I remember a few from various stages of my life (born 1984).
Seeing the demo footage of Sonic 2 in Woolworths and thinking the leaves falling down in Aquatic Ruin zone was so cool and advanced.
The original Sega arcade of Virtua Racing with the moving cars completely blew me away.
I remember my uncle loading up Cannon Fodder on his Amiga, and a REAL song with REAL music came out, along with REAL photos. I was amazed haha.
A few years on I remember a PlayStation demo disc having promo footage of the first Gran Turismo and it looked so real to me, I watched it over and over. The first Driver on PS1 looked absolutely amazing to me also.
Pairing two TVs and two Xbox consoles together for an eight player local Halo death match. Online gaming will never match the energy in that room.
My buddies and I had easy access to a theater, which had giant curved walls on each side of the stage. We hooked up three projectors to three Xboxes; One projector for the stage, and one for each of the curved walls. Then we ran them into the sound system.
We did it two or three times a week for months.
The funny part is that you could always tell who was screenlooking, because the screens were so big that you had to physically turn your head away from your own screen. And at that point you just die, cuz you start missing the people right in front of you.
Everything about Metroid Prime. Incredible soundtrack, gorgeous scenery, interesting wildlife, challenging bosses/puzzles, and so so so much lore. It’s still probably my all time favorite game. Can’t wait for Prime 4 to come out!
Actually making it to level -1 in SMB after finding out how to do it from the TV show Video Game Power. I needed my NES Advantage to do it reliably, but it blew my mind to learn it was legit.
Stepping out of the sewers in Oblivion for the first time. Nothing has really captured that feeling since.
Just remembered that seeing Doom for the first time is another obvious one. Man that game was incredible when it came out.
I remember my brother telling me about Wolfenstein 3D. I insisted that something like that, that moved smoothly at your command in any direction instead of in clunky 90° turns and blockwise steps, was impossible with the current technology.
I was wrong.
you were right, the computers couldnt do the math in time. the trick was to precalculate the sin/cos tables for angle steps into tons of lookups instead.