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

[kenjab]

I've been gaming since 2nd gen, but have only been "Wow'ed" a handful of times, and almost always by graphics advancements.

3rd gen - seeing games on the NES that I had previously only seen in arcades, like Excitebike, Punch Out! and Super Mario Bros. Also, as others have mentioned, seeing epic scale games like Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy completely changed what I saw games could do. While I enjoyed many, many games for the next decade on consoles and PCs, every advancement after that seemed iterative to me until:
1997 - My first graphics accelerator. I got a 3dfx Voodoo card, and seeing Quake and Doom and racing games run with soooo much better graphics AND higher framerate was just amazing. The next wow moment came much sooner:
1998 - Half-life. Just the way the game progressed with in-engine cut scenes and how the military units were actually intelligent in how they attacked you was pretty mind-blowing. Then, a couple years later:
6th gen - Seeing Madden 2001 on the PS2 for the first time running on a Best Buy display (where I worked at the time). This was the first edition of the game that had close-ups of the players between plays, and it was a massive step up graphically from the previous gen versions of the game.

Since then, I don't feel I've been wow'ed by anything, really. I kinda fell away from gaming as my career and family took precedence until my kids were old enough to game and I got a Wii late in its life, and now a Switch. I've liked both and also have continued PC gaming but don't feel I've been wowed in a while. The advancements seem so much more subtle now.