I wish I could say that my first memory of gaming on a PC had some dramatic impact on my life. But, truth be told, I was five years old and could barely understand what a computer was, let alone how much they'd come to define my life as an adult. My grandparents had an old DOS machine that had only one game on it: Reader Rabbit. I remember having to bug my sisters every time I wanted to play so they could input the run command because that was far beyond my capabilities.
A few years later, however, I'd have my first true PC gaming memory. I saw an advertisement for Heroes of Might and Magic 2 in PC Gamer and found a demo I could download online. I vividly remember it being almost exactly 25 MB in size—only because that still took a whopping four hours to download over our slow-ass dial up internet.
It was a Sunday morning and I had stayed home from church pretending to be sick so that I could play. My grandma phoned and, not wanting to interrupt the download and lose my progress, I ignored the software that kept popping up alerting me to her call. By the time the demo finished downloading, she called for probably the tenth time in a total panic because she thought something bad had happened to me. I felt guilty and got into a lot of trouble from my parents because we had a rule that we always had to stop the internet to answer the phone. But that guilt was quickly swept away the moment I booted up the demo and was teleported into a land of sorcerers, zombies, and halflings. I probably put a hundred hours into that demo as a kid—my parents refused to buy me the full game. And, to this day, it's one of the fondest memories I have of gaming on a PC.
It's fun reliving those earliest memories of PC gaming, which is why this week I want you to share yours. What was the game? How did it make you feel? Who were you with? Take a moment to gather all of the details before you respond. Next week, we'll round up our favorite responses and share them with our community.
So hop in the comments and take a trip down memory lane with us.
