure games, really loving them like Floyd, Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon and later The Curse of Monkey Island. While in highschool with a friend who lived across the street we hooked eachother up in a LAN and then invited other friends to play 2v2 or 3v3 LAN parties of Quake, Quake 2, Age of Empires etc.
With this period ending, a new period started in 2000, when I started university. I lived on campus, and we had a network with other rooms and most nights we played one of these: Counter Strike, StarCraft and Atomic Bomberman, Medal of Honor
During this era I also played some of the best single player games like Baldur's Gate 2, X2 The Threat, Need for Speed Porsche, got hooked on Championship Manager (now Football manager) and played many more that I don't even recall very well.
After university most of my gaming was done on a laptop, so I usually couldn't run the most demanding games, so I played the likes of Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Jade Empire etc. Then I bought my first gaming laptop which was able to run more demanding games, playing Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Witcher 1 & 2, Civilization 3-4, and many more.
In the recent history I loved The Witcher 3, but I also enjoyed the new isometric games like Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny.

However in the last one and a half year my priorities have changed, and now I'm playing the best role playing game of my life, that of a dad of a little girl. Each day is a wonder, however my PC gaming suffered for it. But I don't mind, I'll probably play my library after she gets older. That's why I love GOG, because you guys keep games up-to-date so I can be halfway sure that in 15-16 years I still can play them.

I used to play FTL a few years ago. I was also fostering a dog around that time named Yoga - the shelter named her that because she liked to roll on her back and move her legs around, which they joked was her "doing yoga poses". Yoga was very sweet but after taking her to an adoption event, I noticed she started behaving oddly in that she would sometimes growl at random strangers. Over time, we started noticing that she had a real problem with these odd shows of aggression toward people, and she seemed to particularly dislike children. She actually lunged at a little boy while I was walking her around our neighborhood.

We took her to various behaviorists and no one could figure out the problem. The best theory is that she was probably a chained dog in her former life and was probably abused and/or neglected a lot. Maybe the neighborhood kids threw rocks at her? We tried to work with her but all the efforts failed and finally we were told that she should not be adopted. She was just too unpredictably aggressive toward people (if she had an obvious trigger, that would have given us something to work on, but she didn't). We found out that her behavior had been observed at the shelter but the volunteer who saw it decided against saying anything because any human aggression is an automatic death sentence. She was always incredibly sweet to us, though. Unfortunately we could not keep her ourselves because she was extremely aggressive toward our cats. We finally made the tough decision to have her put to sleep. We did decide that we would formally adopt her, since she was more or less our dog and we wanted to be able to keep her ashes.

The night before her date, I started a new FTL game and figured I'd name my ship the Yoga who was napping next to me (she'd had a nice special dinner). So I'm playing and doing pretty well, actually the best I've ever played it, but finally it's late and we had to go to bed and have a mostly sleepless, very depressing night. We got up, took Yoga to meet her destiny, and came home and spent the next few days crying a lot. It's one thing to put down a terminally ill dog, but having to do that to a dog in the prime of her life who had only shown us love will always eat at me, no matter how many people have said we did the right thing and at least gave her a home for a few months that she would not have otherwise had.

Finally, one day I'm sitting around and I remember I had that unfinished game of FTL going. So I loaded it up, somewhat reluctantly, and then I picked right up where I left off. I ended up going all the way and blowing up the mother ship on my first try. The Yoga had prevailed. And then I shut the game off and I just haven't felt any real desire to go back to it since. I think it's a very good game and I recommend it to anyone who wants a fun strategy game, but emotionally I'm done with it. I like to think that the game ended forever with my Yoga winning.

I have 4 gaming moments that stuck with me

1. When Sephiroth swooped down with his Masamune and kebab'ed Aerith in FFVII. I was so pissed, shocked and sad all at the same time.

2. When Master C̶h̶e̶f̶ Chief stepped out of the crashed escape pod and looks up at the entirety of Halo. I stood there so long I was nearly killed by the patrolling Banshees.

3. When I chose my server and logged into the Nord starting area during the launch of Guild Wars 2. There were so many half naked (either because of broken armor or for the lulz) avatars running around the beautiful winter wonderland accompanied by the dulcet nostalgic theme music of the original Guild Wars. There were lots of dynamic events happening all around us with NPCs shouting at you and it felt like a real lived-in world so different from the quest hubs of older MMOs.

4. When I got Geralt intoxicated in the drinking contest at the bar and then attempted to fistfight Fat Fred while my screen was smeared with vaseline lol. I was so pissed at first but that moment stuck with me too.

This is something I posted on a thread here long ago, but I can't find it. I've got quite a few gaming stories, but since I'm visiting my home town in a few days, I was reminded of this when I saw this contest.

In 2001, when I've had been living abroad for a couple of years by then, I went back to visit my home town during the summer holidays. My cousin had just got a new game, Hitman, and we spend a lot of time at his place playing it. When I first played it at his place, he was stuck on an early level. He wasn't good at English and was having trouble with the objectives and couldn't finish the level because he was killing too many innocents. I've helped him with that level and over the course of the holidays we finished the whole game.

What made that playthrough memorable, was the fact that back at home, I'd usually play all my games "completionistly". I'd make sure I find out every secret, try out every item, make sure I do everything properly. I'd abuse the save and often refer to online guides to ensure I got everything right. But at his place, it was fun to play... well just for fun for a change. We'd take turns playing (together with his brother sometimes) and just see what we could do. No help, no walkthroughs, no save abuse, no trying to get the perfect score, making mistakes, making them again, dying in silly manners... but discovering everything on our own and having so so so much fun. It reminded me of playing video games as a child, when I didn't take them so "seriously". The level I remember most was Nature of the Business (Budapest Hotel), the nuclear ship and the final asylum level.

I bought a copy of the game to take home, and finished it at home by myself after I got back, doing every level "properly", but it wasn't half as fun.

My cousin's father was killed a couple of years ago, and since then whenever I play any Hitman game I remember him. He used to often watch us play that summer. It was a fun summer all round. My group of cousins/friends were all 15-19 then and it was the last time we met and spent so much time together; the next time I was there most of them were in college or working or married and we no longer spent much time in a group together.
That was also the first time I played Soldier of Fortune, which just appeared on GOG, with the same cousin. But he only got it towards the end of the holiday, so we only played very little of it.

I've since played Hitman 2 and Hitman: Contracts. Several years ago my cousin gifted me Hitman: Blood Money. And a few years ago Cyraxpt from these boards gifted me Hitman Absolution on Steam.

Ah, OK. That wasn't entirely clear. 'Share your gaming moment and win 10 games of their choice' made it sound as if someone else would do the choosing. Thank you for the clarification!

I don't have one single gaming moment but rather, a collection of smaller ones that really helped shape me into the lover of video games that I am today.

Playing Spyro the Dragon for the first time and just absolutely falling in love with the adventure that it and the next two games would take me on.

Playing Dark Cloud 2 for the first time and letting my imagination run wild with the journey and letting the art and the story and the characters fuel my imagination for later in life.

Playing Mass Effect 3 for the first time and laughing and crying all the way through.

Finally finishing Bastion and letting the music just carry me away after experiencing one of the true works of art in gaming.

Playing Guild Wars and joining the guild where I would meet some of the best gaming comrades I've ever had and all of us joining up again when Guild Wars 2 came out and going on new adventures together.

Getting teary eyed while talking to Wynne in Dragon Age: Origins because she's just the best video game grandma ever and she was even willing to make a sweater for Sten because she doesn't want him to get chilly. ;___;

I've been very busy on some projects over the past few days, but here are a few quick ones:

- When Oblivion came out my PC at the time couldn't run it becuase the graphics card was some low-end POS (IIRC it was a Radeon 9200SE)... I *did* manage to get it running with some hack, but the graphics were completely screwed up, it was running in a tiny window, and despite all that the performance was still poor. Getting a better graphics card immediately became a priority :p

- As a fan of Remedy's earlier games I was eagerly following development of Alan Wake... right up until they announced that it was going to require Windows Vista. Vista was garbage & there was no way I'd accept it, so at that point I stopped paying attention to Alan Wake. Fast forward some years later - Windows 7 had released & turned out to actually be pretty decent and I had just moved on to it, when I remembered Alan Wake. So I went to the game's website to catch up... only to discover that at that point it was now "Xbox only" - FFS! Fortunately it *did* eventually get a PC release, and was even released here too :) Hopefully it will return some day & perhaps we can get the Max Payne series here too.

Some DRM-related gaming memories:

- Half-Life 2's requirement for activation on Steam was a big disappointment for me and my brother. I remember telling him about it requiring online activation via Steam - he initially didn't belive me, but he had pre-ordered it & checked when it arrived... he ended up returning it & getting a refund.

- I also remember the day that BioShock launched (I got the collector's edition), finding out about the SecuROM DRM, and the 3-activation limit... I was extremely disappointed to learn about that. They also omitted the game's executable from the disc to prevent it getting cracked prior to release, so it has to be downloaded before you can play. The funny thing though is that while it does this it tells you that it's "downloading the latest patch", but in reality all it's doing is downloading the release executable; you still need to patch it after.

- When Dragon Age 2 launched they tried to rebrand SecuROM as "Sony DADC Copy Protection" due to SecuROM's poor reputation harming sales. EA and Sony DADC both denied it but few people believed them, especially after it was examined & its code was found to be rather similar to SecuROM's...

I remember when I was struggling with Counter-Strike, Fallout 2 and Diablo II. I spent all my evenings on CS. It got to a point where I was ringing for CPL clans and I remember this one year where I got banned from 23 servers for "hacking". It was the last year before version 1.6 dropped. I couldn't keep myself from playing Diablo II or Fallout 2 as well and it was hindering my performance on CS. Oh the struggles of the day XD

Some very fond memories that I have also are from playing Sim City on the SNES when I was younger. I loved it so much the game has followed me everywhere since. On computers, on my modded original xbox etc. Now I feel better kn owing it follows me everywhere I go and I have Android to thank for that XD

Though after the original xbox, I withdrew from consoles or "triple-A" titles in general. I've hated the direction of the gaming industry since then. (I feel the need to point out that I was 14 at the time when I started giving up on the industry. I was not the stereotypical "old is gold" geezer and a COD release every year? I was just not having it...).

Playing little games here and there I realized I found solace and a home with indie developers. Those games capture the same awe I had as a kid when discovering new concepts and different ways of doing things. Thinking of DEADBOLT, Risk of Rain, FTL, Undertale, Machinarium, Reigns, World of Goo, Human Resource Machine and Terraria to name a few. These games are where true inspiration and creativity is born and strives. Sure I enjoy the occasional big release, in fact I am waiting impatiently for Cyberpunk 2077 and MechWarrior 5, but nothing compares to my experiences when playing indie games.

Love this thread, keep em coming!