Which game made you a gamer?What was special about it?

[S.Peelman]

Wow, this is an impossible question to answer.

Technically I started gaming at a very young age, but didn't really get into it until many years later. The timing of my starting gaming was about the turn of the generation from the 3rd to the 4th, but I wasn't aware of course what was going on being only like 3 or 4 years old.
Therefore, I don't know for sure what my first game was, especially with my access to my mother's and aunt's older consoles and my own 'baby-laptop' it could be an old computer game, a 2nd Gen game, a 3rd Gen game, or even a 4th Gen game on my aunt's then new SNES.
I have a few suspects though.

For a while I was only mildly interested until probably the turn to the 5th gen. Somewhere around then did I became a real gamer. However the list of games that propelled my interest is longer than the list of suspects for the very first game.
Was it a console game like Zelda: A Link to the Past, Yoshi's Island, Super Mario Kart or Super Mario 64, or was it a PC (well, Mac in my case) game like SimCity 2000, Sim Tower, Star Wars: Rebel Assault II or Dark Forces, Wolfenstein 3D, Prince of Persia or Warcraft II even?

It could potentially even be as late as Zelda: Ocarina of Time when this happened. I specifically remember the lead-up to the release of that game. It was the first game I truly was hyped for, the first game for which I truly followed it's development and anticipated it's release at the age of 10.
However, I also remember a lot of play-time before that.

I'd say either A Link to the Past or the combo of Rebel Assault II and Sim Tower are the games that made me a real gamer.

The first got me interested in the concept of consoles. I never realized there were such things as companies, story-lines in games and series before that due to young age and disinterest and was just 'playing' for the sake of playing without actually knowing the depth of it. It got me interested in all those things and opened my eyes and easily put got me aware that 'Nintendo' and 'SEGA' were different things. By extension, it made me have interest in the next generation.
The latter pair however got me addicted to actually playing things. I kept coming back to those two games. I played through Rebel Assault II countless times, to this day I can still dream every millimeter of every level. It's probably the game I've seen the end-credits for the most, and when playing Sim Tower I did such things as turn up the volume when we had dinner so I could hear downstairs if I was still making money! After that I began to want more and more.

If only I could secretly take a peek into the past to see what I was up to back then.