Your biggest wow moment of each gen you've lived through

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Here are some of my moments:

Gen 2 - Just seeing video games hooked up to my TV for the first time just blew my mind.  My favorite game was Adventure which I played for years before getting bored with it.

Gen 3 - After playing the Legend of Zelda, I realized that they had made a game that was somehow better than an arcade game.  That was mind blowing for me, because the arcade games were supposed to be the top of the line experience.  LoZ had great action like an arcade game, but it had an in-depth adventure which you would never be able to get at an arcade.  I could see the paradigm shift coming because of LoZ.

Gen 4 - Playing Final Fantasy 2 (4) had a huge wow factor.  Great graphics, but more importantly it had this huge fleshed out story and in depth characters.  I already really loved the first Final Fantasy and now this sequel seemed light years ahead of the first game.  I didn't realize that the trick was it was really the 4th iteration of the series and that is why it was so advanced.
Honorable mention - Actraiser.  This game shoudn't be fun, but dammit it is.

Gen 5 - Final Fantasy 7 had gorgeous graphics in it's day.  I showed the intro to my daughter a couple of years ago and she still thought it looked cool.  The graphics are dated, but the cinematography of the opening sequence is still impressive.  Most importantly this game has my favorite story in all of video games.  FF7 was just so excellent in every way.  Wow!

Gen 6 - ICO and Shadow of the Colossus both had huge wow factors back in the day.  I just felt I was playing in a living painting.  

Gen 7 - Biggest wow was probably 2D Mario on the Wii.  4-player Mario was just so cool.  This was also the only game my wife and I could play with our daughter when she was 3.  Every other game was too complex, even Mario Kart, but she could keep up with us in 2D Mario.

Gen 8 (Wii U/PS 4/ 3DS) -  I have these 3 systems, and while there are some fun games there, nothing had a huge wow factor.  Kind of a disappointing generation.

Gen 9 (Switch) - Breath of the Wild.  I remember leaving the plateau and immediately going far away from the suggested path that the game provided.  I was skeptical that this game would be as good as Nintendo hyped, and I expected that I couldn't really go wherever I wanted right out of the gate.  Boy was I wrong, so wrong, in such a wonderful way.  You really can just go wherever you want in this game and get totally immersed and lost in this world.  This game is a masterpiece.  It really does invoke feelings like I originally had when i was first playing the original.  At the same time it's really it's own type of Zelda game.  It's a new and beautiful type of Zelda.


Honorable mentions on the PC:
Diablo 1 - This is the first game I played on the internet.  The game was horribly hacked and broken and yet just being able to play on the internet was an amazing experience.

Ultima Online - The first real MMO.  Just a couple of years ago I tried out Diablo on the internet and now I am playing with thousands of people at once?  Mind blown.