What were the five most important video games to you throughout your youth/teen years?

[Benji]

https://mobile.twitter.com/jakeregal/status/1260449257821216768?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet

What the Tweet says.

1. Sonic The Hedgehog
2. Final Fantasy VII
3. Championship Manager 2
4. Pokémon Blue
5. Tekken

I would probably include Amiga games on there but none of them stuck with me the same way those five have. They turned gaming from a fun past time into a hobby.

[Kaney]

Metal Gear Solid

Pokemon Blue/Yellow

GTA3

Final Fantasy 7

WWE HCTP

No idea what order they'd go in but i spent far longer on all them than I really should.

[DavidMarrio]

GTA San Andreas

Championship Manager 01/02 

Pokemon Red

Mario 64

WWE Smackdown HCTP 

These are in no particular order

[Adam]

1. Championship Manager 01/02

2. Smackdown! Here Comes The Pain

3. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

4. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

5. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I was very sports-oriented as a kid so a lot of mine should be along those lines, but I think this is a good mix of five off the top of my head. Champ was an obsession and always will be in some form, sunk so many hours into football management sims it isn't even funny. Honourable mention for Football Manager 2008 as well as I probably played that as much as I did 01/02. The first Smackdown I got into was Shut Your Mouth! but HCTP just took it to another level and I played countless season modes on that one, such a fun game.

San Andreas was an eye-opener, for so many reasons. I was probably only about 13-14 when I started playing it and the scope and content of the game was mind-blowing. Been a huge, huge Rockstar fan ever since. COD is the most recent on this list, I was firmly a teenager by that point but I remember completing the campaign on the Christmas Day that I got it and eventually me and my friends got into playing it all the time co-op. I'm not a big FPS fan at all but got into COD big-time during those high school years.

And I have to give it to the Harry Potter franchise too because those games were great fun as a kid, and it was mainly them I played aside from football games before getting a bit older and stuff like GTA and COD took over.

[apsham]

Grand Theft Auto was my first introduction to modding and getting the most of out a game - there were tons of custom maps for the original game that changed things up.

Age Of Empires is in close contention with Warcraft 2, but very much the same as GTA - it was one of the first games that showed me how you can mod, script and change things up and I think it also helped to foster the great interest that I had in history at the same time.

Metal Gear Solid was probably the first big storytelling experience that I had, and one of the first times that I really wanted to know more about the characters in video games and start to expand past that.

Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow expanded the personal interest that I had in games and moved it more into a social experience.

Super Mario All-Stars / World came with my SNES which was my first console so... yeah, don't really need to say much there.

These were the first things that came to my mind - there's a dozen others that could slot in here and be just as valid I think, but that looks pretty much on point.

[Bobfoc]

29 minutes ago, Benji said:

https://mobile.twitter.com/jakeregal/status/1260449257821216768?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet

What the Tweet says.

1. Sonic The Hedgehog
2. Final Fantasy VII
3. Championship Manager 2
4. Pokémon Blue
5. Tekken

I would probably include Amiga games on there but none of them stuck with me the same way those five have. They turned gaming from a fun past time into a hobby.

Sonic, CM2 and Tekken would probably make my list too. I didn't play FF7 until I was an adulthood, though. I'd add Metal Gear Solid and Street Fighter 2, I think. Special mention goes to Hover, the free Windows 95 game, which was my favourite pick-up-and-play game.

[RPS]

This is a great question. 

1. GTA III: I bought a PS2 for this game. This game was a revolution. Nothing compares to it. Me and my brothers would spend countless hours toying around the city, doing missions, running people over. At the time, the game felt incredibly huge. It felt like you could spend hours and hours and hours in this game world. In reality, the game is incredibly tiny and restrictive. But at the time it was a revolution. 
2. Super Mario 64: In the  same way of GTA III, Mario 64 warped my mind. My brothers and I obsessed over the Mario platformers that came before. We would beat, restart and beat again Super Mario World and Mario 3 countless times. Super Mario was, in some ways, gaming to us. So Mario 64 took that expectation and took it to a whole new level. Again, that first painting in Super Mario 64 is tiny. But do you know how many hours me and my brothers spent obsessing over every nook and cranny. Shooting ourselves into the air and figuring out "can I go here? can I go there? Is there a way I can do that?" 
3. Pokemon Red: I never really played JRPGs. I watched other people play them and loved them. I watched my older brother play Mario RPG and Final Fantasy games, but rarely myself played them. That all changed when Pokemon Red came out and changed my mind. I still remember beating the game and my team to this date - Venosaur, Graveler, Pidgeot, Butterfree, Ninetails, Poliwrath. It was the first JPRG I truly loved and enjoyed. I have since played every single mainline Pokemon game and beat most of them. My kids today watch the Pokemon anime, play the Pokemon games and collect the trading cards. 
4. The Sims: I never really loved simulation games when I was younger, because they all felt obtuse. You would do something but never see the tangible reward in front of you immediately. You would build a building, but it would often take time and you would have to have the patience to watch it grow. The Sims provided you an instant tangible reward in a game - if you gave a hug to someone, you saw the ramifications of that hug. What the Sims gave me a greater appreciation of as a child is appreciating those underlying systems. I realized that, much like in a simulation game where you had to wait to watch the building go up, you had to have the patience to see how your actions impacted and rippled through the game. A hug was not just a hug, but the beginning of thousands of interactions. This game is also really important because it was a computer game. I played a lot of computer games growing up, from the original MS-DOS games to Blizzard games like Starcraft and Warcraft and Diablo. PC Gaming is so important to me. 
5. The first four were easy. The last one is tough, because it would have to be a multiplayer game that me and my brothers obsessively played over. But we had so many of these games. Mario Kart, Mario Party, the wrestling games, Destruction Derby, SSX, Tony Hawk, Mortal Kombat... there are too many to name. The first four were most definitely the games I played "the most" as a kid, but also the games that also just happened to be super important for me. The last game I would probably pick would be the original Super Mario Kart on the SNES. It is not the best Mario Kart game. But I remember our family being the first to own this game in the neighborhood. We would have tourneys and battles with kids from the neighborhood. Me and my brothers would play the levels for hours and hours, trying to get the leaf to hop over into one of the safe areas and taunt the other player. 

 

[probablyoliver]

Streets of Rage 2

Final Fantasy VII

Ocarina of Time

Tetris

Metal Gear Solid

[Krabby]

1. Tecmo Super Bowl (NES): The first game I remember playing in my life. I remember coming home from sledding one night and going to my room to play and my hands being so cold I couldn't properly hold the controller/play. I spent countless hours playing it on my own and with my dad. We would put together tournaments and play against each other (if both of your teams advanced to play one another you got to pick and had to give the other team to the other person; no one was allowed to pick the 49ers in most tournaments because they were OP. One of my favorite gaming memories is when I was down 35-38 against my dad - I was the Houston Oilers and I think he was the Rams. I went to kick a 45ish yard Field Goal to tie it except...he freaking blocked it...BUT, I recovered the fumble with my kicker and took it to the house to win. We laughed a lot that day - now we don't talk anymore. 
2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo64): I bought the Gold Edition from a Game Tester whose mom worked with mine at the time. I spent a long time beating the game on my own (Yes, I beat the water temple without help thank you very much. My friends would come over and we'd take turns playing. My dad, even though he was a strictly sports gamer, would play the fishing minigame. At first I would have to get him there, then later he figured it out enough on his own. The story, characters, and setting are so engrossing and the gameplay so much fun. I would later get the strategy guide for Christmas and go back to get all the hearts and stuff I missed on my own.
3. Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII (PS2): I was a huge Dynasty Warriors fan and my buddy got this game and I fell in love with it. My mom took me to Mankato (Hour from our house) and we looked all afternoon to find it only to come up short...we came home and, despondent and desperate, went to our local entertainment store. Lo and freaking behold - they had a copy. I stayed up until 4:00 am playing that night. I played that (and the later iterations) for a disgusting amount of hours - the replayability is insane and it's just a ton of fun. I think ROTK IX was my favorite of all time but 7 was my introduction to the series. 
4. Wrestlemania 2000 (Nintendo64): Another game I poured time into - this was about my high water mark as a wrestling fan for several years. I loved that you could make your own titles and custom wrestlers. I would put together pay per views and tournaments and let them run while I did homework and then mark the results down in a notebook. I made all of Team Canada for awhile I do remember. I also made myself haha. I was still pretty convinced wrestling was real in those days so it's ironic to look back and think about how much I enjoyed booking wrestling without really knowing what I was doing. I also would ran a wrestling league in my notebook during study hall. I long for those days and EWR/TEW/Fire Pro are ways I am trying to recapture that innocent childhood feeling. 
5. Final Fantasy IV (Super Nintendo): I never owned a PS2 but I did learn about emulators and when I went to my aunt's for a few weeks in the summer I took a ton of hard disks and made myself an emulator/rom collection. Amongst those games was Final Fantasy IV (or 2 as it was called then). I had played FF1 years earlier, and loved it, but I wasn't very good at the game because it was my first RPG. FFIV/2 was really the first one that I understood and played (mostly) through. I loved the gameplay concept and the story and world; I would go on to play many more RPGs in my life so far.  Ironically, while this is definitely an influential game I've never actually beaten it! I might have to remedy that sometime soonish.

[Marcos]

If we were to go based on hours played it would just be five versions of Championship Manager/Football Manager, however, making things a bit more unique:

1: Championship Manager 01/02 - I could spend hours playing this without even noticing it.  Since then I think I've bought every CM/FM release since.  

2: Civ III - Reading the Twitter thread Benji posted it seems that Civ III was the 'bad one' of the Civ early games due to it not being done by Sid Meier, but I could still lose myself in the full game and no other Civ before or since has caught my interest like Civ III

3: Broken Sword: The Shadow of Templars - I was slightly late to find Monkey Island and all it's variants, so Broken Sword was really my first point and click to find clues style game.  Plus as a youngster Nico Collard was my first video game crush!

4: Driver - Was my first real driving game and has always just stuck as being addictive and fun!  Sort of when downhill after the first one though

5: Kessen - As you can see, outside of Driver, I was a kid that liked the nerdy stats and tactical style games!  Kessen was another one of those and the first war style game that I played.  Plus it has given me a weird knowledge of Japanese history 

Honourable mentions for Rollerocaster Tycoon 1 and Age of Empires 2 as well.   

 

[Pooker]

Civ II

Diablo 2

WWF No Mercy

WCW/NWO Revenge 

Fifth one is hard. I want to say Double Dribble on the NES, since it was the first basketball game I loved playing. Or it could be The Sims. Or one of the Extreme Warfare games.

[Hajjhowe]

Wrestlemania 2000 (N64)
Madden 99 (N64)
NHL 1997 (Sega)
Kirby's Adventure (NES)
Super Mario Brothers (Atari)

The 3 wrestling games were almost certainly the ones I played the most. My friend and I would create entire 'leagues' and run simulated matches with them. Madden pretty much got me interested in football and was the first game I owned of that genre. NHL was the same idea as Madden and a game I also played a ton of. Kirby was one of my favorite games and probably the first game I beat without using a game genie so it holds a special place to me (Even if in retrospect it was incredibly easy). Finally I don't remember the name but I definitely had some sort of Mario Brothers knock off game that was strictly the enemies spawning from pipes part for Atari and that is probably my earliest video game memory.

Edited May 22, 2020 by Hajjhowe

[The Kraig]

I'm thinking of a very specific period of my life.

1. Halo 2. It became my social life away from school in my late teens and when I started college. I have friends to this day who I have met at festivals and whatnot. I even banged one for a few months. Then about ten years later had a brief relationship with her sister. I mean...that's pretty much the most a game has affected my real life. I would also say I was one of Europe's better players at one point. When you know a game so inside and out you begin to play with just grenades, or just melee attacks, to try to make it harder.

2. Extreme Warfare Revenge. This one kind of explains itself. From being part of this community, to making graphic packs and I believe the first data pack for TEW back in the day, it's in total consumed a lot of my time. I played EWR for so many hours.

3. Pokémon Sapphire. I remember playing this before it came out in Europe and was blown away. I had kind of lost interest in Pokémon since the anime was dragging on and I found Gold/Silver to be relatively disappointing compared to Blue/Red. But when I played Sapphire, it was so fresh and the meta-game took me a long time to understand. To this day I've played through every generation, and currently have a "living Pokédex" with every Pokémon. I am also level 40 (max) on Pokémon Go by playing a little bit each day and sometimes having a Go day. It's immediately satisfying meeting someone who is also into the games. I have considered even recently about entering tournaments.

4. Star Wars: The Knights of the Old Republic. Taking a franchise I had become disinterested in and breathing life into it with a fantastic story and quite frankly, better characters than the original trilogy. This also got me more interested in Western RPGs after being put off by JRPGs for years due to their grinding gameplay. I was going to say Mass Effect, but without KOTOR, I would never have played Jade Empire, Mass Effect or Dragon Age - which are some of my favourite games - if I had never picked up KOTOR in a game shop one day. I hadn't even heard of it. KOTORII was out because I almost bought KOTORII before I spotted KOTOR. Knowing I could go back to the shop and immediately buy the sequel was a rush! Shame it wasn't as good.

5. Football Manager. I'm not picking a year, but some of you may remember I used to update the game data to give the game a more 'real world' feel. I took over the project and massively expanded it to include all competitions and clubs. I remember sitting at my PC for days, going from bed, to PC, to bed working on researching and it made such a huge difference when playing the game. I enjoyed it, but it burnt me out. I lost my enthusiasm to continue the update when I decided I was spending far too much of my time playing FM. https://sortitoutsi.net/ipb-archive/topic/42781/fm10-susie-real-names-&-competition-lnc-fix-beta

I don't even remember making these posts on Susie. But it's definitely me. I must have been exhausted. I considered applying to work for SI at one point. 😂

 

 

So yeah, definitely life-changing games.

[MalaCloudy Black]

Final Fantasy VII
Ocarina of Time (tie between that LTTP)
GTA: San Andreas (tied with GTA: Vice City, probably)
WCW/nWo Revenge
Diablo II

I have fond memories of going to the store, getting a 12 pack of Surge, and then staying up all night playing FF7. That was basically the ages of 13/14 for me. Come home, get my homework done, FF7. Spend all weekend playing FF7. 

Ocarina of Time, my ex-uncle was a truck driver, and he bought a N64 when they came out. Since he was on the road all the time, he left the console - and the only game he had - with me and my brother, and we spent countless hours running around Hyrule. Thought it was the biggest, most expansive game ever at the time. Link To The Past, on the other hand, was the first video game I ever actually owned. Came with the Super Nintendo we got for Christmas in... '93? '94?

Vice City was the first GTA game I ever played, and I liked it a lot, but was blown away by San Andreas. The sheer amount of stuff to do in SA compared to VC was just insane. Also, as someone who was pretty into rap and hip-hop and loved the films Menace II Society and Boyz N The Hood, I thought the setting was way cooler than "Scarface ripoff" (sorry not sorry, Vice City).

WCW/nWo Revenge, my friend had. I spent at least two or three summers at his house while my parents were at work and we played this game pretty much non-stop. La Parka forever.

Diablo II was one of the first PC games I owned. Got a Diablo/Diablo II pack and at first, I was overwhelmed by D2, but then I got online and started looking around. I saw these builds people were doing and learned about the secret cow level and I'm pretty sure I copied some cookie-cutter Paladin build and managed to get pretty good at the game. 

[arwrestling]

1. WWF SmackDown 2: Know Your Role - I loved this game. I played it as recently as 2 years ago. It's a fun nostalgic trip. Big roster for the time, the career mode never got boring (despite it being 8 matches Raw - 8 Matches SD  - 8 Raw - 8 SD - 8 on PPV, next month). It's the first WWE game I owned and we played it sooooo much. I'm surprised the disk still works. 
2. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance - I wasn't sure what version of MK to put, as I've been playing the series since the first one came out on the Super NES. But I went with this one as it was a game changer with the 3D graphics and fighting world, the story mode, create a fighter, etc. Its the game that really made me learn and get into the mythology of the series.
3. The Sims - All iterations really, but the original Sims introduced the series to me and I still play Sims 4 on the regular. 
4. Extreme Warfare Revenge - Goes without saying how important it's been. Brought me here, years ago, and I've played it to death. Legacy continues to this day with TEW 20.
5. Pokemon Red/Blue - Interchangeable here, my brother and I each had one and we swapped them constantly. I've gone back to it more than once over the last 20 years, and between Pokemon Sun, Pokemon Go and Pokemone Shield.. not to mention countless fan made versions for the Emulators. It's been a series that played a large part of my gaming life. 

[Pooker]

After reading a couple other replies, I should probably take out one of the wrestling games and throw in either one of the Madden games on the N64 or Knights of the Old Republic. Both games/series that I spent a ton of time playing.

[Katsuya]

1. Pokemon Red - I remember to this day the frustration when, in my first play through, I got all the way to Agatha with pretty much just an overpowered Venusaur and she wiped the floor with me.
2. Jumping Flash - First console game, still one of my absolute faves to go back and play. Such a fun and wacky platformer and it set me up (along with Pandemonium) to really love that type of game for a while.
3. WCW/NWO Revenge / Wrestlemania 2000 - I played both of them equally even if I got Revenge first, I guess. They're both so, so good, and I never had No Mercy to compare them to either, so I think that has made them much more special over time.
4. Championship Manager - Days, Weeks, hell probably months of my life have been spent on CM 97/98 and CM 01/02. 
5. EWR - It was EWR or Halo and to be honest EWR probably just pips it out, for pretty obvious reasons.

[OctoberRaven]

1. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem- Still my all-time favorite game to this day, and jump-started my love for cosmic horror

2. Fire Pro Wrestling GBA- My introduction to the best wrestling game series of all time.

3. EWR 3.0- My gateway to the second best wrestling game series of all time... Total Extreme Wrestling. Oh and the third I guess.

4. Pokemon Red- My introduction to JRPGs.

5. Killer Instinct- While I didn't realize it at the time, this was the earliest cyberpunk game I remember playing.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

I THINK on Facebook I said:

Metal Gear Solid

Sensible World of Soccer

Monkey Island

Tomb Raider 2

....and now I can't remember the other one. 😔

[Naitch]

Sly 2: Band of Thieves - I loved this game when I first came across it and have since played the franchise multiple times. I just started the first game again last weekend with the intention of getting the Platinum trophy on Slys 1-3 and the minigames, because I've already got it on 4.

Smackdown vs. Raw 2007 - This is the game that got me into wrestling.

Football Manager 2012 - I still play it, literally put at least two hours into a Monaco save today.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - I think I've completed Oblivion two or three times. As in, 100% completed including Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. It would be more if the graphics didn't look so outdated now but I don't think that'll stop me from coming back to it once I force myself through the main Morrowind story (Morrowind gameplay really hasn't aged well). In contrast, I still haven't completed the Civil War questline on Skyrim nor started any of the DLC bits.

GTA: San Andreas - I was several years late but loved the game regardless. It eventually led me into GTAs IV and V, the latter of which was the last game I bought on release.

Honourable mentions go to Populous: The Beginning, Crash Team Racing, FIFA 02 & 04, PES 4-6, Worms World Party, and THPS1 from my pre-teen years.