Most Memorable Gaming Experiences [Updated]

A chronological list of the best and most memorable moments from the literal eternities I’ve spent gaming.

[1999] – Red Alert I: It’s hard to decide between Age of Empires I and Red Alert I, but despite playing both like a rabid, salivating zombie during my childhood, I’ve come to realize that the latter ultimately holds a greater formative grip over me. It’s this game that first got me fascinated with the Cold War and history in general. There were two separate CD-ROM’s, one for the Allied and one for the Soviet campaign – and also the map editor, that goddamn editor where I must’ve spent fucking ages creating all sorts of demented maps. I was thus propelled into the RTS sinkhole from the age of eight. So, yeah, thanks for ruining my life Tanya, try dry frying me on a tesla coil.

[2001] – Knights & Merchants: Goddamn Medieval simulator. A truly addictive yet highly peaceful piece of pixelated crack. It may well be my all time most played damn game. I enjoy its cozy simulation of daily life in the Middle Ages, alongside the heart-warming graphics and stellar soundtrack. While it’s technically an RTS, back in the day I’d just repeatedly load low-stake missions as town-building sandboxes. It sure beat the slop Maxis or EA was conjuring back then, after all, back in those days there was no Banished, Feudal Village or Manor Lords, or anything in that genre. Knights & Merchants was filling a gaming niche before it even existed. And yeah, even more than Red Alert, this glorious piece of shit is responsible for ruining my life, since it was a huge influence on me finding Medieval times interesting. Thanks a lot Joymania Interactive, you forged a Byzantinist. Precisely… what the ever-loving fuck even is that? Sounds like a joke profession like licking windows or something. Goddamn I love it though; throw me into blacksmith’s forge on the rim of a mountainous woodland and let me fuse with the haunted alloys. Byzantinist… lol.

[2002] – Serious Sam: Yes indeed sir, you may of course pipe the organ music from The Grand Cathedral up my rectum, along my vagus nerve and into my brainstem. But I must warn you, dear sir, it is not entirely necessary since it already resides there quite freely. Serious Sam is what Croteam was doing before The Talos Principle, and it was what me and my brother and a couple of demented friends were doing before we evolved into what might today pass as human to the untrained eye. This game is absolute mayhem; unhinged blasterino with an X-plosive glazing of dry humor. And the best part about it: an incredible array of secrets to discover in an era before we had an internet connection to ruin the fun. Hours upon hours were spent scouring each level for secrets and other miscellanea, each one alighting our faces like a collapsing neutron star. The amount of fun we had in this game was beyond reason, and in hindsight, it really shows how fun is wherever you seek it. I mean, on the surface there is nothing extraordinarily marvellous about the game, but it was a right time in the right place sort of situation. Today, I probably wouldn’t touch this sort of crap. But Serious Sam: The First Encounter and Second Encounter were just perfect for us semi-humanoid lifeforms trying to shed the chrysalis of pre-teen dogwater that was our lives back then.

[2004] – Vampire the Masquerade, Bloodlines II: 2004 was a gargantuan year for gaming, since it also saw the release of Half-life II. If you’ve watched Valve’s new documentary you know how big of a deal that was. It’s exceedingly hard to pick one of these two masterpieces over the other but VtMB wins on the mood and vibe and how much all that shit impacted my subsequent artistic tastes. This game was cyberpunk before it became mainstream; you’re basically in Night City (perma night-time LA). Perhaps it’s better to call it dark-urban-punk or something, since there’s not much cyber in it. But the grimdark-corporate-wasteland-with-a-dash-of-punk aesthetic definitely got me hooked. World of Darkness is such an amazing IP in general, it’s a real shame more games are not set within this setting. For a 14 year old, there was nothing more hauntingly mood-setting than this game. I mean you have Angel from Massive Attack greeting you on the fucking main menu. Take me back to The Asylum and to the Voerman sisters… I must’ve played through the game like ten times yet the cursed hotel sequence STILL creeps me out. VtMB was my first foray into a game with horror elements (together with F.E.A.R roughly around the same time) which turned into yet another goddamn lifelong passion. A curse that has also been dictating my tastes in other media. Good times.

[2005] – Soldat: It’s fucking high-school, our brains are spinning on overdrive, class is but a means to reach the next recess, and three new badly-policed computer labs have just been installed. The mayhem which follows was practically preordained. It is forbidden to play games on school computers – was a hilarious rule since it was broken more than it was upheld, despite the detentions and suspensions handed left and right. A dedicated group of recess gamers rapidly evolved out of the mass of demented teenagers milling about school. Positions with screens facing the back wall were much coveted, for obvious reasons. A catalog of shit was gamed to oblivion based on cracked versions distributed quicker than a virus, including favorites such as Quake and Soldat. But it was the latter that ultimately came to define high-school gaming shenanigans more than anything else. The amount of bloodshed and PvP mayhem unleashed via Soldat was unhinged; the amount of funny stuff Rasso and Emre and Muammer the False Prophet and everyone else got up to in Lab 2 was the stuff of legends, rim-jobing boogeyman with a chainsaw while pounding someone’s face point-blank with a fat M79 shell, or sniping someone’s rectum from a pixelated bush-cover… does life even offer a more sophisticated form of fun? Goddamn was Soldat one hell of an experience. We would be generating rage-cells and sweating out of our anuses while shouting like brainless apes, all the while some poor girls or kids from younger years or some other normal life-form would be trying to print their homework or some other lame-ass shit next to us, trying not to look at us out of second-hand embarrassment and probably also fear. We were disgustingly beautiful. Because break-time was quite short (especially morning break), there’d always be someone eating a fucking hotdog or some other mayonnaise-filled piece of shit while trying to play, resulting in mouth juice or mayonnaise or globs of crusty saliva etc. running onto the keyboard or down their shirt or something. And I mean who even names their kid [Redacted], fucking hell, man. Soldat was truly peak fun. Beyond the peak, in fact. We were living the next level of human evolution.

[2006] – Worms Armageddon: Worms is a franchise that could have been in many locations on this list, since it was a part of my life from about 1999 onwards. It’s the epitome of a local multiplayer game (i.e., sitting in front of a single PC as a group). We played it for so fucking long with Baris, including both Worms II and Worms: Armageddon. Our cracked copy of the latter was bugged and only loaded a single map. Yes we played one single map (the one with sunflowers) forever and ever since the multiplayer challenge never got boring. Even before that, though, around 1999 or so, me and Emre discovered Worms II, our first introduction to Team 17’s demented creation. It was grenade mayhem – is all I can say. Absolute unfettered madness. I still remember the excellent intro-video for Worms II, and when I close my eyes, I can still hear the squeaky little slithering noise the worms made as they ‘walk’, I think it’s part of my molecular fabric by now. Later still, circa 2006 or so, me and Rasso kept creating super-sheep challenges, purely to guide sheep-missiles through unbearably long custom-made tunnel and trap formations. This is the next level shit that has landed this game on the year 2006 of my list. This game is iconic and definitely the GOAT of its genre, whatever that may be, but definitely not tactical artillery.

[2008] – Maniac Mansion: Holy hell – is how I would begin describing this gaming experience that rather uniquely for this list, took place in a single sitting spanning a very long all-nighter. The location was Ilgar’s father’s house, the visual medium was a projector, and the attendees were around six-to-eighth RC bitchboys intoxicated with various crap. We completed these games, guideless and in that single evening. The way ET managed to navigate the lightless corridors in MMI remains the stuff of legends among us. And MMII: Day of the Tentacle – goddamn the humor and time-travel puzzles all landed so well after the high of beating the first game in a single sweep. Must’ve spent around 12 hours or so total on these, but the collective intellect of a bunch of demented clowns fermenting grey matter in malformed skull-boxes is clearly no match for any puzzle or riddle. Exit light, enter BLIGHT.

[2009-10] – DotA: Brain damage, anyone? Yes ma’am, I’ll take a double serving of that juicy, rage-laced bowl of PURE DAMAGE please. Ah… what an exquisite taste, how addictive. I’ll take another, and another, in fact, just keep’em flowing. Oh, what’s that? Why yes ma’am, of course you may insert that incredibly thick pipe of ANABOLIC RAGE right into my anus and vacate the premises. So… this is a remarkably accurate re-telling of my gaming life in the years 2009-2010, a hell-scape called Defense of the Ancients. This damn game, which I still occasionally make the mistake of playing since Valve decided to immortalize it in a second iteration, is the definition of a love-hate relationship. No other game has the ability to enrage a mortal man to this extent. It’s gaming’s fentanyl. Back in those days the scene had matured enough that there were several large online servers. I was mainly active on Eurobattle and Wepla, both of which unfortunately had a ranking/elo system that further fuelled the sweatiness. But when you taste the mountain of salt on the opposing team’s losing-ass keyboard everything becomes so fucking worth it. As all connoisseurs know, a form of uncontainable, necrotic glee suffuses over one’s whole body upon noticing any emotional damage delivered to the opposing bitch-ass team. This happens, on average, fifty percent of the time. While, for the other half, you end up mining salt in a bottomless pit of darkness. What a delightful experience. It’s easy to spot a DotA enjoyer outside on the street, they will constantly be muttering something in demonic tongue about a “missed stun” or a “fucking feeder” or some other form of alien language based on molecular vitriol, and if you get really close and look inside their short-sighted pupils, you will notice a nebulous cloud formation that spells out “FUCK YOU” and “KILL ME” in equal proportions like a quantum byte suspended in the definition of pathetic. Yes, I think everybody should play a few thousand hours of DotA to learn what rock bottom is. Absolute pleasure laced with pure bliss.

[2015] – The Witcher III: The first game I truly fell in love with since the VtMB-HL2 era. Multiplayer games have a sort of type-II fun enjoyment about them, where they can often be as annoying as they are rewarding. The best of the best single-player games will always outshine them in terms of minute-per-minute experience, a phenomenon well exemplified by TW3. It landed like an atomic bomb in the gaming scene; the sheer breadth of the game, its size and length, the deepness of even the most peripheral side quest, the beauty of its graphics, the voice-acting, and pretty much everything about it was well beyond its time. This game was the first time I went to the trouble of finding out what the screenshot shortcut was on Steam – absolutely breathtaking sunsets. And then, the Blood & Wine expansion… god-fucking-damn CDPR set the new gold standard in gaming experiences. It took a long while for a game to replicate let alone surpass this excellence. I recall how after playing TW3, Bethesda’s bland-ass crap immediately felt so hollow and devoid of life (e.g., Skyrim), even the good-old Fallout games stopped providing enjoyment. It was a watershed moment for Action-RPGs.

[2016] – Factorio: An absolute nerdgasm, and a fucking blackhole of time consumption. We first discovered it in April 2016 together with Rasso and Emre. The coop mode led to some hilarious moments where we all trolled each other to oblivion and back (train-mower mayhem). It’s a logic-based circuit and factory building game. It’s also, unfortunately, a game of SCALING UP. There’s always something to expand, always some form of input or output related bottleneck to tweak. Goddamn it’s so time consuming and addictive. It’s also fairly difficult, and I’ve thankfully forgotten most of what I knew, so I’m too intimidated to start again. But just last month the developers launched a space-faring expansion after almost a decade?! Crazy longevity… just shows the game’s excellence. It’s also very close to being Turing complete, and thus can be nerded to infinity and back with ridiculously complex (and cumbersome) in-game logic circuits.

[2018] – PUBG: Anaerobic exercise at its finest. I find the concept of Battle Royale (last man standing arena – e.g., Hunger Games) to be one of the most exciting and adrenaline-filled competition styles in existence. It is definitely the most intense thing you can play. This genre was a fairly late arrival in the gaming world due to hardware bottlenecks in simulating 100 player online arenas (e.g., older games such as CS are only 10 people), but with the advent of ARMA2 and its popular offshoot, H1Z1, Battle Royale games began their late bloom. And now today they’re a staple of the industry with so many different versions and styles. But PUBG was and remains the GOAT of BR’s in my opinion, since it has that visceral military-simulation weight to it (severely lacking in pathetic, cartoonish games such as Fortnite or Apex etc.). I fell into this sinkhole for over a thousand hours, most of it either solo (last man standing out of 100) or duo with my brother. It pretty much got me through my first year in Canada. Hot-dropping in Pochinki or Pecado or Goroka will forever remain an unmatched gaming experience. The winter landscape of Vikendi and especially the night map with the beautiful auroras was my absolute favorite. I’ve never had my heart beat so intensely as when I survived into the last two or three players in a solo match. Back in those days, winning a solo game in PUBG (a rare feat) was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever experienced in front of a screen.

[2019] – Outlast: Okay so this was another short-lived but memorable fuse, since the game is a single-player horror classic. Outlast was the first game since Amnesia: The Dark Descent that fucking terrified the shit out of me. I was wintering over in Berlin to see Selin, and our dear friend Gökhan was visiting us for a few days. It was during those dreary days that my bold suggestion along the lines of “Hey, do you guys want to play this game called Outlast on the big screen with all the lights off and on maximum volume?” was accepted suspiciously easily. We sat there staring vacantly into the dark void of an enveloping nightmare, continuously passing the controller to the next person like a hot potato whenever the fear got too unbearable. Outlast, much like Amnesia, makes the player powerless, so the only recourse is to hide and/or run away from the terrifying shit clawing and crawling and running towards you. That sense of “there’s something right fucking behind me breathing down my neck” is enough to make anyone’s orifices quiver in terror. The only thing to do in that all-too-common situation is to press the ‘move forward’ button even harder out of sheer desperation and some weird form of newfound, psychogenetic finger strength. Going through all that shit and surviving and turning around to see your two supposed friends submerged under comfy blankets with their eyes shut is enough to make anyone hurl the controller to the NEXT PERSON. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, homie. In hindsight, I’m amazed we completed the game.

[2020] – WoW Classic: Okay so the first and second versions of WoW (Vanilla and BC) are likely up there in my most played shit of all time, but I have absolutely zero interest in the cartoonish mess that is current retail WoW (and that has been for the past decade and a half). While I played this beautiful addiction and social interaction generator back in the day too (2006-), it was not until WoW Classic was announced and my good friend Mert made the scandalous decision of saying, hey why don’t we all play it together, that shit really hit the corpse-fan. Our journey began in September of 2019 as I was flying to Canada on my own to face the exceedingly dreary Pacific seaboard – but alas, it turns out I was far from alone. We’d just started playing WoW Classic as a group of nine or so IRL friends which interlaced with other subgroups such as my brother and his friends etc. A marvellously bustling environment. We made the fateful decision of creating an English speaking guild with me as its leader. This, then, turned into a two-year adventure where a 40-man raid team was managed and led and policed and conversed with for countless hours. Many new friends of various nationalities were made along the way, some of which I even ended up meeting IRL. The gameplay in WoW is unrelentingly mediocre and quite bland, and I will not snort the necessary copium to even start arguing it isn’t so. What made this adventure so special was the atmosphere. The chillaxation of tuning into a raid night, cracking a beer, and just vibing on Discord as hours start to evaporate, the world outside be damned. Of course, our core group being officers made the whole ordeal even more rewarding since inevitably there was a certain degree of favoritism in loot distribution, although we kept this to a minimum. Covid was an absolute blessing. Servers truly began overflowing from March 2020 onwards, absolutely frothing with unreleased energy that was channeled into the game, vitalizing it to a degree I’ve not seen since. This was one really good thing about Covid: Hordes of people forced indoors, logging in and bringing all that unshackled energy to the game, while the real world burned and disintegrated outside. Truly a time to remember. I mean, I was even creating a monthly guild newsletter at one point, fucking apeshit effort in hindsight. But all good things must end, and the magic slowly died around 2021.

[2020 December] – Life is Strange: This game is an oddball in this list, since it’s really different in style from everything else here. Yet I fucking loved it. It was deep winter in the snowed-in Alpine mountains and Selin had gone to Turkey over Christmas to see her family, leaving me alone in Innsbruck for ten days or so. I remember connecting my laptop to the TV and just getting super into this game’s storyline and characters. An amazing, emotional game, particularly the second and third acts, where you see the diverging timelines on your fateful decisions and how they affect Chloe. And the art style and graphics of this game just somehow work so well; such a cozy atmosphere. I really wished Arcadia Bay existed IRL; I was all ready to travel to Oregon.

[2021 December] – Rayman Legends: In 2021 August, I’d gone back to Vancouver after a year-and-a-half of remote work thanks to the pandemic. I was excited to be back in da scene, and finally not have to teach three back-to-back classes on Zoom from 1:00 till 4:00 AM local time. Anyway, shit went south really quickly; mental barriers, depression, shit-whipped weather, and a variety of medical semi-urgencies. All this resulted in me burning (even more intensely than usual) to see my cosmic floodlight, to be with her, to embrace her. So, I said fuck this shit, life’s too short, and left the Pacific rim in December, hiking my ass back to the Alpine foothills whence my floodlight was beaming her million-watt warmth beyond the space-time continuum, her sublime energy rippling through the fabric of reality. Three layovers and seventeen coffees later, I was back in her light. One fun activity we decided to try during those frosty winter months was to play Rayman Legends on the projector. My oh my, was this to become a mad adventure. Selin got absolutely hooked on it, her competitive vein throbbing at the prospect of completing everything at the most difficult level to get the platinum stars. Together we battled, together we fell, bled, got up and conquered. It was an intensely fun and somewhat frustrating grind, but we did it. Rayman Legends really isgreat fun to play couch-coop since you can play two players on the same screen with great ease. It’s perfect for this. The amount of content is also decent; I think it took us close to 60 hours. Riding this high, we then went on to play through the Crash Bandicoot series, but that was single player, so required passing the controller to each other every so often. Still great fun of course.

[2022 February] – Cyberpunk 2077: Yes Mr. Gibson, indeed sir, this mess is all your doing. Thanks for infusing this paradoxical love of suffering and a grimness into us all. What sort of madness is this? No one quite knows. But it’s just so evocative and hauntingly beautiful. The Cyberpunk atmosphere from Bladerunner to Neuromancer to god-knows what else, has always been an absolute favorite of mine, as I stated above. After a much exaggerated (but in reality mildly rocky) launch fiasco, CP2077 has gone on to become the stuff of legends (average reviews tipped over to overwhelmingly positive on Steam as of last month). Night City is such a mood setter. Sometimes I’d just launch this game and walk around the nihilistic post-capitalistic wasteland and muse about everything and nothing. It’s beautiful and horrific at the same time. And I mean Keanu Reeves being in it is just too good to pass up anyway, not to mention other people later on. And Grimes’ in-game performance, when it suddenly begins, is so spine chillingly beautiful. CDPR is good with this sort of musical insertion, as I am reminded of Priscilla’s Song in the Witcher III – one of the greatest musical presentations in video game history (perhaps equalled only by Hope’s Song in Baldur’s Gate III, an utter goosebump generator when one first unexpectedly hears it piping through the seventh layer of hell – more on that game later though).

[2022 June] – Disco Elysium: This. Is. The. Best. Game. Ever. Made. I could write an entire novel about this game and call it something unimaginative like Sacred and Terrible Air. Disco Elysium is the pinnacle of writing not just in game media but any onscreen medium (easily surpassing even the majority of literature). The prose is haunting and evocative and completely beyond this world, while the dialogues are also unbelievably well constructed and humorous and weighty and everything you could ever want. Disco Elysium resonates in your soul. It’s still there today, lingering just beneath the surface of my cerebrum. Okay, now that I’ve hopefully made it crystal clear that this game is the GOAT, then we can move onto other titles, since there is nothing more to say really: just go play it. Or face the fact that you will die incomplete. You will perish less fulfilled than those who have experienced it. And. You. Will. Die.

[2023] – Baldur’s Gate III: Since this game made the CRPG genre mainstream and catapulted DnD memes right into the TikTok feeds of suburban moms, there’s not much praise-mongering that needs to be done here. Everybody not living under a rock or in some secluded cave has likely heard about it. I played this beauty twice over on release, before it blew up (give me a medal please), and I have to say it was and remains one of the best gaming experiences of my life. The Dark Urge path, in particular, was the icing on top. And I mean, Orin the Red anyone? Goddamn what an ace villainess. I won’t ramble about BG3’s merits too much, since there are a million reviews already doing this, buttressed by a multitude of game of the year and game of the decade awards. While I’m happy what would ordinarily be a niche, geeky CRPG set in the DnD universe became super popular thanks to Larian’s stellar efforts, it makes me mildly annoyed that other equally excellent games remain unrecognized (e.g., see Rogue Trader, below).

[2024 January] – Lethal Company: Welcome to your first day on the job – here you will learn the intricate blend of deep horror and unhinged comedic bullshit. It was the 1st of January, I still remember, when I finally got bored stiff with whatever the fuck I had been doing, and decided to join my old friends on Discord for some gaming shenanigooms. I was alone over Christmas and New Year in Nether-fucking-lands getting my ass handed to me by the weather, deep thoughts, and God almighty himself: the perfect bleak-ass setting for some real gaming. Lethal Company turned out to be a truly memorable experience, since it’s the first online thing I properly committed to since the whole WoW Classic saga three years earlier. Gaming with friends is always fun, but LC takes it to the next level since it’s cooperative (players vs machine) – always more fun that the stress of PvP shit. The simplicity of the gameplay loop, the excellence of the horror elements, the comedic value of all the voice-related gimmicks and stuff is just too good not to commemorate in this list. It truly was a vibe in those winter months, the magic lasting way into March and April, before the winds of life blew us all in separate directions. The Skinwalkers mod remains peak fun.

[2024 Autumn] – Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader: This grimdark CRPG almost immediately became one of my favorite gaming experiences. The richness of the world, lore, dialogue and characters, and the complexity of the combat system is an absolute pleasure to experience. I played it back-to-back three times. Yes, indeed, I have a low attention-span and likely a cocktail of ADHD and whatnot but it did not bore me one bit to play this three times in a row – something I can never normally do. Each playthrough becomes so different and unique based on the diverging paths and consequences and moral choices you follow. I have a lengthy review where I compare Rogue Trader to BG3 and show why it’s a tad better in my opinion, although both are excellent. I won’t repeat all that here, instead see: https://steamcommunity.com/id/cahitmetez/recommended/2186680/

[[[-Postscriptum-]]]

There are many, many truly excellent gaming experiences that I could not include in this list, since I did not want to overcrowd it too much. Honorable mentions go to: Planescape: Torment, Beneath a Steel Sky, Portal I & II, STASIS, Signalis, Half Life II, Mass Effect II, Crash Bandicoot, Age of Empires, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Fallout: New Vegas, Company of Heroes, and probably many others I can’t remember right now.

In closing, I’d like to thank my family and friends for giving me the opportunity to write this dissertation: Without you this would not be possible. Also, Serkan Abi, thanks for opening Adeks in Besiktaş and being such a dudebro about it. I’d also like the thanks the idiotic fucks who thought setting a legal closing limit of 2AM on internet cafes was sensible. Fuck you pieces of shit, although you may have saved my life. But did I want saving? And anyway, Portakal and Alt-Adeks existed. So yeah, I’d like to extend my gratitude to all the participants in this planetary simulation that is somehow, miraculously, still ongoing. Unplug this crap already!

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Cover Image: Screenshot from Black Mirror III