Doom, no question. I was an Amiga owner at the time, and we were used to being the go-to platform for computer gaming. Then Doom came along and pretty much sent the Amiga scene on a quest for a "Doom clone" that it would never achieve.
Ooh the first game that really blew my mind on the PC was Homeworld Cataclysm. I spent so many hours as a kid just going back and forth in the tutorial section of the demo, making a huge space fleet with no pressure, just gawking at the beautiful space backgrounds, the cool spaceships and their visual effects of thrusters, lasers and beam cannons.
It's still one of my favorite strategy franchises and games of all time.
I remember when DOOM came out. There was a little crowd of maybe 8-12 people at the computer huddled around a 486 demo running the shareware version of the game, I think it was at Fry's Electronics, everyone was entirely stunned by how good the graphics were.
Seeing DOOM for the first time was amazing. I'd seen Wolfenstein 3D, but I couldn't stand the graphics and it made me nauseous. DOOM looked much better and the music was cool too. I would watch my dad play for hours but I didn't play it myself until my dad gave me the cheat codes (As an 8 year old girl, I was too scared to play without invincibility lol, I'd panic and quit as soon as I was taking any damage). I loved exploring the levels and trying to find the secret areas.
That game made me feel things in a way that no other game had made me feel before that. The deep emotional story telling in that game was leagues beyond anything I had played before it. I played it once a year for a while.
I remember my first time playing Half-Life was pretty incredible. What really wowed me was the intro being so slow, and you just starting in a normal world, with no combat for like 45 minutes. I'd never seen anything like it before, and I loved the feeling so much. I used to hang out in the intro area for as long as I could, just enjoying how immersive and calm it felt. To this day I really dislike games that have little to no down time to them - I love just hanging out in a world. My favourite genre wound up being JRPGs since they handle that balance so well.
I played half life way later (2014-ish) and it's hard to imagine how crazy it must have seemed back then. Even now, delaying the combat for that long is pretty rare. Back then I can't imagine how groundbreaking it must have been.
It was Lemmings. It's the first game that I saw on an Amiga computer. Adorable game, good music, fun gameplay.
If we're talking IBM PC, I can't pick between Diablo, Doom and Dune 2. I was so young and there were so many games created that would define genres to come.
I played it at a counsin's house when their parents were not home and we didn't even know that "saving progress" could be a thing, so we played through the first 15 or 20 levels a number of times ^^
Definitely not the first, but I took acid and turned on Mass Effect for the first time back when it came out and it (probably literally) blew my mind. I think I played for 8 hours straight and I think most of it was walking around talking to every single NPC I could lol.
GTA3 for me. I didn't even care about the missions, I was just blown away by the open world. I remember spending a whole summer just exploring Liberty City.
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