I was 1st introduced to PC games in the 1980s. My cousin had a PC and showed me various games; GI Joe, Maniac Mansion and a few other games. I wasn't impressed. Up until then, I was use to arcade games. And, none of these games looked anywhere near as arcade games did - they also looked complicated in controls and what not.
I pretty much wrote PC gaming off.
From then, it was Atari, Nintendo and Super Nintendo.
My high school got a 'fleet' of Compaq Persarios in 1995. We used them to learn programming in QBasic.
I decided to buy a Compaq Persario (not the one pictured above). It was a tower, 100Mhz, 16MBs system memory, 1GB HDD, CD drive. It was HUGE. I upgraded it by slapping on a VooDoo 3D video card. The one that worked with your current card to handle 3D graphics. Also upped the processor (to 166, I think) and system memory (a WHOPPING 80MBs!).
Anyway, the jump in graphics and performance was insane. I remember being floored when I played Quake 2 on my recently frankenstien-esque system. The VooDoo 3D card really made things look great (for the time). I remember playing Resident Evil on the PC and seeing these higher rez 3D figures on top of muddy / pixelated garbage.
Early PC games were:
- Magic Carpet
- Sim City
- Duke Nukem
- The Neverhood
- Curse of the Monkey Island
- Quake 1 & 2 (the demo for Quake 1 was like something from the future...)
- Soldier of Fortune 2
- Half Life
- Starcraft
- Warcraft
- Diablo 1 & 2
- Blood
- Shadow Warrior
Most of the PC games when I 1st got into PC gaming were only for the PC (Diablo 1 was on the PS1). So, you couldn't get anything like them anywhere other than the PC.
Some console games that made it to the PC were cool as well; Metal Gear for example. I loved it on the PC, as I was able to get a higher / crisper resolution.
At some point, I went straight Mac and only played World of Warcraft.
Eventually, I circled back to PCs and got to the point where everything, except Playstation 1st party games & Nintendo games, are on the PC.