What game caused your helli$h descent into computer building?

Duke Nukem 3D and Quake were the reason I paid a boutique to build my first "powerful" computer.
Quake 3 was the reason I built my first myself (with my first 3d video card).
Didn't really mess with computers for a while after that until Doom 3 was announced. That's when I got into it again and haven't stopped since
 
Unreal-GlideVoodoo1flyby.jpg
 
Commander Keen was one of the first games I played. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom really got me hooked on PC gaming

My insatiable need for hardware upgrades started with Need For Speed 2 SE. When I saw the graphical goodness of that game paired with a Voodoo2 it became an addiction.

Quake 2 got me going on the multiplayer front.
 
I JUST remembered another milestone...

Getting Carmageddon to run in 3dFX mode... took some serious hacking, but oh, the carnage! :D
 
It was 2000 and the game No One Lives Forever for me. It ran horribly on my P3 500mhz, 64mb RAM, and TNT2, so after reading a few forums I bought a rather expensive (For a 10 year old) 128mb RAM stick. CSS forced me to upgrade to a nice little gaming laptop. (Dell XPS M170/M1710) (Slideshow on the old system,although mildly upgraded, 800mhz P3 and a Geforce 2) A budget desktop quickly followed, and then I started work on the monster in my sig. Not good..not good.
 
Romir said:
Unreal-GlideVoodoo1flyby.jpg
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God that brings back SOO many memories. I remember after finally getting my new Voodoo 2 working and installing unreal and then dealing with some other hardware issues that screen finally came on...

I nearly shit a brick .. downside was I had less ram than required so it skipped a shitload :eek:
 
Bringing back these memories is a tad depressing actually. In recent years, game development has been more about pursuing an economic venture than creating a good, fun game.
 
My interest in building actually never came from gaming, it came from wanting to understand how things work and how they're assembled. I took apart my toys as a kid and tried to figure out how they went back together, same with anything I could get my hands on. Gaming has never really been a primary focus of my upgrading. I do it because I enjoy it.
 
Originally I hassled my dad to upgrade from our Tandy TX 1000 286 to a 486DX 66 so I could play DooM at home and not just at my uncles house who had the nirvana set up of three 386/486s for lan play. Prior to this I'd been playing awesome games like King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Obitus, Centurion, round42, Alleycat and the like.

Later I bullied my dad into getting a TNT2 so I could play Quake2 in opengl and get better performance on our HP PII 350. Unfortunately we didn't have an agp slot so ended up getting a Voodoo2 which turned out to be better for Quake2 anyway as it had Glide.

Once I moved out a few years later I built myself a Duron 700, Geforce2MX 32MB system from scratch with Quake2 still my primary focus. I became one of the best players in Australia along with one of my clan mates but alas the game hasn't been played over here for years... If it was I would still spend a lot of time playing it and probably would have never got into CS in a big way.

I recently got Bad Company 2 which prompted me to upgrade from a 4830 and AM2 2.6Ghz (3 year old processor) to a Gigabyte 5850 OC edition and Phenom 550 X2 BE. I've been most impressed with the results. :)

Um so yeah, games. Games got me into hardware addiction.
 
World of Warcraft got me starting to build me own, bit by bit, here and there, and Crysis just made it worst !
 
Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord got me giving up on a rental computer, two years into the three year rental period, and get myself a proper computer.

(Getting the rental in the first place was fine though, since it was cheap (total cost for three years was about 40% less than buying an equal computer up front), I desperately needed a new computer, and fresh out from the university I didn't have the money to buy one.)
 
HL2. I did almost a total rebuild for that game in mid-2004. Before that it was just upgrades. Started around... i dunno 2000 or 2001? I've since fallen out of the game. Until now :D My new system components arrives on friday!
 
Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom in the early 90's. Then in the mid 90's the puke fest began... frame rates got weird and motion sickness ensued.
 
Falcon 3.0, I used to be on top of the original CompuServe Challenge Ladder...
 
I wasn't really big on PC video games when I was younger, I was more of a console fan and the first PC FPS I played was Half-Life on some crappy school computer back in 2000. My mom bought prebuilt HP and IBMs but I never did any real gaming until I heard of an amazing MMO called Anarchy Online from my cousin. I played that in 2001 which required internet thus I purchased my first internet connection (AOL). The internet showed me a whole new world of PC gaming. I bought another prebuilt Emachine to play Tribes 2 on decent settings which required me to buy and add an Nvidia Gforce FX5200, my first PC part. But I noticed technology advancing while my machine was stuck in the past. I continued to add small things to boost my performance. A DVD drive, RAM, HDD, whatever I could do to squeeze a little more life out of it.

I finally built my first computer in 2004 when I was 13. It was an AMD Athlon 64 on some ASUS Motherboard, a 9600XT with a Far Cry bundled game, 4GB DDR RAM, 350W PSU for about $1500 back then. It ran like a dream. Those were simpler times when all I played was Tribes 2, Anarchy Online, Counter-Strike. Then Counter-Strike Source was leaked and I played Half-Life 2. I wanted more power so I made a quick jump to intel in 2006 and built a Core 2 Duo PC for about $1200 using a 7900GS.

Then I saw Crysis and built my next rig with that game in mind. Still didn't get the results I was looking for, so I kept building and building until I finally ended up with the one in my sig. I've built about 6 personal rigs between 2004 and 2009. With 2 costing over $1000. and 1 over $2000.
 
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it was always some Blizzard game that made me upgrade.
my first PC (P-90) didn't run Starcraft all that great so i made the jump to a P2-400
that PC didn't run Diablo2 "smoothly" so i jumped to a P3-800
that PC ran War3 like ass so i bumped to a P4-2.53ghz w/ Radeon 9700
and Starcraft2 is coming up so just made a jump to i7 w/ GTX 480 :)
 
Nothing will ever recapture the magic of first staring at the Unreal rolling demo or the first Quake II screens in Maximum PC, or gazing longingly at the screenshots on the back of beefy PC game boxes in the store and frantically checking to see whether your specs meet the requirements.

The earliest days are always the best. Now we have gigantic game development budgets, digital distribution, fifty forums to bitch and whine about games, DRM, super high resolution...

Everything is always getting better, but somehow, never as good as it once was..
 
Matrices said:
Nothing will ever recapture the magic of first staring at the Unreal rolling demo or the first Quake II screens in Maximum PC, or gazing longingly at the screenshots on the back of beefy PC game boxes in the store and frantically checking to see whether your specs meet the requirements.

The earliest days are always the best. Now we have gigantic game development budgets, digital distribution, fifty forums to bitch and whine about games, DRM, super high resolution...

Everything is always getting better, but somehow, never as good as it once was..
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I remember when maximum PC was worth reading. Those where the good ol' days. We need a new magazine worth reading that isn't 3/4 ads.

[H] magazine maybe?
 
I actually just got a Maximum PC in the mail yesterday from some $5 subscription I probably filled out weeks ago. I had to look at the cover and the date to make sure that I was indeed reading the latest issue - the contents were so outdated in some respects that I thought it was from last year. Gems included "upgrade to the ATI 5850 from your 8800 GTX!" and sober advice to upgrade video card drivers.

It's definitely aimed mostly at the mid-level enthusiast. Maybe it was always that way and I just didn't mind it years ago when I was a mid-level enthusiast.
 
Theif, and then UT really kicked it into gear. I purchased an Athlon 700 slot A, and have been wast...er I mean building PC's ever since. :)
 
l88bastard said:
I have been gaming since the early 1980s and my first computer was a 286 12mghz whopper!

I played all of the greats on it, A-10 tank killer, Red Baron, Stunts, all of the Sierra games (Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, Heros Quest, Police Quest)...and I fondly remember when my dad go a 486 50MHZ speed machine and how buttery smooth A-10, Red Baron and Aces of the Pacific ran on it....but I never went custom computer building until 2007!

I got out of computer gaming for a while, mildly returning to it in the late 90's and when Grand Theft Auto came out in 2001 I actually made my first video card purchase and got a 9700 pro which also served me well with Battlefield 1942...but I was still using a COMPAQ base computer with all that lol.

Crysis. Crysis caused me to finally junk the store bought PCs and go out into the strange world of saving money by spending loads of money on Hi-end computer building addiction!

So what game caused you to learn more about computers?
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Doom 1 Shareware.
 
DarknRahl said:
Originally I hassled my dad to upgrade from our Tandy TX 1000 286 to a 486DX 66 so I could play DooM at home and not just at my uncles house who had the nirvana set up of three 386/486s for lan play. Prior to this I'd been playing awesome games like King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Obitus, Centurion, round42, Alleycat and the like. ...
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Word. I remember "suffering," through (it was actually nirvana at the time) playing Doom on a 386-SX 16MHz (no math co-processor) with 6MB of ram. Framerate was approx 3-4 fps at full screen, if not less, but could get into the teens if I ran it at 1/4 screen or so.

Upon playing it on a 486-DX based machine it was just surreal.

DarknRahl said:
Later I bullied my dad into getting a TNT2 so I could play Quake2 in opengl and get better performance on our HP PII 350. Unfortunately we didn't have an agp slot so ended up getting a Voodoo2 which turned out to be better for Quake2 anyway as it had Glide.
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Are you sure? Much of my playing was either in software mode or with a Voodoo2 in Q2, I recall it was OpenGL and a really good Glide Wrapper was written for it.
 
This is embarrassing to say but Carmageddon I believe was the game that got me started. I played plenty of games before but it's the first one that ever required me to do some upgrades to get it running (needed a 3d card).

LOL it was worth it, the game was awesome at the time.
 
Matrices said:
I actually just got a Maximum PC in the mail yesterday from some $5 subscription I probably filled out weeks ago. I had to look at the cover and the date to make sure that I was indeed reading the latest issue - the contents were so outdated in some respects that I thought it was from last year. Gems included "upgrade to the ATI 5850 from your 8800 GTX!" and sober advice to upgrade video card drivers.

It's definitely aimed mostly at the mid-level enthusiast. Maybe it was always that way and I just didn't mind it years ago when I was a mid-level enthusiast.
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Agreed. I like CPU (Computer Power User). I have both MaximumPC and CPU both of which I only did because my kid was selling subscriptions for school. Both are aimed at mid level but I think CPU is better.
 
Matrices said:
The earliest days are always the best. Now we have ... digital distribution
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I'd argue digital distribution's always been here.

I downloaded Doom shareware. I downloaded Quake shareware. Without that kind of word of mouth I'm positive I wouldn't have bought (let alone known about) Doom, and probably almost the same for Quake...

CS kept Half-Life sales up and made the game a must buy. Downloadable mod, before going retail.

With all the stuff for Doom/Quake/Unreal/HL that you could download, DD's been going strong for a long time...

Gabe might have really reconsidered Steam had he not already understood that people were willing to already download MBs upon MBs, now up to GBs, alone just for drivers, patches and these mods...

If people had said no to that, Steam wouldn't have worked...
 
I upgraded for Unreal Tournament. I had a Celeron 90MHz that could barely run Win95 and upgraded to a P2 366MHz with a Voodoo 2 GPU. Both systems were hand me downs.
 
I'm only 24, but I have been into computer games as long as I can remember - Pre-Windows 3.1 days for sure. The latest computer I used that was technically the family's PC had a K6-2 450MHz and integrated video. Then I saw video previews of Return to Castle Wolfenstein probably in 2001 and knew I had to have it. I think I downloaded the demo once it came out (on 56K) and tried playing it, but my computer probably wouldn't even run it. So I continued to save up all my paper route money and bought and built my first custom PC when I was 15. IIRC it had an Athlon XP 1700+, Radeon 7200 64MB non-DDR, and probably somewhere around 512MB RAM tops and a 40GB HDD.

So RtCW got me started (which is the greatest multiplayer game in the world by the way!), but ever since then I was always saving up just so I could upgrade my PC as soon as I could, haha.
 
What Game? None.

Being a tech-head just always thought it made more sense to build my own PCs since my first 486, when I switched over from an Amiga.

Coming from an Amiga, I wanted graphics and sound, so I researched the hardware before assembling and bought some kind of Fast Diamond 2D card.
 
Long ago... LONG ago...

Quake 2 came out. I tried to run it on my Crapaq and it was terrible. Litterly, and please understand, I did grow up in the sticks, a friend told me "HEY you know you can add a Video Card to that thing and make the game run faster and look better?" I was intrigued. So one night, I ran to a best buy I think it was and bought a (Of all things, WTH was I thinking? OH yea I didn't even read Hardocp then lol) 3dfx Voodoo Rush. The card nearly did not fit in the case at all. I had to thread it in from the back, made a mess of it but got it in.

I couldn't believe how much better Quake 2 was!! After that, I was hooked, before long, the 20fps (Rofl) I was getting in that setup was just not good enough! I decided to do it from the ground up...... Fast forward, well over a decade in time and here I am.

EDIT - I had alot of computers and gaming systems before that, including a C64, a 3do! and even an atari! That said, the instance above is what set me on the course building my own, and I have never looked back.
 
Grand Prix 2 was my "hook". I spent countless hours playing on a 486DX2-66MHz. Good times. Hell!, I couldn't even imagine owning that computer now. I have so many driving sims....the smallest installation being around 10GB. That old system's storage space could not even hold a mod.
 
Must have been Quake/Duke Nukem 3D.. possibly Half Life 1 (Counter-Strike era as well).
 
Romir said:
Unreal screen shot
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They have a 227 patch made by fans of the game that works wonderfully on Windows 7, you can find it at www.oldunreal.com Every now and then I get the urge to load some of those old games for the Nostalgia. Unreal at 1920x1200, awesome.

RangerXML said:
Before I modded computers to maximize PC performance I modded the boot sequence and what loaded on boot in the autoexec.bat. I take it you never tried modding your autoexec.bat so that it wouldn't load any crap (like Windows 3.11), once you have a lean machine which only loads DOS even a 386sx (can't remember if I was ever able to salvage a mathco from anywhere) with only 4MB of RAM could run DOOM, once I got to 8MB I could let it load all the Windows stuff. I fried my 100Mhz 486, I thought that CPU didn't need heatsinks, boy was I wrong.
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I had a long long autoexec.bat file that I used for a menu that let me choose if I wanted to stay in DOS or head to Winblows 3.0 (CRASH CRASH CRASH). I remember playing with EMM386.exe due to my playing F15 Strike Eagle 3, which required expanded memory. Game had bugs but I had no Internet connection to download patches, not that 2400bps dial up would have helped. I was in heaven when I started subscribing to PC Gamer magazine and found they included game patches on the CD. If it weren't for PC Gamer, I never would have bought Half-Life, I spent so many hours in that game, shooting rockets and helicopters and blowing things up with remote control explosives, priceless.
 
unreal tournament 2004 made me pick up a 9700 pro, pentium 4 2.4 ghz, 512 mb ram.
 
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Saabjock said:
Grand Prix 2 was my "hook". I spent countless hours playing on a 486DX2-66MHz. Good times. Hell!, I couldn't even imagine owning that computer now. I have so many driving sims....the smallest installation being around 10GB. That old system's storage space could not even hold a mod.
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In 1996 I had the very latest hardware (new high-end system bought just months earlier), and GP2 still ran like ass on it... This was back when 24fps was supposedly fluid...

This was also back when one CD could have been used to hold a full system backup.
 
Zarathustra[H];1035780132 said:
Speaking of true classics...
Does anyone else remember this gem?
portsofcall-splash.jpg

I spent countless hours playing ports of call.
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I wonder what that's doing amongst the abandonware?
It's still very much live and kicking! (The "classic" as well as newer and improved versions.)
 
Olle P said:
I wonder what that's doing amongst the abandonware?
It's still very much live and kicking! (The "classic" as well as newer and improved versions.)
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For the longest time the author had changed the licensing for the original DOS version to be free, but recently that has been rescinded and rolled into the licensing for the newer version.

I didn't realize (until googling for that screen shot) that there was a new version. I am partially intrigued, though I really fdont hvae time for this stuff anymore. My weeklong re-addiction to half-life 2 and subsequent purchasing of the episodes and finishing them, coupled with my rediscovery of civilization (through Civ 4) has been enough to exasperate my better half already :p
 
And I just remembered another two that I had forgotten about that were amazing (though not graphically)

Tank wars!

Tankwars-shot.jpg


Followed a year later by the much improved Scorched Earth!

Scorched_Earth_gameplay.png


Back in my 286 days these games were some of the best hot-seat multiplayer games around!

(I'm still a little bit bitter that the version for the Amiga 500 named "Scorched Tanks" was so much better

gameplay.png
 
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