What Games Have Actually Affected You?

FortKnox asks: "What games have affected you simply by playing them? What games immersed you so well into its environment that you actually felt different after playing it? For me, I'd have to go with System Shock 2. Basically the predecessor to Deus Ex, it was the only game that made me so afraid that the minute I heard a matron mother, I turned the other way and ran. What game scared you to death, or made you think after playing it?"

Hmm

[afree87]

I'd have to say the game that most affected me is Global Thermonuclear War.

Half Life

[HunterZero]

I swear, I'll never play that game in the dark again. Damned headcrabs scared the hell out of me, jumping out of dark corners and attacking me in air ducts.

Afterwards I hard a hard time getting to sleep since there was a storm outside and it sounded like the headcrabs were coming to get me.

GTA3, for one...

[phillymjs]

There are times now in traffic when I get that unimistakable urge to just pull into the oncoming lane to pass some slow moron in front of me, or to pull the guy who cut me off out of his car at the next red light and lay a beating on his ass.

I don't do it, of course, but one can dream... and I know I'm not alone, because I've seen other posts on here from people similarly afflicted.

THPS

[pfb]

tony hawk's pro skater: everything is a grind or jump these days...

M.U.L.E.

[E. T. Alveron]

Yeah it was 1983...yeah it was on the Commodore, but who needs more than 64k anyway?

D2

[eightball01]

I can't seem to quit playing this god forsaken game no matter how hard I try. On the other hand, it has taught to me to double check everything before you accept a trade. :)

Warcraft II

[Fapestniegd]

I played it for 72 hours straight and got severely dehydrated. If I hadn't looked at the clock I, might have died.

Myst

[neurostar]

I always got scared playing that... it was too quiet... I was always expecting someone to come out from around a corner shooting...
The worst part was that my brothers would always come in and scare the shit out of me. :o

But I guess I'm just a pussy... :\

This is pretty sad but...

[Bedevere]

Once I was talking to someone about the benefits of recycling and solar power and then I realized I was basing my entire discussion on what I had learned from playing Sim City 4.

Games don't affect people

[SpanishInquisition]

If Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

Re:Halo

[Aiku1337]

Oh boo hoo </jealous>

Jedi Outcast

[dupper]

When I started playing it, it switched my allegiance from strongly Star Trek to strongly Star Wars. I've since acheived a comfortable geequalibrium between Star Trek, Star Wars and Tolkien.

Re:Nail those Pedestrians!

[nelsonal]

I've noticed a 10 mph or so increase in my driving speed after an evening of Gran Turismo. I don't notice going faster, I just realize that I'm getting places earlier.

Minesweeper

[RhettLivingston]

Its really the simple games that get me the most. To really play minesweeper well, you have to commit complex patterns to instinct and then defocus your eyes a little so that you see and comprehend all of the field at one time. Then you sort of make your world one with the field and shut out everything else. After a few hours of minesweeper, I'm a very dangerous driver because turning off that pattern matching logic is difficult. I tend to find myself instinctively relating the cars to the cells of the field and wondering which are the bombs.

Nethack

[weston]

Nothing else comes close. Several months ago my machine crashed and I had to reformat my hard drive. By this time I was already having dreams ascii dungeons, monsters, and a 'd' following me around hoping for '%'. I decided maybe it was best if I didn't reinstall nethack. Though there's still those darn public nethack machines....

I don't know if I'm the best example, though. I've spent tortured nights dreaming of physics problems, one or two particularly bad nights dreaming of C++, and even come up with a Pascal algorithm or two in my sleep.

Of course, I have also come upon the secret of life once or twice in my sleep, but can never seem to remember it when I wake up...

Definately the original Super Mario Bros.

[thadeusPawlickiROX]

I can't tell you how many times I've broken my hand by jumping up and trying to break blocks... And I've gotten sick a few times trying to eat magic mushrooms to make me big too!

I think I'll stay away from those fire flowers, I can't imagine what those would do to me.

GRAND THEFT AUTO

[YOU ARE SO FIRED!]

It introduced me to sleeping with hookers. I've never felt so diseased!

Pong

[GordoSlasher]

When I heard the sound of that little white square hitting that white line, knowing that the little white square was now headed toward my white line, I was so frightened I turned and ran.

Slashdot

[blair1q]

But then they stopped keeping score.

Re:Duke3D

[Epistax]

DUDE! I was playing Duke3D for the first time, and I was just about to end the first level, when my Weird Al CD playing (which had "ended" quite a while ago), played a bonus 10 second snippet of weird al screaming and a lot of weird sounds going on.
Scared the shit out of me.

Wolfenstein: "GUTEN TAG"

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

Talk about nearly peeing yourself.

Re:That's actually a pretty good question

[Anonymous Coward]

That damn dog. I shot him for hours on end. Fucker always just laughed. DIEDIEDIE

Re:Half Life

[phyrestang]

Have you ever played the "They Hunger" mod for half-life? It's sort of a horror/zombie thing. The first time I played it was in a dark room at 2am, and I had just set up my surround sound. To this day I still don't know how the hell that zombie made it out of my room before I turned around to look at him.

Leisure Suit Larry

[grahams]

If it wasn't for Leisure Suit Larry, I wouldn't know that failing to take a condom off after sex results in terrible disease.

Thanks Al!

The original DOOM, for another...

[phillymjs]

Not long after the DOOM phenomenon began, I had to sleep in my basement during the period after I gutted my bedroom and before my new furniture for it arrived. The basement [spymac.com] has wood-paneled walls, and a lot of stuff hanging on them. One night as I was sleeping down there, one corner of a "frameless" picture frame decided to let go of the nail upon which it was hanging at about 3am one morning. It began swinging back and forth on the remaining nail, scraping against the paneling. It made a noise that was practically indistinguishable from the tearing noise you heard when one of the baddies in DOOM (the guy on the right side in this screenshot) [gamesdomain.com] got too close to you and started inflicting damage by clawing at you.

That noise immediately triggered said DOOM character's appearance in a dream, and about 10 seconds later I bolted upright, wide awake and feeling around for my gun, any gun-- what woke me up was the feeling panic that I was taking damage from that guy, and I couldn't see where he was to shoot him. Then I realized it was a dream. THEN I realized I still heard the sound, even though I was awake. Finally, I noticed the swinging picture frame, laughed sheepishly and pulled it off the wall before going back to sleep.

Tie Fighter Wars...

[blackmonday]

Might have been responsible for me and my roomate dropping out if college. My old roomate to this day claims he "became Darth Vader".

Re:Hmm

[AceM2]

Aww.. I don't suppose you can dig it up again eh? ;( I always wanted to play a game like it.. I've seen a few wannabes, but the "game" in the movie was so neat looking =P

Re:Hmm

[spooky_nerd]

Does anyone remember the version of nuclear war for the TRS-80? It didn't have graphics to speak of, but it did have millions of dead people at the end of the game.

Re:Myst

[kingkade]

But I guess I'm just a pussy...

Christ, thanks for leaving me with nothing to reply. Trolls need to feel needed too ;-)

Re:Hmm

[slux]

I love it when games attempt something like this. The excellent Uplink [introversion.co.uk] is an excellent example of an immensely capturing, yet simple game that has the "Is this real?" magic. It just makes you think "what if?" when you start it up and it says it's connecting, see the almost real IP, etc. Great stuff.

I'd argue that some of the attraction in the original Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn was also because of the movies between missions, where you'd be briefed directly by a game character and proceeded to make a tactical decision. They lost the magic already partially in Red Alert as there were more characters interacting together and it just didn't feel as involved for the player and lost it completely in later games such as Tiberian Sun where the movies mostly consisted of bad acting where the player wasn't involved in any way.

Are there more of these? I've played my share of games and I'm sure there are ones that I just can't remember right now.

First person shooters such as Unreal have been able to awe me by their detailed visuals and some games present an awesome storyline but very few manage to get the player so involved in the game world. Ironically, role-playing games that would seem the most obvious ways to attempt this are often just settle for presenting a story and getting the player interested in some stats-crunching.

HALO and Eternal Darkness

[Moryath]

Playing a marathon game, co-op with a friend... got to the Flood at 4AM on a stormy night. Geez, that was crazy. Likewise w/ Eternal Darkness... the sanity stat was the craziest thing I ever saw. That and the fact that most of the sanity effects were geared at the PLAYER. I still remember seeing a BSOD come up... man that was wierd. That and the fact that I got so into it that I actually went and answered the knocking door... not in game but at my house...

Psyche people read: Destruction Derby

[CrazyJim0]

When you had to rail a car RIGHT on to get it to do a 360.

The announcer yells,"Threeeeee SIXTEEEEEE!"

Its awesome... So I'm driving home after 6 hours, and see someone pulling out of his driveway.

Now since the timing in the game is like under a second which way you need to aim, you don't really have much time to think about your actions.

I almost deliberately turned into the back of this person coming out of their driveway because I was in an almost hypnotic state, thinking of the game.

So to get people suggestive:
#1: Use lots of loud and cool noises in your game to reward people for doing cool things.

#2: Have the cool thing be something very similar and realistic to real life.

#3: Leave the window for the action to be under a second, so conscious thought can not control a reflex action.

Then guaranteed at least 1 or 2 people out there would do the shit in real life.

Zero Wing...

[Daniel Baumgarten]

...or at least its introductiory sequence. When something unexpected happens, I now say "what happen?" by force of habit. Toaplan hath set me up the bomb.

Re:Tetris' lingering side effects

[Teun]

I had it worse.

For a few weeks i was stuck in a rather remote location with a Compaq II as company.
It had this 'Tetris' game on it and I started playing it but found it rather impossible, the 'highest scores' showed several hundreds of points by some unknown predecessor and I could not even reach 100...
I figured they had 'edited' the list.

After about 10 days of playing I scored in the 10's of thousands and went loopy, even ordinary daily problems seemed like a bunch of falling blocks that only needed organising before hitting the floor.

Scary, I laid off of the game for more than a year before I tried again.
But I had several calls of collegues if it was me that had got to these high Tetris scores on that field computer...

Re:GTA3, for one...

[po8]

Heh. Back in the day, I spent about 8 hours playing multiplayer air combat with acm [websimulations.com] on an SGI Onyx system (a predecessor of the Onyx 3000 [sgi.com]), with its incredibly-realistic-for-the-time 3D rendering and physics.

On the drive home, I found myself needing to cross 4 lanes of traffic to make a light. Without thinking, I spotted a small opening, stepped on the gas, and floored it, squeezing through quite nicely. Then I realized what I had done.

Resolved: remember that I don't have bonus lives.

Re:Hmm

[RighteousFunby]

Fuck that, The Nuclear Control Institute [nci.org] and The Mayak [greenpeace.org] gave me nervous breakdowns that no game can match. Though actually, Realms of the Haunting, had strange squeaking knife throwing things that drove me NUTS...

But still, those sites made me fail my exams >:(

It know it's old school, but....

[Anita Coney]

I'll never forget after one all night Doom session, leaving work down a hallway when the elevator door opened. I literally jumped to the side of it before realizing that I was no longer playing.

Myth II

[NetDrain]

My friends and I still say the infamous "Casualty" whenever we accidentally break/destroy something.

Many times it would have made everything better when you accidentally fry some CPU/expensive component if only the great deep voice from the sky stated loud and clear: "Casualty."

And when you spill your entire cup of coffee into your computer, you'd get a high-quality "Casualties!" to put a smile on your face. Genius, I say.

Re:Tetris' lingering side effects

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus ! for all this years i thougt it was just me !

I remember having recurring nightmares in which i was playing an impossible level, every piece was falling fast and when at last i was downing the pile. Suddenly a bright blue sphere apeared falling.. slow, very slow. And then I started to think desperately.. where the f*ck can i put the sphere ! where ! and every time i woke up sweating with my heart sounding as a train..

After some nights like this i quit playing tetris, i loved it, but it was too dangerous.. i was't playing it, it was the game who was playing with my mind.

True Story

Re:The original DOOM, for another...

[EvilNTUser]

Ah, yes, computer related nightmares...

I had a nightmare about getting r00t3d tonight. I'm not kidding. Seriously. Is there anything that screams "go outside!" more than that?

At least you had the dignity of being scared by a big ugly monster that wanted to kill you. I mean, that's manly.

I sure as hell don't know what being scared by script kiddies is... :-P

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2

[breon.halling]

It's the first Hawk game I played of the series, and I still fire it up from time-to-time.

It affected me to the point where, walking down the street, I'd notice a rail or a bench or what-have-you, and think "I could darkslide that, no problem!"

Even worse, I'd be watching one of those extreme sports shows, and anytime I'd see someone do some crazy trick in the halfpipe, I'd be, like, "Whatever! I can do that. That dude sucks."

Of course, after a minute, I'd remember: Oh yeah, that guy's doing it for real...

=)

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I think mine would be "Lemonade Stand" on my Apple II+. I nearly pee'd my pants when I had allocated most of my money to inventory, and not only did it rain the next day, but there was construction on my street, diverting traffic. Being a cool day, the construction workers were not interested in Lemonade. I went bankrupt. That is probably the pivotal moment of my life.

I did better in Quake I, though... ;-)

Re:Zero Wing...

[drew]

i've been playing a lot of alpha centauri lately, and every time one of the faction leaders wants to speak to me, i can't help but read "Switch to main viewscreen" as "Main screen turn on"

Re:Balance of Power

[deadsaijinx*]

nice link. I like how it gives you an error message. I now understand why you were very, very angry. If you want, you can try the html version [mobygames.com]. Not that there is much ado on that page, but whatever.

Zork, without a doubt

[kamikazichaser]

I mean, be honest, does anyone here want to meet a grue? It may have just been text, but it surely changed my life.

Re:Civilisation

[isorox]

Civ, for letting me spectaculary fail an RE exam

I believe the question was "Descibe a cration theory".

I wrote

"In the begining, the earth was without form, and void
but the sun shone upon the sleeping Earth
and deep inside the brittle crust
massive forces waited to be unleashed...."

Re:Hmm

[realdpk]

Ah yes, those innocent times of the past, when you received strange packages from unfamiliar places and all you had to worry about was what video game was inside.

Tetris: the game that programs you

[Doktor Memory]

About ten years ago, I was home from college during the summer, and making a little extra cash by being a receptionist at an insurance company office.

Being the middle of summer, half of the adjusters were on vacation, and the rest of them were taking as many personal days as they could manage. There was nothing to do except answer the phone when it rang twice a day... ...and play Tetris on the 386 running Windows 3.1 on my desk. So I played it a lot. For hours on end, day in and day out: racking up some pretty impressive scores, and spending almost entire days in the Tetris Zone.

This went on for about three weeks, until one afternoon I had to put a particularly intense game on hold to go answer the call of nature. I ambled into the bathroom, sat down in one of the stalls and was all set to do my business, until I made a fatal mistake: I looked down...at the floor made out of thousands and thousands of 1.5" white square tiles.

I swear to god the entire room tilted sideways, and if I hadn't been sitting down, I would have fallen. I could feel the parts of my brain that had been doing nothing but tetris pattern recognition for the previous four hours having a near-meltdown as they looked at this solid mass of blocks and tried to map tetris shapes onto each of them. For about 15 seconds, it was like watching a thousand games of tetris played at once, transparently overlaid on each other. I imagine that the sensation was a little bit like what epileptics feel: a firestorm of neurons triggering all at once.

As drug experiences go, it had a lot to recommend it, but I have never really wanted to play Tetris since. Just say no.

Boonga Boonga

[tetro]

People are mad at me when I enact the game.

I blew chunks after this!

[tokaok]

Descent, god this game really changed me after playing it.

It made me so damn dizzy i puked in the washroom and could walk straight back to my comp to finish the first level.

Netrek

[habig]

Aside from the many hours of my life sunk into the game, there was more than one occasion when driving home after playing netrek for too long I felt the quite natural urge to ogg the oncoming traffic.

Ships coming the other direction, must latch onto them and blow up!

Re:The Final Fantasy series...

[Guppy06]

"but the attention to storyline"

Ignoring the first, are we? Hell, the story to the original Dragon Quest/Warrior was more coherent than the three or four paradoxes that one caused...

1. If I killed Garland in the beginning of the game, who got sent back in time?
2. If I killed the Four Fiends, who sends Garland back in time?
3. If I go back in time and kill Garland then, who spawns the Four Fiends?
4. If I killed the Four Fiends in the past on my way to killing Garland for the second (first?) time, how come they manage to make it to the present unscathed?

Square: Um... uh... Hey, look! There's a hidden tile game in it!

Re:Tetris' lingering side effects

[Griim]

In Soviet Russia, Tetris plays YOU.

Re:Half Life

[Dr. Photo]

That was just your wall mirror, telling you that after 3 days of playing nonstop, you definitely needed a shower and shave...

Barney Doom

[FraggleMI]

hours and hours of fun. I almost failed high school because of it...

The sounds of barney throughout the levels!

Scary shit :)

Jones in the Fast Lane...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jones in the Fast Lane... This game scarred me for life.
I used to play it when I was little, and when "Wiley Willy" used to pop-out of nowhere and steal all your money - I'd get so freaked out I'd cry.

Hardcore baby.

Re:Tetris: the game that programs you

[Dr. Photo]

This went on for about three weeks, until one afternoon I had to put a particularly intense game on hold to go answer the call of nature.

Wow, you sure know how to hold it in!

Re:Warcraft II

[Chucow]

I played it for 72 hours straight and got severely dehydrated. If I hadn't looked at the clock I, might have died.

72/24 = 3 days.

You claim you realized by looking at the clock, but the time of day would have been exactly the same. I know I've missed entire days that way before ;)

Re:Half Life

[shroudedmoon]

I remember one of the first times I was playing Half-Life. Ok, here's a strange combo, but it had me ripping off my headphones and running for the light switch.

I'm stalking through dark corridors (2 am, of course), when there's this haunting "chanting" coming from everywhere in the game. I couldn't make out what it was saying, or where it was coming from. FREAKED the crap out of me. The alien game had suddenly gone all haunted and spooky... Scared me to death... All I heard were disembodied children giggling and singing.

Turns out what had happened was that my son had left his Reader Rabbit Toddler CD in the drive, and when HL went to fetch music, it pulled the audio tracks off of there. The in game music volume was low enough that I couldn't make out the words... Just the rhythm :)

Re:Balance of Power

[MoneyT]

Truly, the only way to win this game was not to play

that might have been the point

Sim City made me hallucinate

[cryptochrome]

Once I played Sim City 2000 for 11 hours straight. Afterwards I was seeing people as mixtures of commercial, residential, and industrial zoning. Took a few hours for that to wear off.

Zork

[wass]

I swear, I'll never play that game in the dark again.

Zork taught me never to wander about in the dark, period. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Re:Tetris' lingering side effects

[dillon_rinker]

My three reactions to this:
1. Geez, some loser geek fanboy wannabe poser pretending he knows...oh, right, that's Wil Wheaton.
2. Too young? Too YOUNG? Too shy, maybe, but certainly not too young.
3. It's probably a lot easier to fill the skyline in now that the two long tetrads are gone =(

Re:Wolfenstein: Scarier than Doom

[Carnivorous Carrot]

After hours of Quake CTF online, I remember watching TV and seeing an ad where you were looking down a tube with a down-escalator in it, with a guy standing on it in a suit reading a paper. I commented to my buddy, damn! I've an urge to jump down into that tube and blast a rocket up his ass!

Quake did that as well

[Aexia]

I had the Warcraft 2 CD in there when I started Quake up one time. I remember thinking "What the fuck has Trent been smoking?"

Re:Zork

[teqron]

I was waiting for someone to bring that game up. I still have a fear of caves.

Define 'affect'....

[otis wildflower]

... if the definition is 'wasted a semester of my education on it', I'd have to say Netrek or Civ would qualify.

Games like Civ and SimCity definitely affected my worldview though.