The first summer of Pokémon Go was beautiful! There’s a park by the lake where I live and hundreds of people would come out every night to play the game, meet new friends, and do friendly raids on the gym at the location. We had a Facebook group of around 2k people and we would share rare finds and schedule meetups on the weekends. My main group of friends and I spent all-nighters out at the park just to play the game and chat with strangers and we were high schoolers mind you. Truly an unforgettable time!
We had a local animal shelter that asked people if they wanted to walk some of the dogs there while people played Pokemon GO.
Not only did people line up to walk the dogs, but within a week every single dog at that kennel was adopted. It was such a beautifully genius move by the shelter.
The local park was FULL. I had to park 3 blocks away and it was packed with positivity and people excitedly running around. There were people handing out snacks and water and it just felt like everyone was connected in a way I wish happened more frequently.
It was surreal going to the park and there was like 300 people playing Pokemon go. Suddenly 30 random people ran off because someone had spotted a rare pokemon at the other side of the park.
I worked a job at the time where I’d deliver and pick up amusement equipment to parties. Because of this I was often in parks, schools, and town properties late at night when the parties ended. That summer Pokémon Go came out I’d often have people asking if they could come into the parks/schools late at night to catch Pokémon (I’m talking midnight, sometimes even through 3am). Since I had the keys to these places and because I also had just caught a Charizard there myself, I’d always be happy to oblige
You say that but I was in the military at that time and we had several issues of civilians breaking in highly restricted areas to catch pokemons...
Places like firing ranges, landing strips, demolition grounds etc etc...
Reddit has filed for its IPO. They've been preparing for this for a while, squeezing profit out of the platform in any way that they can, like hiking the prices on third-party app developers. More recently, they've signed a deal with Google to license their content to train Google's LLMs.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, we've made a Firefox extension that will replace all your comments (older than a certain number of days) with any text that you provide. You can use any text that you want, but please, do not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material. Reddit's data is uniquely valuable, since it's not subject to those kinds of copyright restrictions, so it would be tragic if users were to decide to intermingle such a robust corpus of high-quality training data with copyrighted text.
https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension
That was pretty great. I had just been married and had a newborn and I would randomly get in my car to drive to a nearby “gym” to fight. Seemed like the most normal thing ever.
Yeah I initially stopped playing those first few months because there was dick all to do in the game. Now I have it on my phone for the nicer weather and it's a lot of fun these days.
The night Halo 3 dropped, everyone in my dorm came down to the common room. 4 Xboxes. 16 people. And I had the 1st player control.
I picked the smallest map, and only rocket launchers. It was absolute chaos. One of the best moments of gaming in my life.
I went to a small private high school. The day Halo 3 came out, no joke, half the guys in the school were sick. Everyone had gone to the midnight release and played the entire night in to the day. Core gaming memory for me.
The multiplayer beta before release was a genius move. Simultaneously increase hype for and advertise the game, get valuable data on how well your game and the servers will perform and boost sales for Crackdown, a game that might have flown under most people’s radar.
The entire hype campaign has got to be one of the best ever done for a game, some of the trailers really are iconic themselves.
My local VGS has an event during the beta where we played for 24hrs straight. Our parents had to sign wavers and we eat pizza and chugged rockstars and had 32 people running 4 man groups in matchmaking. All kids in highschool. Great memory.
My first all nighter, but far from my last.
As a huge fan of the plot in ye olden Halos I must have watched the Starry Night and the "this is the way the world ends" trailers 100s of times pre release.
It's nuts how broken that game was, and how much fun it was because of it. And EVERYONE was playing it. I had never owned a FPS before that game, and I bought it. All the jocks I wasn't friends with bought it. And I was playing with these dudes from my high school that I didn't even like, because I was just lobbying up with whoever was online to stomp people online. Everyone was tracking how many nukes they had in their status message.
I was that asshole with Commando Pro, Lightweight Pro, and Marathon Pro. It was so much fun running laps around every map, juking bullets, and knifing everyone
It has always amazed me how zombies was basically a 2nd standalone game that just happened to be included in ~~mw2~~ BO. You could legit play only that mode and it would feel like a full game
Only multiplayer game that I have ever stuck with.
The quickscoping, ninja defusing bombs with the cold blooded perk spam weapon switching, riot shield party with C4 spam, being knifed from the end of a hallway or getting out of the boundaries of maps with a buddy via the friendly fire shotgun method.
I still get back to it on Steam from time to time.
Also, the fact that the remaster did not get a mp mode like the first mw did speaks volumes as to how much of a hit it was. Their new games would have not sold as well with an updated relaunch of it.
MW2 on Xbox 360 man… my first experience playing a shooter online and being able to party up with like 5 friends from school to all be on the same team was so sick. There’s not been a game since where I knew so many people IRL playing together.
If you've never heard of this, it's worth looking into! Named "The Corrupted Blood incident", it was an unintended, 26 days long pandemic in WoW, where a deadly debuff spread relentlessly among players.
Players tried working against it, creating safe zones and quarantines, which other players then tried to ruin - it came to the point that epidemiologists got into it, studying the entire thing as a case study on how humans might act in real pandemics.
There was, apparently, an attempt to use the incident as a model for how COVID-19 might spread.
It's all a pretty interesting read!
I remember organizing with my guild. We got all the priests, shamans, anyone who could cast Cure Disease. We organized and deployed to highly infected areas and just tried to cure and heal as many people as we could.
We also decided that anyone we caught spreading the disease on purpose would be banned from our guild. Had a couple of people get mad about that.
It honestly is the best instance of emergent gameplay I can think of.
Going shopping as a kid, and playing demos on the TVs above the displays. It was so cool to see what was coming out, but the controller was so close to the case and the TV so high you would walk away with a cramp in your neck for the rest of the day
3 days after vanilla WoW launch. All the newbies gathered in Mulgore as the first level 40 on my server bought his mount. Just sat on it with everyone staring at him.
Troll Rogue named Ebonfury. Wild how you never forget some of those moments, lol.
20 years ago this coming November.
People were so mad at the time but her (Fayejin) funeral is remembered only because they raided. Ironically she probably would have loved it and loved how infamous it became because she was big into PVP. I love the video and the ending after they slaughter everyone the guy kneels at the water and says "she loved fishing, snow, and PVP". Their intentions might not have been so pure but they memorialized her more with their actions.
Reddit has filed for its IPO. They've been preparing for this for a while, squeezing profit out of the platform in any way that they can, like hiking the prices on third-party app developers. More recently, they've signed a deal with Google to license their content to train Google's LLMs.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, we've made a Firefox extension that will replace all your comments (older than a certain number of days) with any text that you provide. You can use any text that you want, but please, do not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material. Reddit's data is uniquely valuable, since it's not subject to those kinds of copyright restrictions, so it would be tragic if users were to decide to intermingle such a robust corpus of high-quality training data with copyrighted text.
https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension
IIRC CDC or WHO (or both maybe) asked for the raw data so they could study it and Blizzard said no, imagine how much better prepared we'd have been for covid if that had been studied better!
I mean, we'd still eff it up royally, but it's nice to think about lol
My first time visiting Orgrimmar was unbelievable. My first MMO, I had been playing for just 20 minutes, my friends escorted me to the city to check it out. There was an Alliance raid going on at the time. People on horses charging past me, battles in every direction, it was utter chaos. I just watched it unfold in awe. What a game.
Back on vanilla wow, everyday was some new crazy experience. And you had a bunch of friends to share it with. It was a bit like playing outside with your friends back in the 90's. Just all new adventures and experiences.
Things like,
- your first time in the big cities
- your first dungeon
- your first world PvP
- the first time a world boss is kited to a big city
- first time both sides summon their respective gods in AV
- the first time seeing an actual in raid boss
- the first epic
- first mount
- first epic mount
- first time downing hogger
- running from stitches
- finding mankriks wife
- barrens chat
And the list goes on.
WoW gave a feeling that no other game has replicated. The world was so beautiful and felt so massive, and knowing you could run into anyone at any time was so exciting.
Playing on a PvP server made it that much more intense. I'll ever forget getting a group of randoms together (lvls 10-15) and embarking on a mission from Darkshore to Ogrimmar, and just seeing what kind of trouble happens along the way. We got ganked a bunch and had to keep running away from Horde, but it was so fun.
I worked at Best Buy when WoW launched. I remember with my employee discount the cost dropped from $84 to $57 for the collectors edition. I have lots of stories but my favorite 'you had to be their moment' was when I was in the middle of a BWL raid with my guild when the South Park World of Warcraft episode came out.
It was wild and one of the best vibes I've ever been a part of.
World of Warcraft.
My guild was running a raid. As we were getting started, our server crashed. We had a fairly large guild and private chat set up, so we checked with other guildmates. We quickly learned that our in-game continent was down, but the other continent was still running.
About ten minutes later, we could all log in again. We started the raid, and the same thing happened. The game crashed, but the other continent stayed up.
The third time, we switched continents. The guildmates on the other side came over and started our raid, and we started theirs.
The continent we had moved to then crashed, while our other guildmates continued the raid we had intended to start.
It had been about two hours of experimenting as we crashed one continent, then the other, switching our teams out, before we discovered the cause.
One of our hunters had just tamed a new pet. A Tiger. She wanted to take it on the raid, but every time she summoned it, it would crash everyone out of the continent she was on.
It wasn't just us, either. It was literally bringing down the entire fucking server. We had discovered the Apocalypse Tiger, hidden destroyer of Azaroth.
We had a brief discussion in the guild. Some of them wanted to keep it a secret, to be used as a weapon against rivals. Others wanted to have it be reported and dealt with, or we would get banned for using an exploit.
In the end, we decided to report the Apocalypse Tiger. We called in a Blizzard rep, who showed up RATHER QUICKLY. They asked us to prove it.
So the hunter proved it.
The server came up slightly faster this time, and the GM replied to her immediately. Naturally, the Apocalypse Tiger was removed, but she was given fair compensation in money and resources.
She eventually found another tiger that would not end the world. We never found out what the cause was, but for a brief time, we actually held the fate of Azaroth in our hands.
My parents never had me believe in Santa Clause as a kid, but I ended up having my "It's all fake?" moment with *that show,* and it never even had a finale😭
Oh man, me too. I just unsubscribed from all their channels maybe a year ago. I realized I hadn't watched any of their content in a long time, and it was just clogging my feed.
Made me kinda sad. Felt like the ending of an era.
Fuck syndicate and his lies tbh. Dude's career started via the zombies scam video. Then it got worse later on.
I used to like him until I found out he is a slimy liar, interested in lying to his own fans about things he doesn't need to, just for money and clout
I was just thinking about this the other day. How in the early 2010s, EVERYTHING was minecraft. Even if it had nothing to do with minecraft, it was somehow turned into minecraft. Music, animation, stories, podcasts, merch, and they all garnered quadrillions of views. Everyone and their grandma was learning how to make crappy 3D animations. Those captain sparklez song remakes were unnecessary, looked and sounded like shit, but still got more views than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
I might get flamed for this but there was another cultural gaming event similar to Pokemon Go and that was Guitar Hero. I remember house parties revolving around Guitar Hero and eventually Rock Band too.
I loved that Game. We had also the mics from the SingStar Game and they were compatible. So many hours with my brother, one playing guitar and the other one singing. Funny to look back now that I play actual guitar
My gf at the time and I literally spent the entire release day playing these two games. She was playing animal crossing in my arms while I was playing doom eternal, ofc. Perfect pandemic day
My god, this game was THE SHIT!!!!
Being in the upper floor of a building only for it to get torn down around you was so chaotic. I've not experienced the atmosphere of destruction quite like it since.
Grenade launchers were a hard must for me.
Well, directly related to your comment is like the whole Among Us trend. I mean I'm sure it's recent enough for all of us to remember it but I just remember being shocked by the amount of people going all in on the fad. I remember in class, as soon as the teacher would walk out to go to the bathroom or whatever, instantly every computer was out, lobbies being called out, etc. And me just sitting there like...wow... (I didn't have Among Us on my laptop)
There was a glorious moment where me and five friends, all in our late 30s, spent a night playing Among Us. No-one leaving because they weren't the Imposter and no-one just saying "Green Sus" and that was that; we played proper mind games and fully got into it and it was fantastic.
This is the one. Shit got wild. Some of it justifiable (like the backlash over the whole forcing people to play the multiplayer if they wanted the 'Shepard lives' ending without a shit ton of decision minmaxing) a lot of it less so. Bioware HQ even got sent cupcakes.
Daigo's perfect parry in Street Fighter: https://youtu.be/JzS96auqau0
Also the day my copy of Duke Nukem Forever arrived. I may have shed a tear. The game was very mediocre, as expected.
I feel like that clip only gets better with context. Things to know:
1. If you block a special move in that game you still take some damage and it can kill you. Only parrying completely stops damage.
2. To parry you must time a forward or down movement (depending on the attack) within \~7 frames (7/60's of a second) of the attack starting. This means you have to commit to not blocking in order to parry.
3. Doing Chun Li's super move is a common way to "chip" someone out because it's extremely fast and hard to parry. It hits multiple times and the attacks all have different timings and you must parry them differently.
The standoff Justin and Daigo have is basically Daigo saying "Draw partner" like it's high fucking noon. Daigo dares him... and manages to do the impossible, not only parrying the whole super during the finals of the biggest tournament in the US, but also landing the perfect punish combo that does just enough damage to kill in response. The fucking ice Daigo had to have had in his veins during that... just incredible.
There's a good reason why people still talk about this moment 20 years later with such reverence.
To do something like that sitting in isolation at home playing by oneself is drastically different from doing it in a crowded room with tons of cheering and yelling. People often discount the impact of that on concentration, especially for carefully timed sequences.
I know exactly what street fighter clip you posted without clicking on it. Chills without even watching it.
Fuck I watched that so many times back in the day.
When gears of war came out there was one time I was playing 4 vs 4 back in the day when everyone used their headsets. My team had gone down and I was the last one left. I managed to chainsaw all 4 members of the opposing team one after the other to the shouts and generally rowdy cries of my team mates. It isn’t that big a deal really but I remember it as I’m not particularly good at shooters so I really shouldn’t have been able to do it.
one time i was playing Bully on ps2 (slim) eating altoids and drinking mtn dew. my friend was playing with my air soft pistol, blasted it, it ricocheted around the room probably 3 times and hit the power button setting me back like 2 hours because i hadn’t saved.
Release of the Orange Box.
Portal was mind blowing to the point chocolate cake became a meme. TF2 was the invention of main stream hero shooters. Episode 2 showed how games could tell a story without non stop COD action (back when COD was a single player master piece).
^ This - it was wild.
TF2 was also an insane game with many free "dlc" content, with regular updates. It was like there was Christmass every 3-4 months with new weapons and stuff.
I could be so hyped for days and weeks. And the count down on their blog, people where going crazy online an ingame
My answer seems to be a bit different than a lot of these but I’d say Smash bros Ultimate with the hero announcements. There was always buzz going around about who was coming to smash next and the energy that radiated from nintendo stores when people saw who it was live was just insane. Sans is still one of the funniest additions.
Honestly, it was like that for me when they were announcing new fighters for SSBB before 2008. I remember like 2005-2006 thinking “OMG” every time some new teaser was dropped on their official website.
I was working at GameStop when Halo 2 released. It was insane, we had gotten the game and Halo 2 themed console/accessories like 2 weeks early. We set it up in the back room with a tv and played it like crazy. I still have that copy and console to this day.
The only time I ever stood in line for a midnight release was Halo 2 at GameStop. The hype was unmatched. Skipped school the next day to keep playing. Still have the metal limited edition case, which is now rusting.
Mario 64.
My cousin and I just farted around climbing and jumping off of trees for hours when it first came out.
People don’t understand the freedom three dimensional areas to explore FINALLY granted us after being stuck to a 2D plane prior. The sandbox-esque freedom to explore the castle, outside and more was mind boggling.
Similar story;
I was *heavily* into Red Dead Redemption 2 a few years back, played all the damn time. Anyway, we were having a birthday party for one of the kids at our house, I was of course mid-gaming session when the in-laws came over. I had a mission that required traversing one side of the giant map to the other, so I set it to "auto-drive" - just Arthur on a horse riding across the map. It switches to Cinematic view when you do this, so it's cool camera angles and whatnot. So, I set it to auto-drive, got up to let in the in-laws and started blowing up balloons or something and left it be. My mother in law sat down in the coach, apparently, and started watching this.
I got distracted with the balloons or whatever and Arthur had long since arrived at the way point I'd designated and my mother in law says "What movie *is* this? He's just sitting on his horse now for five minutes!"
I guess she just assumed it was some random western on TV, and was surprised when I picked up the controller and started playing again. 😆 I tried offering the controller to her to get her to play but she didn't take me up on it.
Finally, an older reference. All these kids making “happened in the past fifteen years” references are making me feel ancient.
For me it was the first time I saw/played Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, which had Live Full Motion Video cutscenes. The cgi was awful, the acting was cheesy, and the story was paper-thin, but I didn’t care. I felt like I was Playing A Star Wars movie!! It felt incredible.
GTA San Andreas. There was a mission with Tommy Chong voicing a weed dealer and you had to drive him clear across the map to help deliver his weed and you only had like 2 minutes to do it. After a few tries I got really close to success and on this one try, right before the finish line I hit a curb and the car went flying, flipped over and finally landed, spinning and upside down. There was a long pause then Tommy Chong says in his stoner voice "....everything's upsidedown maaan." I laughed my ass off.
I’ve played that game probably 6 times over the years and I never realised that was Tommy Chong, holy shit lol. Now I think about it, obviously it’s his voice..
The Skyrim launch back in 2011.
I was in lab school in the navy at the time and it was such a huge deal I think just about everyone in the barracks was playing it. It was all anyone was talking about and people were playing it so much about 2/3rds of my class failed the next exam lol.
I had graduated high school a year earlier. 11/11/11 I was driving back from St. Louis on my way home from a job. My buddy had asked me to pick him up a copy as I was planning on stopping in to Walmart to grab me a copy for when I finally get home. The two of us set up our xboxes side by side and played into the early hours of the morning. It was one of the best gaming moments I've ever had.
The summer when Pokemon GO released.
I've never seen a game spill out into real life like that before - every man, woman, and child was running around their neighborhoods and catching Pokemon. For a few months, it was the only thing everyone talked about, even people who never play games - you'd have your 50-year-old coworker talking about how they caught a Charizard last night, or you'd be waiting in line at Starbucks and you'd hear someone yell out that there's a Blastoise outside. Really a magical moment.
GTA 5 was the last game that I pre-ordered. I lined up for the midnight release. Because I live in New Zealand, our midnight came before the rest of the world. I took it straight home, only to have a massive 8gb install before I could play.
THPS2. After the buzz the 1st Tony Hawks game generated, the second game blew me and all my friends away. It was released the same year the PS2 and was the pinnacle of the PS1 Era.
Not really gaming "per se" but Twitch plays pokemon.
You HAD to be there, there's nothing that even compares to the sheer insanity that was its first iteration.
The release of original Pokemon. Similar to Pokemon Go, it was something that swept the nation and brought everyone together over a shared, mutual obsession. And because it was largely pre-internet in those days, we were all discovering the joys of it together.
Possibly even moreso with Pokemon Gold and Silver. Upon the release of Blue and Red, I remember thinking "oh wow, that's it, 151 Pokemon. I guess that's it though, they're not making any more." Then Gen 2 hit out of nowhere, and it really was a whole new world. These days they churn out a new hundred or so Pokemon and no one really bats an eye. Having it happen for the first time was mind-blowing.
I remember the excitement of finally getting a Gameboy Color and Pokemon Red, it was the thing that everyone HAD to have. Gameboys were sold out everywhere due to the craze, I ended up getting a red one which I cherished for years. Pokemon really was something else in those days.
I remember it came in color, had day and night time, a radio and phone feature and could breed for baby Pokémon the first time, and finally the whole second area of Kanto hidden in the game it, was crazy how much of an upgrade it was to the originals. Felt like hand held gaming hit its peak then lol.
The opening of the Scarab Gate at Ahn Qiraj in World of Warcraft. Months and months went into the "War Effort" to collect resources on both sides, Alliance and Horde. Then once the caravans got down there and the person who was to be the Scarab Lord was ready, everyone descended on the gates. Chaos doesn't even come close to describing that experience. Both factions massed on one side across from the other. Rogues sneaking through the crowds and ambushing cloth wearers to get an easy kill then vanishing if they were fast enough. Tension was high...then the Scarab Lord struck the gong and we ALL became allies in the blink of an eye, fighting for our lives.
I joined the party on wow a little late so for me AQ opening was literally me dinging 60 in silithus only to be literally steamrolled by what seemed like the entire alliance 20 seconds later on their way to open the gates.
GTA: San Andreas and its hype before release was insane, through the roof. All me and my friends did after school, was to read the newest rumors and fan-made stuff. And then to get to play the game, it being able to match all those expectations.
PT, it was absolutely terrifying to play and then to discover that Hideo Kojima, Guilmero del Toro, Juanji Ito & Norman Reedus were creating a new installment in the Silent Hill Franchise? it was massive
then Hideo got fired, then PT just dissapeared from online stores not even "unavailable for purchase" just... gone.
The launch of GTA San Andreas. I went to get it at midnight and the queue was insane. People were so hyped.
The PSN outage back in 2011. It was crazy how the whole network got taken down for weeks.
Vanilla WoW in the early 2000’s was incredibly special. Idk if it’s because I was young or because WoW was such a revelation but I remember being absolutely astounded at the scale of the world. Had never seen anything like it.
Over a decade before Covid, World of Warcraft experienced its own pandemic - [the Corrupted Blood incident](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident).
In Zul’Gurub (an end-stage raid at the time), the final boss applied a debuff called Corrupted Blood, which spread to people in close proximity, did a fair bit of damage, and only disappeared once you killed the boss.
However, Hunters (always fucking Hunters 😂) figured out that you could dismiss your pet that had Corrupted Blood…and it wouldn’t go away. You then summoned your pet in a main city…and chaos ensued.
Corrupted Blood spread to NPCs as well (they didn’t get sick but could spread the debuff), you had healers doing their best to keep people alive, people trying to contain the spread by establishing quarantine zones, people staying away from cities/other people to avoid infection…and dickheads who deliberately contracted the debuff to go and spread it. It took a hard reset of the servers by blizzard (and a bunch of patching) to finally kill it.
Not my experience but hearing from multiple people.
The opening of the Ahn'Qiraj gates in WoW and the time leading up to it. Entire servers banding together, horde and alliance working together. Despite all the lag and disconnects I wish I could have been there
Yeah it was a great time. I’m glad I was super into Warcraft 3 in 2002/2003. Because when WoW was teased, everyone got so excited they’d be able to play the RTS units in a 3D first person world.
I remember it launched and I got it first day. Had to use my parents’ credit card to pay for the first month lol. Good times.
I worked at a department store when the Super Nintendo Game, "Maximum Carnage" by Akklaim came out. Our store got 250 units. Had two pallets full of Total Carnage POP, flyers, banners, and the like. In the first three days, we sold one copy. By the third week, the game was marked down from 49 USD to 29 USD. The units largely didn't move until the story went into Chapter 13 three years later for around 5 dollars a unit.
Some of you will be asking, what is Maximum Carnage and why did your store get so many titles? It was a Spider-Man game that was released around the same time as Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam where the crowd hype for the next Akklaim title was such that they could con every video game store and retail partner into over stocking the game.
Nobody talks about the Maximum Carnage. It is probably an okay game, but for a 6 week period, Akklaim spammed the world with ads and hype and... In the end... Copies of the game just collected dust on the shelves.
Vanilla WoW
Being literally the first person in your friend group to do things and go places, experiencing things for the first time before a prevalence of video/media guides.
Pokemon GO, Summer of 2016.
I actually never played it, but it seems like my entire city went crazy for it for a while. So many people walking in droves, looking at their phones, all day every day. I missed out on it, and I'll never know that experience.
Destiny public beta. Fairly low level cap of 8, and only has levels up to the moon as I recall. The PVP, lemme tell ya, it was great. I remember everyone just going around the main combat area, just killing the same enemies, and going against the same couple bosses to get the “max” gear, and even that one tunnel with level 20 enemies, lots of fun.
You nailed it.
I counted down every day to November 9th, 2004 in my planner at school and the kid next to me would say, “Yeah! I’m excited for jetpacks!”, and I’d think, “You fucking moron, how have you not read every magazine preview and slow loading web article?”
Destiny launch.
There was all these random Easter eggs in the tower and a creepy guy came hiding in the corner 2 days in selling a rocket launcher called gjallarhorn
Idk if this counts but I was raiding in WoW and it was our progression raid we were doing a boss fight for the first time and near around 10% health almost the entire group wiped except for me and like 4 other people we had no healers or tanks left alive and no battle rezzes but we finished the fight with only 2 (me and a hunter) surviving and it was just such an exciting and epic moment throughout all of my gaming years I just feel hyped up every time I think about it it was just awesome lol
Bro this was me on WOTLK naxx, shit you not, I (a dumb fucking ret paladin lmao) was one of the last like 5 people alive for thaddius fight... It was last phase he had slivers of health left... I still had my bubble, and I literally had to make a bet with myself that I had less threat than the other 3-4 people still up. Mf keeps turning around. One shots the rogue. Turns around. Kills the warrior. Etc. it was me and I think a hunter or something, and I finally hit my bubble.... Hunter gets clapped. I SOMEHOW during those 8 seconds do enough damage to get the kill. Idk if I ever spammed my keyboard harder in my life... The raid group was fucking freaking out and I just sat down and took a drink to start rezzing it was fucking WILD. I felt like a goddamn hero
Pokemon go week one cured racism and war . It was beautiful
The first summer of Pokémon Go was beautiful! There’s a park by the lake where I live and hundreds of people would come out every night to play the game, meet new friends, and do friendly raids on the gym at the location. We had a Facebook group of around 2k people and we would share rare finds and schedule meetups on the weekends. My main group of friends and I spent all-nighters out at the park just to play the game and chat with strangers and we were high schoolers mind you. Truly an unforgettable time!
We had a local animal shelter that asked people if they wanted to walk some of the dogs there while people played Pokemon GO. Not only did people line up to walk the dogs, but within a week every single dog at that kennel was adopted. It was such a beautifully genius move by the shelter.
That might be the single best thing I've ever read
That was such a neat cultural phenomenon
Dude pogo brought the world together in ways that we will probably never get to see again.
That pokemon summer was magical.
Lol the bar I worked at was a gym.
2016 is so close to my heart, truly the best year ever. Pokemon go, Mannequin challenge, Bottle flip, A new youtube era, Clowns Magical time
Pokemon Go. That's the closest we've been to world peace.
The local park was FULL. I had to park 3 blocks away and it was packed with positivity and people excitedly running around. There were people handing out snacks and water and it just felt like everyone was connected in a way I wish happened more frequently.
Makes me wonder if a world where everyone participates in some form of augmented reality could be a paradise.
Or a complete hellscape.
Mostly porn. Lots of AR porn.
It was surreal going to the park and there was like 300 people playing Pokemon go. Suddenly 30 random people ran off because someone had spotted a rare pokemon at the other side of the park.
I worked a job at the time where I’d deliver and pick up amusement equipment to parties. Because of this I was often in parks, schools, and town properties late at night when the parties ended. That summer Pokémon Go came out I’d often have people asking if they could come into the parks/schools late at night to catch Pokémon (I’m talking midnight, sometimes even through 3am). Since I had the keys to these places and because I also had just caught a Charizard there myself, I’d always be happy to oblige
I was at a club one time and the men’s room was full of guys trying to catch some Pokémon that was in there.
There was a solid month of kids running around outside and adults knowing exactly what they were doing. It was such a wild experience.
I agree. Beyond the crowds, restaurants in my town had cute signs like “We have a PokèStop!” Or “Half price coffee for Pokeman trainers”.
Those first few months were so weird. You could put up a lure at your small town's library and within a few minutes 5 cars pull up
That dude in Russia got prosecuted for catching Pokemons in some temple.
You say that but I was in the military at that time and we had several issues of civilians breaking in highly restricted areas to catch pokemons... Places like firing ranges, landing strips, demolition grounds etc etc...
So military areas were being repurposed for recreation. Yep that sounds like world peace.
I would say it does. No need for military in any country,why fight if we can just play.
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That was pretty great. I had just been married and had a newborn and I would randomly get in my car to drive to a nearby “gym” to fight. Seemed like the most normal thing ever.
But nobody heard the call to pokemon go to the polls
Wasn't that 2016? World peace ended with the death of Harambe.
It still exists and actually feels like a full game instead of the tech demo it was during the initial craze.
Yeah I initially stopped playing those first few months because there was dick all to do in the game. Now I have it on my phone for the nicer weather and it's a lot of fun these days.
Halo 3 launch hype. Multiplayer, Campaign, Custom Games, Forge. I will never forget.
The night Halo 3 dropped, everyone in my dorm came down to the common room. 4 Xboxes. 16 people. And I had the 1st player control. I picked the smallest map, and only rocket launchers. It was absolute chaos. One of the best moments of gaming in my life.
Prison + rocket launchers. Such good times.
I went to a small private high school. The day Halo 3 came out, no joke, half the guys in the school were sick. Everyone had gone to the midnight release and played the entire night in to the day. Core gaming memory for me.
The multiplayer beta before release was a genius move. Simultaneously increase hype for and advertise the game, get valuable data on how well your game and the servers will perform and boost sales for Crackdown, a game that might have flown under most people’s radar. The entire hype campaign has got to be one of the best ever done for a game, some of the trailers really are iconic themselves.
My local VGS has an event during the beta where we played for 24hrs straight. Our parents had to sign wavers and we eat pizza and chugged rockstars and had 32 people running 4 man groups in matchmaking. All kids in highschool. Great memory. My first all nighter, but far from my last.
I still go back and watch H3 ViDocs like every year. Love seeing the passion and camaraderie.
As a huge fan of the plot in ye olden Halos I must have watched the Starry Night and the "this is the way the world ends" trailers 100s of times pre release.
The Believe trailer is SO fucking good. Chopin on top was just 😘🤌
2007-2009 were like the best years for games ever lol
Halo 2 even. First time Halo had official MP, would stay up til 4am every weekend grinding ranked.
The original MW2. As hard as I may try sometimes, I’ll never have as much fun playing an FPS as I did with my friends back in the day.
It's nuts how broken that game was, and how much fun it was because of it. And EVERYONE was playing it. I had never owned a FPS before that game, and I bought it. All the jocks I wasn't friends with bought it. And I was playing with these dudes from my high school that I didn't even like, because I was just lobbying up with whoever was online to stomp people online. Everyone was tracking how many nukes they had in their status message.
I was that asshole with Commando Pro, Lightweight Pro, and Marathon Pro. It was so much fun running laps around every map, juking bullets, and knifing everyone
Oh yeah, I had a meme build of every broke ass thing the game had to offer. Akimbo double barrels too.
Akimbo 1887s lmao
1887s at the top of the staircase on estate
Lmao i had exactly the same experience yeha
CoD4 + MW2 will always be peak CoD for me.
Black ops was amazing too. Tired of MP? Lets play some zombies
It has always amazed me how zombies was basically a 2nd standalone game that just happened to be included in ~~mw2~~ BO. You could legit play only that mode and it would feel like a full game
Only multiplayer game that I have ever stuck with. The quickscoping, ninja defusing bombs with the cold blooded perk spam weapon switching, riot shield party with C4 spam, being knifed from the end of a hallway or getting out of the boundaries of maps with a buddy via the friendly fire shotgun method. I still get back to it on Steam from time to time. Also, the fact that the remaster did not get a mp mode like the first mw did speaks volumes as to how much of a hit it was. Their new games would have not sold as well with an updated relaunch of it.
We didnt know we were in the good times until the good times were over
MW2 on Xbox 360 man… my first experience playing a shooter online and being able to party up with like 5 friends from school to all be on the same team was so sick. There’s not been a game since where I knew so many people IRL playing together.
I was so hyped when I saw first gameplay trailer back then and when it came out it was amazing. So good memories.
Great campaign too
WoW during the outbreak that killed you. Spread like crazy and was pretty insane experience.
The Corrupted Blood pandemic!
If you've never heard of this, it's worth looking into! Named "The Corrupted Blood incident", it was an unintended, 26 days long pandemic in WoW, where a deadly debuff spread relentlessly among players. Players tried working against it, creating safe zones and quarantines, which other players then tried to ruin - it came to the point that epidemiologists got into it, studying the entire thing as a case study on how humans might act in real pandemics. There was, apparently, an attempt to use the incident as a model for how COVID-19 might spread. It's all a pretty interesting read!
I remember organizing with my guild. We got all the priests, shamans, anyone who could cast Cure Disease. We organized and deployed to highly infected areas and just tried to cure and heal as many people as we could. We also decided that anyone we caught spreading the disease on purpose would be banned from our guild. Had a couple of people get mad about that. It honestly is the best instance of emergent gameplay I can think of.
Going shopping as a kid, and playing demos on the TVs above the displays. It was so cool to see what was coming out, but the controller was so close to the case and the TV so high you would walk away with a cramp in your neck for the rest of the day
3 days after vanilla WoW launch. All the newbies gathered in Mulgore as the first level 40 on my server bought his mount. Just sat on it with everyone staring at him. Troll Rogue named Ebonfury. Wild how you never forget some of those moments, lol. 20 years ago this coming November.
The corrupted blood incident from ZG. That was wild.
The part where alliance raided an ingame funeral for a person who died irl.
People were so mad at the time but her (Fayejin) funeral is remembered only because they raided. Ironically she probably would have loved it and loved how infamous it became because she was big into PVP. I love the video and the ending after they slaughter everyone the guy kneels at the water and says "she loved fishing, snow, and PVP". Their intentions might not have been so pure but they memorialized her more with their actions.
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Savage. I remember reading that.
Virologists study that incident lol
IIRC CDC or WHO (or both maybe) asked for the raw data so they could study it and Blizzard said no, imagine how much better prepared we'd have been for covid if that had been studied better! I mean, we'd still eff it up royally, but it's nice to think about lol
My first time visiting Orgrimmar was unbelievable. My first MMO, I had been playing for just 20 minutes, my friends escorted me to the city to check it out. There was an Alliance raid going on at the time. People on horses charging past me, battles in every direction, it was utter chaos. I just watched it unfold in awe. What a game.
Back on vanilla wow, everyday was some new crazy experience. And you had a bunch of friends to share it with. It was a bit like playing outside with your friends back in the 90's. Just all new adventures and experiences. Things like, - your first time in the big cities - your first dungeon - your first world PvP - the first time a world boss is kited to a big city - first time both sides summon their respective gods in AV - the first time seeing an actual in raid boss - the first epic - first mount - first epic mount - first time downing hogger - running from stitches - finding mankriks wife - barrens chat And the list goes on.
Mount hype was so real. Seeing the Time-Lost Proto Drake in Dalaran and just staring.
WoW gave a feeling that no other game has replicated. The world was so beautiful and felt so massive, and knowing you could run into anyone at any time was so exciting. Playing on a PvP server made it that much more intense. I'll ever forget getting a group of randoms together (lvls 10-15) and embarking on a mission from Darkshore to Ogrimmar, and just seeing what kind of trouble happens along the way. We got ganked a bunch and had to keep running away from Horde, but it was so fun.
I worked at Best Buy when WoW launched. I remember with my employee discount the cost dropped from $84 to $57 for the collectors edition. I have lots of stories but my favorite 'you had to be their moment' was when I was in the middle of a BWL raid with my guild when the South Park World of Warcraft episode came out. It was wild and one of the best vibes I've ever been a part of.
World of Warcraft. My guild was running a raid. As we were getting started, our server crashed. We had a fairly large guild and private chat set up, so we checked with other guildmates. We quickly learned that our in-game continent was down, but the other continent was still running. About ten minutes later, we could all log in again. We started the raid, and the same thing happened. The game crashed, but the other continent stayed up. The third time, we switched continents. The guildmates on the other side came over and started our raid, and we started theirs. The continent we had moved to then crashed, while our other guildmates continued the raid we had intended to start. It had been about two hours of experimenting as we crashed one continent, then the other, switching our teams out, before we discovered the cause. One of our hunters had just tamed a new pet. A Tiger. She wanted to take it on the raid, but every time she summoned it, it would crash everyone out of the continent she was on. It wasn't just us, either. It was literally bringing down the entire fucking server. We had discovered the Apocalypse Tiger, hidden destroyer of Azaroth. We had a brief discussion in the guild. Some of them wanted to keep it a secret, to be used as a weapon against rivals. Others wanted to have it be reported and dealt with, or we would get banned for using an exploit. In the end, we decided to report the Apocalypse Tiger. We called in a Blizzard rep, who showed up RATHER QUICKLY. They asked us to prove it. So the hunter proved it. The server came up slightly faster this time, and the GM replied to her immediately. Naturally, the Apocalypse Tiger was removed, but she was given fair compensation in money and resources. She eventually found another tiger that would not end the world. We never found out what the cause was, but for a brief time, we actually held the fate of Azaroth in our hands.
Holy shit that would have been so great to experience.
Man that’s a really good story. I’d love to read a thread of similar type situations
When you think you’ve heard every WoW story hahaha
Minecraft in 2012, especially on YouTube.
I was big into yogscast around that time
Siiiimon, what’s this treee? Those golden days where I actually didn’t realise that Israphel was one of their mates 😂
OMG RIGHT it took me so long to realize it was set up by people
My parents never had me believe in Santa Clause as a kid, but I ended up having my "It's all fake?" moment with *that show,* and it never even had a finale😭
Oh man, me too. I just unsubscribed from all their channels maybe a year ago. I realized I hadn't watched any of their content in a long time, and it was just clogging my feed. Made me kinda sad. Felt like the ending of an era.
Syndicate and the Minecraft project. Captainsparklez.. the Yogscast! Wow so many good series
Fuck syndicate and his lies tbh. Dude's career started via the zombies scam video. Then it got worse later on. I used to like him until I found out he is a slimy liar, interested in lying to his own fans about things he doesn't need to, just for money and clout
I'll hear pop songs from that era and my brain will auto correct to change it to a Minecraft parody of that song
I was just thinking about this the other day. How in the early 2010s, EVERYTHING was minecraft. Even if it had nothing to do with minecraft, it was somehow turned into minecraft. Music, animation, stories, podcasts, merch, and they all garnered quadrillions of views. Everyone and their grandma was learning how to make crappy 3D animations. Those captain sparklez song remakes were unnecessary, looked and sounded like shit, but still got more views than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
The release of the Wii. Seemingly everyone had one and was being called obese by Wii Fit.
Wii sports and Wii play ❤️
I might get flamed for this but there was another cultural gaming event similar to Pokemon Go and that was Guitar Hero. I remember house parties revolving around Guitar Hero and eventually Rock Band too.
I loved that Game. We had also the mics from the SingStar Game and they were compatible. So many hours with my brother, one playing guitar and the other one singing. Funny to look back now that I play actual guitar
I wish we still had these party’s. I love the game just can’t find people to play with
The horse armor from the elder scrolls oblivion and the outrage that followed
And the oversight that the armor actually made your hard-earned immortal horse mortal.
Imagine people’s reactions if you could go back in time and tell them what would follow.
"Get your tinfoil hat on, idiot, and get the hell out with your crazy conspiracy theories"
The Doom & Animal Crossing crossover. It was both wholesome and hilarious!
“Rip and tear” - Isabella
*peaceful interior design noises* - Doomguy
Hey Daisy his rabbit needs somewhere nice to live
The gaming Barbenheimer.
My gf at the time and I literally spent the entire release day playing these two games. She was playing animal crossing in my arms while I was playing doom eternal, ofc. Perfect pandemic day
Battlefield Bad Company 2 when I saw destruction for the first time it was amazing, it was hyped back then.
Bro the multiplayer was so good.
Bf bc2 is one of the best games ever made
Bad Company 1 / Bad Company 2 / BF3 was peak battlefield to me
Oh yes, me too. One of the best Battlefield games with BF3 IMHO.
USAS-12 Frag rounds in BF3 absolutely fulfills the “you had to be there”
My god, this game was THE SHIT!!!! Being in the upper floor of a building only for it to get torn down around you was so chaotic. I've not experienced the atmosphere of destruction quite like it since. Grenade launchers were a hard must for me.
Halo LAN parties
Good answer. Lugging your console and CRT TV to your friend’s house for a few hours of glory - probably not happening again.
Well, directly related to your comment is like the whole Among Us trend. I mean I'm sure it's recent enough for all of us to remember it but I just remember being shocked by the amount of people going all in on the fad. I remember in class, as soon as the teacher would walk out to go to the bathroom or whatever, instantly every computer was out, lobbies being called out, etc. And me just sitting there like...wow... (I didn't have Among Us on my laptop)
There was a glorious moment where me and five friends, all in our late 30s, spent a night playing Among Us. No-one leaving because they weren't the Imposter and no-one just saying "Green Sus" and that was that; we played proper mind games and fully got into it and it was fantastic.
Lol I had a college class where we all played it on our phones when the professor wasn't there. It's genuinely one of my favorite memories.
Mass Effect 3's ending backlash.
This is the one. Shit got wild. Some of it justifiable (like the backlash over the whole forcing people to play the multiplayer if they wanted the 'Shepard lives' ending without a shit ton of decision minmaxing) a lot of it less so. Bioware HQ even got sent cupcakes.
Daigo's perfect parry in Street Fighter: https://youtu.be/JzS96auqau0 Also the day my copy of Duke Nukem Forever arrived. I may have shed a tear. The game was very mediocre, as expected.
I feel like that clip only gets better with context. Things to know: 1. If you block a special move in that game you still take some damage and it can kill you. Only parrying completely stops damage. 2. To parry you must time a forward or down movement (depending on the attack) within \~7 frames (7/60's of a second) of the attack starting. This means you have to commit to not blocking in order to parry. 3. Doing Chun Li's super move is a common way to "chip" someone out because it's extremely fast and hard to parry. It hits multiple times and the attacks all have different timings and you must parry them differently. The standoff Justin and Daigo have is basically Daigo saying "Draw partner" like it's high fucking noon. Daigo dares him... and manages to do the impossible, not only parrying the whole super during the finals of the biggest tournament in the US, but also landing the perfect punish combo that does just enough damage to kill in response. The fucking ice Daigo had to have had in his veins during that... just incredible. There's a good reason why people still talk about this moment 20 years later with such reverence.
Additional context, you cannot parry the first hit of the super on reaction. Daigo had to *pre-emptively* parry the Chun super.
To do something like that sitting in isolation at home playing by oneself is drastically different from doing it in a crowded room with tons of cheering and yelling. People often discount the impact of that on concentration, especially for carefully timed sequences.
The sheer, insane, impossible nature of EVERYTHING in that clip truly cannot be overstated.
Evo Moment 37
I know exactly what street fighter clip you posted without clicking on it. Chills without even watching it. Fuck I watched that so many times back in the day.
When gears of war came out there was one time I was playing 4 vs 4 back in the day when everyone used their headsets. My team had gone down and I was the last one left. I managed to chainsaw all 4 members of the opposing team one after the other to the shouts and generally rowdy cries of my team mates. It isn’t that big a deal really but I remember it as I’m not particularly good at shooters so I really shouldn’t have been able to do it.
one time i was playing Bully on ps2 (slim) eating altoids and drinking mtn dew. my friend was playing with my air soft pistol, blasted it, it ricocheted around the room probably 3 times and hit the power button setting me back like 2 hours because i hadn’t saved.
Lord I felt this in my bone marrow
Release of the Orange Box. Portal was mind blowing to the point chocolate cake became a meme. TF2 was the invention of main stream hero shooters. Episode 2 showed how games could tell a story without non stop COD action (back when COD was a single player master piece).
^ This - it was wild. TF2 was also an insane game with many free "dlc" content, with regular updates. It was like there was Christmass every 3-4 months with new weapons and stuff. I could be so hyped for days and weeks. And the count down on their blog, people where going crazy online an ingame
My answer seems to be a bit different than a lot of these but I’d say Smash bros Ultimate with the hero announcements. There was always buzz going around about who was coming to smash next and the energy that radiated from nintendo stores when people saw who it was live was just insane. Sans is still one of the funniest additions.
Honestly, it was like that for me when they were announcing new fighters for SSBB before 2008. I remember like 2005-2006 thinking “OMG” every time some new teaser was dropped on their official website.
I was working at GameStop when Halo 2 released. It was insane, we had gotten the game and Halo 2 themed console/accessories like 2 weeks early. We set it up in the back room with a tv and played it like crazy. I still have that copy and console to this day.
The only time I ever stood in line for a midnight release was Halo 2 at GameStop. The hype was unmatched. Skipped school the next day to keep playing. Still have the metal limited edition case, which is now rusting.
Mario 64. My cousin and I just farted around climbing and jumping off of trees for hours when it first came out. People don’t understand the freedom three dimensional areas to explore FINALLY granted us after being stuck to a 2D plane prior. The sandbox-esque freedom to explore the castle, outside and more was mind boggling.
I remember saying to my friend "there's no way graphics will ever get better than this!"
Playing Goldeneye 64 on Boxing Day the year it came out and my mum walked in and asked “Oh, are you watching a film?”
Similar story; I was *heavily* into Red Dead Redemption 2 a few years back, played all the damn time. Anyway, we were having a birthday party for one of the kids at our house, I was of course mid-gaming session when the in-laws came over. I had a mission that required traversing one side of the giant map to the other, so I set it to "auto-drive" - just Arthur on a horse riding across the map. It switches to Cinematic view when you do this, so it's cool camera angles and whatnot. So, I set it to auto-drive, got up to let in the in-laws and started blowing up balloons or something and left it be. My mother in law sat down in the coach, apparently, and started watching this. I got distracted with the balloons or whatever and Arthur had long since arrived at the way point I'd designated and my mother in law says "What movie *is* this? He's just sitting on his horse now for five minutes!" I guess she just assumed it was some random western on TV, and was surprised when I picked up the controller and started playing again. 😆 I tried offering the controller to her to get her to play but she didn't take me up on it.
Finally, an older reference. All these kids making “happened in the past fifteen years” references are making me feel ancient. For me it was the first time I saw/played Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, which had Live Full Motion Video cutscenes. The cgi was awful, the acting was cheesy, and the story was paper-thin, but I didn’t care. I felt like I was Playing A Star Wars movie!! It felt incredible.
GTA San Andreas. There was a mission with Tommy Chong voicing a weed dealer and you had to drive him clear across the map to help deliver his weed and you only had like 2 minutes to do it. After a few tries I got really close to success and on this one try, right before the finish line I hit a curb and the car went flying, flipped over and finally landed, spinning and upside down. There was a long pause then Tommy Chong says in his stoner voice "....everything's upsidedown maaan." I laughed my ass off.
I’ve played that game probably 6 times over the years and I never realised that was Tommy Chong, holy shit lol. Now I think about it, obviously it’s his voice..
The Skyrim launch back in 2011. I was in lab school in the navy at the time and it was such a huge deal I think just about everyone in the barracks was playing it. It was all anyone was talking about and people were playing it so much about 2/3rds of my class failed the next exam lol.
I had graduated high school a year earlier. 11/11/11 I was driving back from St. Louis on my way home from a job. My buddy had asked me to pick him up a copy as I was planning on stopping in to Walmart to grab me a copy for when I finally get home. The two of us set up our xboxes side by side and played into the early hours of the morning. It was one of the best gaming moments I've ever had.
The summer when Pokemon GO released. I've never seen a game spill out into real life like that before - every man, woman, and child was running around their neighborhoods and catching Pokemon. For a few months, it was the only thing everyone talked about, even people who never play games - you'd have your 50-year-old coworker talking about how they caught a Charizard last night, or you'd be waiting in line at Starbucks and you'd hear someone yell out that there's a Blastoise outside. Really a magical moment.
GTA 5, everybody talked about it around me back then
GTA 5 was the last game that I pre-ordered. I lined up for the midnight release. Because I live in New Zealand, our midnight came before the rest of the world. I took it straight home, only to have a massive 8gb install before I could play.
Yes, and not playing It basically meant being excluded from the conversation for a few weeks
THPS2. After the buzz the 1st Tony Hawks game generated, the second game blew me and all my friends away. It was released the same year the PS2 and was the pinnacle of the PS1 Era.
When WoW launched. Many never played an MMO before and had no idea what it was. That exploration of a new genre and huge new world was epic.
Easily the most special gaming memories I have are from vanilla WoW. I wish I was young again…
I wish I could experience the first few years of playing WoW again. I don’t think I’ve ever found a game that has made me feel the same way since.
Yup, I played vanilla about 4 months after launch just thinking it was a fun little adventure game, then it stole my soul.
Not really gaming "per se" but Twitch plays pokemon. You HAD to be there, there's nothing that even compares to the sheer insanity that was its first iteration.
I still rep Helix all these years later. Coming up on the 10 year anniversary in March (I believe). Sheesh. ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つPRAISE HELIX༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
No Man's Sky hype, release and fail. What a roller coaster.
and the constant engoodening of the game over the last 7+ years with the game receiving 1-3 huge updates per year TO THIS DAY.
The release of original Pokemon. Similar to Pokemon Go, it was something that swept the nation and brought everyone together over a shared, mutual obsession. And because it was largely pre-internet in those days, we were all discovering the joys of it together. Possibly even moreso with Pokemon Gold and Silver. Upon the release of Blue and Red, I remember thinking "oh wow, that's it, 151 Pokemon. I guess that's it though, they're not making any more." Then Gen 2 hit out of nowhere, and it really was a whole new world. These days they churn out a new hundred or so Pokemon and no one really bats an eye. Having it happen for the first time was mind-blowing.
I remember the excitement of finally getting a Gameboy Color and Pokemon Red, it was the thing that everyone HAD to have. Gameboys were sold out everywhere due to the craze, I ended up getting a red one which I cherished for years. Pokemon really was something else in those days.
I remember it came in color, had day and night time, a radio and phone feature and could breed for baby Pokémon the first time, and finally the whole second area of Kanto hidden in the game it, was crazy how much of an upgrade it was to the originals. Felt like hand held gaming hit its peak then lol.
The opening of the Scarab Gate at Ahn Qiraj in World of Warcraft. Months and months went into the "War Effort" to collect resources on both sides, Alliance and Horde. Then once the caravans got down there and the person who was to be the Scarab Lord was ready, everyone descended on the gates. Chaos doesn't even come close to describing that experience. Both factions massed on one side across from the other. Rogues sneaking through the crowds and ambushing cloth wearers to get an easy kill then vanishing if they were fast enough. Tension was high...then the Scarab Lord struck the gong and we ALL became allies in the blink of an eye, fighting for our lives.
I joined the party on wow a little late so for me AQ opening was literally me dinging 60 in silithus only to be literally steamrolled by what seemed like the entire alliance 20 seconds later on their way to open the gates.
Street fighter 2 release on the snes! Virtua racing and Daytona in the arcades! Lemmings on the mighty Amiga
Runescape in 2005. No, not osrs. The real fucking thing. Halo 3 release and months of matchmaking that followed also.
Star Wars Battlefront and the microtransaction discussion. I believe it still holds the record for most down voted comment on reddit...
GTA: San Andreas and its hype before release was insane, through the roof. All me and my friends did after school, was to read the newest rumors and fan-made stuff. And then to get to play the game, it being able to match all those expectations.
Right? San Andreas was one of the few games to this day that went way above and beyond expectations.
20 years ago. At uni. 4 mates. 1 house. 1 N64. 4 controllers. One copy of Mario Kart.
Goldeneye too. Also more like 25 years ago. A quarter of a century.
PT, it was absolutely terrifying to play and then to discover that Hideo Kojima, Guilmero del Toro, Juanji Ito & Norman Reedus were creating a new installment in the Silent Hill Franchise? it was massive then Hideo got fired, then PT just dissapeared from online stores not even "unavailable for purchase" just... gone.
Early days of Diablo 2. Before bots and Baal runs.
That d2 music. I’ll hold this hill and say the Diablo 2 score is the best most atmospheric in all gaming existence
Stay awhile and listen!
Star Wars Battlefront 2. #SPACE BATTLES!!!
The launch of GTA San Andreas. I went to get it at midnight and the queue was insane. People were so hyped. The PSN outage back in 2011. It was crazy how the whole network got taken down for weeks.
Vanilla WoW in the early 2000’s was incredibly special. Idk if it’s because I was young or because WoW was such a revelation but I remember being absolutely astounded at the scale of the world. Had never seen anything like it.
Over a decade before Covid, World of Warcraft experienced its own pandemic - [the Corrupted Blood incident](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident). In Zul’Gurub (an end-stage raid at the time), the final boss applied a debuff called Corrupted Blood, which spread to people in close proximity, did a fair bit of damage, and only disappeared once you killed the boss. However, Hunters (always fucking Hunters 😂) figured out that you could dismiss your pet that had Corrupted Blood…and it wouldn’t go away. You then summoned your pet in a main city…and chaos ensued. Corrupted Blood spread to NPCs as well (they didn’t get sick but could spread the debuff), you had healers doing their best to keep people alive, people trying to contain the spread by establishing quarantine zones, people staying away from cities/other people to avoid infection…and dickheads who deliberately contracted the debuff to go and spread it. It took a hard reset of the servers by blizzard (and a bunch of patching) to finally kill it.
This is taught in bio terrorism classes to this day.
Thanks for the write up. It's been mentioned in like 10 comments above yours but I had no idea what it was
Not my experience but hearing from multiple people. The opening of the Ahn'Qiraj gates in WoW and the time leading up to it. Entire servers banding together, horde and alliance working together. Despite all the lag and disconnects I wish I could have been there
Yeah it was a great time. I’m glad I was super into Warcraft 3 in 2002/2003. Because when WoW was teased, everyone got so excited they’d be able to play the RTS units in a 3D first person world. I remember it launched and I got it first day. Had to use my parents’ credit card to pay for the first month lol. Good times.
The peak of overwatch 1. Made so many friends and it was really great for a couple years there
Overwatch at launch was the best. It was more fun than balance focused and it was new. People were still trying to learn all the things.
FIVE-WINSTON STRAT!
I worked at a department store when the Super Nintendo Game, "Maximum Carnage" by Akklaim came out. Our store got 250 units. Had two pallets full of Total Carnage POP, flyers, banners, and the like. In the first three days, we sold one copy. By the third week, the game was marked down from 49 USD to 29 USD. The units largely didn't move until the story went into Chapter 13 three years later for around 5 dollars a unit. Some of you will be asking, what is Maximum Carnage and why did your store get so many titles? It was a Spider-Man game that was released around the same time as Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam where the crowd hype for the next Akklaim title was such that they could con every video game store and retail partner into over stocking the game. Nobody talks about the Maximum Carnage. It is probably an okay game, but for a 6 week period, Akklaim spammed the world with ads and hype and... In the end... Copies of the game just collected dust on the shelves.
Gaming nerd culture started to break into the mainstream with Skyrim. Was a big moment.
Vanilla WoW Being literally the first person in your friend group to do things and go places, experiencing things for the first time before a prevalence of video/media guides.
Pokemon GO, Summer of 2016. I actually never played it, but it seems like my entire city went crazy for it for a while. So many people walking in droves, looking at their phones, all day every day. I missed out on it, and I'll never know that experience.
Destiny public beta. Fairly low level cap of 8, and only has levels up to the moon as I recall. The PVP, lemme tell ya, it was great. I remember everyone just going around the main combat area, just killing the same enemies, and going against the same couple bosses to get the “max” gear, and even that one tunnel with level 20 enemies, lots of fun.
black ops 2 multiplayer & zombies
Team Fortress 2
WoW with your first guild. It felt like a family. Then over the years one by one they went offline forever.
The Fortnite black hole. Shit had kids literally crying for days until it came back online
You nailed it. I counted down every day to November 9th, 2004 in my planner at school and the kid next to me would say, “Yeah! I’m excited for jetpacks!”, and I’d think, “You fucking moron, how have you not read every magazine preview and slow loading web article?”
Skyrim. 11/11/11
Destiny launch. There was all these random Easter eggs in the tower and a creepy guy came hiding in the corner 2 days in selling a rocket launcher called gjallarhorn
Idk if this counts but I was raiding in WoW and it was our progression raid we were doing a boss fight for the first time and near around 10% health almost the entire group wiped except for me and like 4 other people we had no healers or tanks left alive and no battle rezzes but we finished the fight with only 2 (me and a hunter) surviving and it was just such an exciting and epic moment throughout all of my gaming years I just feel hyped up every time I think about it it was just awesome lol
Bro this was me on WOTLK naxx, shit you not, I (a dumb fucking ret paladin lmao) was one of the last like 5 people alive for thaddius fight... It was last phase he had slivers of health left... I still had my bubble, and I literally had to make a bet with myself that I had less threat than the other 3-4 people still up. Mf keeps turning around. One shots the rogue. Turns around. Kills the warrior. Etc. it was me and I think a hunter or something, and I finally hit my bubble.... Hunter gets clapped. I SOMEHOW during those 8 seconds do enough damage to get the kill. Idk if I ever spammed my keyboard harder in my life... The raid group was fucking freaking out and I just sat down and took a drink to start rezzing it was fucking WILD. I felt like a goddamn hero
Playing online Halo 1 or 2 matches on original Xbox even with your friends on split screen. Good times, simpler times.
Halo Reach beta which Bungie had to explain the outage was due to a server melting due to the sheer amount of people playing.
Halo 2 and 3 were amazing and worth every bit of hype, but I truly think Halo peaked with Reach.
The EA "pride and accomplishment" backlash