Story:
Well, in the 90s I had a 486 PC running with 80 Mhz clock speed. I loved to play Colonization and Civilization on it.
One day, saturday evening, I was playing Colonization and all of sudden the PC shut down. I was like "What the hell?" and restarted it. After just about two minutes the same happened again, so I called a friend, who knew more about computers than I then.
We opened the computer and started it. At one glance we saw, that the fan on top of the cooler on the CPU wasn`t spinning, it was broken!
We removed fan and cooler and replaced it with a much bigger cooler. But this wasn`t enuff. So we placed a piece of toilet paper in a gap between the cooling ribs right above the CPU and placed a little piece of ice on it. This was enuff to cool the CPU for about 20 minutes. All I had to do, was to place a piece of ice on the toilet paper every 20 minutes and I was able to play the whole weekend thru, untill I could buy a new fan.
So I had the first ice cooled desktop computer in the world! :-)

Thank you SO much. Wish I could click that +1 buttons more than once (without cheating which I don't do...).

i had read that article awhile ago, and I could empathize with her, I ran a couple of guilds in my time and it was hard work, drama ridden but fun nonetheless. after a few years of near inactivity in one guild I closed it down and was amazed at how many people were upset, those who hadnt signed on for months even... now that im older I understand that they just wanted that place to stay forever, like a bookmark in their life, someplace to just visit now and then.

These are all very interesting stories. I don't have anything as good as the proposal or nightmare one, but a couple come to mind.

1. When I was very young, a messy divorce left me and my mother homeless (Pennsylvania in the early 80s was not kind for this). We sort of flitted from to house to house while my mother did nanny work. I'd say I was bout 4 or 5 or so. Anyway, the place where we ended up settling was with her best friend and her husband, Ted. Ted was a programmer who had been screwed over by Tandy and ended up managing a Radio Shack, but still took a lot of secondary contract work through various people he knew. Anyway, Ted worked on porting things to the TRS-80, sometimes for other companies, sometimes for his own fun. Stuff like Rogue, or Mickey's Space Adventure, or (in his own spare time) making a TRS-80 Zaxxon that didn't suck (anyone will tell you devs around then - there was a lot of copying stuff, to say the least!). But he was also the first positive father figure I ever really had. Bonded over computers with me when I was a kid. Taught me how to program (in BASIC, of course, I was a small kid!). Showed me stuff like BBS', the first hard drives and modems for those tandy Coco product lines etc. But Ted also smoked and drank a lot, particularly afer the Tandy issues, and he unfortunately came down with lung cancer in his mid 30s and passed on while I was still small. He continued to send me software and try to encourage me to learn computer stuff until he was too sick to talk and had to be hospitalized. Eventually, my mom left her friend's house, remarried, and settled down and I ended up working with computers professionally through externships etc in high school, and continue to work on my own in IT as best I can. Worked with troubled kids for a time too, and tried to put it into practice this same concept. It worked ok, from time to time.

I'm not great health wise now (I have some nerve issues affecting various parts of my body), which has stalled my career a bit, but I like to think I tried to do the best by him. Essentially, through old games and teaching, he sort of brought me back from nothingness and showed that things could be worth living. The fact that he did it all while he was getting so sick just blows my mind even now. You use whatever tools are available to you to reach out to people who are hurting. In this case it was Rocky's Boots, Robot Odyssey, etc. I think that's what speaks to the power of these old games - it's like an old song - it's not the content itself sometimes, it's the memories attached to them of a certain place in your life.

2. Back when I was in school IT, I once almost got in trouble but got the love of my upper class (teenagers) when I switched out a Succesmaker-type typing tutor with a couple of copies of The Typing of the Dead for Halloween played on a big projector. Unfortunatley, local overseers for the school came in and we had to scramble. But it was a pretty epic hour :P

There are a few gaming memories that stick out.

The first game I really got into was the first (original version) Quest for Glory. I used to play it on our old Tandy 1000 TX, and spent hours swapping out game floppies and hunting cheetaurs and trolls in the forest. Still got the floppies too - they probably still work!
The satisfaction of actually defeating Baba Yaga, and the fun of making it through the Brigand fortress. Wow.

But not until the first Witcher game did I finally have a gaming experience that toyed with my emotions. The music, the scenery...brought a tear to my eye and my heart in my throat. Act IV in the fields...mega wow. The burning buildings in Act V...It is an experience that I will never forget.

And recently, the Flame in the Flood, donated by one of our fine community members here, blew my mind yet again. I'm still playing it off and on, the music and gameplay is somewhat of an addiction for me at the moment.

My collection is modest. But it is beloved. Even the worst of my collection still have sentimental memories.

move along.

My college roommate Zach and I always enjoyed an idle Friday night playing a game of Age of Empires. But then we heard about this new "Age of Empires" that spanned all of history: Empire Earth. We rushed down to the mall and picked up a few copies on the Friday afternoon that it released. We installed it and started right away into a gigantic multiplayer map. Him versus me. Nobody knows anything about how to work the game.

We had pizza delivered that night and grabbed some Cokes from the fridge. It felt like an hour passed when Zach called out to me "Can you guess what time it is?"

"Nine?" I asked.

"No! It's eleven already!"

We'd normally be getting ready for bed, but we kept going. We were only in the Dark Ages.

What seemed to be another hour or two passed. In that time, I nuked his fleet of tall ships, defended my shores from his rapidly advancing army, and squeezed out a victory with a tank and artillery blitz.

We congratulated each other on a game well played and then looked at the time. Five o'clock in the morning.

So we threw on some light jackets and took a leisurely walk through Milwaukee and sat at the water's edge as we saw a beautiful sunrise over Lake Michigan.

Gaming has been the most fun for me when it provides a fun adventure that leads to a far more human experience than what we could possibly have without it.

Thank you GOG for Empire Earth on my digital shelf. Every time I see it, I remember that sunrise in the park with a dear old friend.

My gaming moment would have to be the first time I played XCOM: Enemy Within. I'd played the tutorial a while back, and I've played through (but never completed) the 1994 original several times over the years, so I knew of how difficult it could be. Well, I got an abduction mission in a trainyard a few months in. The squad I sent in had a couple of missions under their belt, but otherwise just a normal 5-man squad. I do alright initially, taking out some sectoids and a muton, when suddenly my sniper gets taken out by something, I don't remember what, from a lucky shot. I initially took it in stride, but after that everything goes to shit. The true reality of what I have to fight hits me as more sectoids, more mutons, and even one or two cyberdisks swarm me. My team's suffering throughout all of this - lucky shots, getting flanked, poor cover decisions on my part; if XCOM is infamous for it, it likely happened. By this point, half of my team was either dead or in critical condition and therefore useless. The only soldiers I have left is a second sniper and an assault with a shotgun, both heavily wounded, and there's still some aliens left to kill.

However, despite my precarious situation, I slowly begin to turn my situation around. I just barely take out the mutons, leaving only sectoids to deal with. The aliens start missing more, allowing some respite for my soldiers, and I'm making more hits than before. In the end, only one sectoid remains. My sniper is the only one with a shot on it, but he's only a few feet away so his hit chance is shit, his rifle isn't laser or plasma, and a shot from the sectoid could kill him. I could move him, but there's no other nearby cover and even if there was he'd be unable to fire after moving, and my assault can't get over without sprinting and wasting their turn. Things seem grim, but I decide to go ahead with the shot as it looks like my best chance for winning. My sniper fires, and not only is the shot a hit, it's a critical, ensuring the sectoid's death and ending the mission with any downed soldiers surviving. I lost some soldiers and the survivors were out for almost a month, but I salvaged what could have easily been a loss into a hail mary that kept me going several more (real life) hours.

My favorite gaming moment involves subterfuge, tears and the joy of victory.

Back in highschool, me and a friend used to play Starcraft on my home LAN. Now, I suck at RTS games, and he would always beat me. Somehow, the game always ended with him using a massive fleet of Protoss carriers to wipe me out.

One day, he used the editor to build us a custom map, with super-units you can capture and used. I watched him do it, and when he went to the bathroom I put my nefarious plan in motion.

I was playing the Terrans, so while he was gone I created myself a super-soldier with something like 9999 lives and firepower. To solve the issue of the soldier's HP being visible, I placed him inside a bunker, thus concealing my ruse.

Waves and waves of his carriers fell to my "defenses", and even the super units he acquired didn't stand a chance. He was none the wiser, at least at first.

At one point I decided that enough was enough, and took my soldier out on a one man rampage across the map. It was glorious :)

My friend was kind of angry with me afterwards, but for the first time, I had won. Worth it.

One of my favorite gaming moments was when I experienced the end of Telltales The Walking Dead - Season 1. Believe it or not but sometimes I am highly emotional and this game just managed to pull all the right strings. I knew what was coming, I was completely aware what to expect in the end of the season (and I was suspecting this since quite a while) but I still got hit so hard. I don't know what it was: maybe the great voice over talents or the animations or simply the moment I played it but I could not help but cry and the main thing is - I could not even stop. The credits were rolling and I could still hardly see them because of those stupid tears. It was so moving and so great.

But ... thinking I obviously am a wussy I had to be sure that I am not alone. So I watched several youtube videos with people all around the world playing the ending and nearly everybody had a similar experience. We are talking about some pre rendered cutscenes in comic look - how did they manage to do this? I don't know but it worked.

So thank you Telltale Games for this rollercoaster ride. I am feeling better since a few days now ;)

Well i don't remember any good ones, but i found it kinda funny recently how in earth 2140 with UCS i was producing tiger assaults, there were no mines for resources in that stage only given some containers resources that you can pick up and the given amount of credit you have, i was trying to defend my base, but luckily i managed to produce one shadow tank and a few tiger assaults. They destroyed my whole base but the goal was to defeat all units and structures. I managed to defeat the enemy with invisibilty, which was still kinda hard since towers could detect you, but i was capable of being in the right range to attack some of the towers, probably had 5 tiger assaults which in the end there were only 2 because some towers managed to destroy my units, so in the end it was a chase of finding all units on map and structures to destroy them and i won without a base.

My fondest moment is when I finally managed to beat Emperor: Battle for Dune playing as an Atreides. That was around 2001 and it was the first time that I have beaten the game (before realizing the obvious programming mistakes that enabled you to win very fast). I remember it so vividly. I was just an elementary school kid then. I was supposed to watch the soup while it was being cooked while I played the game. But obviously I was so enthralled by the game that I managed to evaporate the soup totally and burn the noodles. Nobody was happy with me that day. The last campaign map was so intense with so many Tleilaxu and Guild units attacking that I was glued to the screen trying to first fight them off and then to annihilate them and the Emperor Worm. Finally I managed to beat the Emperor Worm and reclaim Arrakis for Atreides and with it the Golden Lion Throne for the Duke. I was so happy that I had no care in the world that day. That campaign with the Atreides really made you think like you were playing for a higher cause, for freedom, for nobility and for a grand future. Ah, the childhood memories are so precious indeed. Now you know what I associate with soup noodles -> Emperor: Battle for Dune.

I have told this story before but will repeat it for this contest. When I was in university I put lots of quarters into the Asteroids machine. After getting married we bought the original Nintendo and had many hours of fun with Mario Brothers and other assorted games. As our children grew up they had most of the various gaming systems. I used to enjoy playing the games with them but then they got way better than I was so we enjoyed watching after that.

My wife and I love going to yard sales. A number of years ago I was at a yard sale when I saw a box copy of Syberia for a dollar. I was not sure it would work on my computer but I bought it and loved the game. I found out about all the classic point and click adventure games but had trouble finding box copies of the classics. My daughters fiance (they are getting married on the 20th of this month!!!) introduced me to GOG. I found instant access to the classics I was looking for. It was easy and the prices were very reasonable. If I ever did have a problem GOG support was quick to offer answers. And when they released Grim Fandango, a game I thought I would never play, I was really impressed and grateful. What I was also impressed with was the amazing community I was introduced to at GOG. I have been exposed to games I would never have known about if it wasn't for this community. I am always amazed at the generosity and the amount of work and time people put in to keep the community going. To posting game giveaways and deals to giving games away on their birthdays this is one amazing group. I have witnessed some amazing support being given to people going through some rough times in their lives. I look forward to checking in with the community every day and seeing what new and exciting things GOG has on the go.

Thanks for the games GOG and thanks for the great community. Here's to another one hundred and ten years!

Oh definitely. One of the toughest boss fights I've ever encountered. Especially because I play these old shooters on keyboard only.

Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings is one of RTS game of all time.
This game marked my childhood because to build the fortress and attack the enemy in this game was something incredible not to mention the historical component. Historical campaigns are something fantastic in this game because we can assimilate some concepts that we learned in the lessons of history of school. So it was a good game for me to enjoy in and at the same time to learn.