I remember a few from various stages of my life (born 1984).
Seeing the demo footage of Sonic 2 in Woolworths and thinking the leaves falling down in Aquatic Ruin zone was so cool and advanced.
The original Sega arcade of Virtua Racing with the moving cars completely blew me away.
I remember my uncle loading up Cannon Fodder on his Amiga, and a REAL song with REAL music came out, along with REAL photos. I was amazed haha.
A few years on I remember a PlayStation demo disc having promo footage of the first Gran Turismo and it looked so real to me, I watched it over and over. The first Driver on PS1 looked absolutely amazing to me also.
3 of them:
watching an Amiga 500 load from disk having only seen 8bit games on tape. Everything that machine did at the time was like magic.
watching the castle fly through intro for Unreal on PC when the first 3D accelerators appeared. Everything changed after that.
experiencing the shark diving demo on PlayStation VR. And also how nothing changed after that! xD
And to have been able to experience that evolution from space invaders to cyberpunk in a single life time has been a privilege.
We’re the only generation that grew up alongside video games. We watched them grow up into what they are today, and our kids don’t even know of a world without them.
I don’t know what “Age” we’re in right now, but I think 1970-2024+ should be referred to as the Video Game Age.
I feel the same way about it being a privilege. I missed the earliest part… but even to have lived through the NES and Master System era through to today has been amazing.
Games will continue getting ever more impressive, but nobody again will witness the kind of seismic leaps in what games could accomplish that people saw between the 70s and 2000s.