It doesn't hold up but while it was happening I don't think there was a better gaming experience than Vanilla WoW. Obviously for some it wasn't the first MMO experience, but for many it was, and it was pure magic.

The random friends made, and mortal enemies you would drop everything you were doing to try and kill. Spending 6 hours clearing a dungeon(read wailing caverns) for the first time with random people you met in chat. Getting your first mount, walking into molten core with 39 other people and killing your first raid boss. Getting your first epic. The stupidity of barrens chat/whatever the equivalent the scumbag alliance had. The first time you had guild mates come to your rescue when some no-life higher level person was camping you and it devolving into an impromptu war between everyone in the zone and their friends. That time you pulled off an epic 1 v 2. Shit talking all the other classes in your guilds class chat during raids.

The drama ohh the drama, the e-gf/bf that became peoples husbands and wives, the guild leaders wife e-humping half the guild. Relationships destroyed because someone would rather spend their time in azeroth that just about anything else.

Drooling over the gear the best players on the server had. Battling on the front lines of alterac valley all night, going to bed and rejoining the same battle, sometimes to cheers from your fellow soldiers that you had rejoined the fight.

I don't think there will ever be anything like it again, we know too much, have access to to much info, but for that brief period in time wow was the greatest game ever.

Maniac Mansion or Zack McKraken on the Commadore64. At the time...at that age... we were living in the future, and it was amazing.

Gothic 2.

Grand Theft Auto 3.

You had to be there to see how absolutely groundbreaking that was at the time. Gaming had suddenly grown up.

It was like all the obvious limits in other games all just got pulled away at once. Explore a full city in 3D, drive around, shoot people, steal a tank.

And the sequel only improved on it, but I've honestly never been so awed by a game before or since. It's like they were the first dev to finally figure out what the PS2 hardware was for. Everything before just felt like a slightly nicer version of what had come before. This was new.

Twisted Metal or Resident Evil

Ocarina of time. All Zelda games since are to some degree compared to it in terms of how successful it is monetarily, gameplay and story-wise. So many modern adventure games are based on this one game. It’s the game that finally made target tracking in 3D work. It’s so well thought out, that a blind streamer is able to play the game probably better than I ever will. If most common people know of “zelda” it’s because of this game. There are so many memes from Zelda in general. It’s one of the few games from my childhood that I will replay for the rest of my life.

Just cause three. blow shit up, kill bad guys, just enough story to explain it all. even better, it strikes a good balance of minimal story and compelling story, which a lot of games like that kinda suck at.

Ultima IV. All the JRPG stuff started here.

Command and conquer generals zero hour

Final Fantasy 1 - It wasn’t the first RPG, but it pretty much defined the series. It still has tons of playability, I revisit it more or less every 5 years. I still have yet to beat Warmech, and only have encountered him a handful of times.

But most of all, it’s the game that saved Squaresoft. If it had failed, we would have missed out on so many great games, including ones also mentioned in this post.

Runners up have to be Donkey Kong, which brought us Mario, which in turn restored vitality into the at home console game industry, and Double Dragon, which brought us PVP and Co-op combat.

Honorable mention would have to be that Simpsons arcade game where Marge can fight with the vacuum cleaner and TMNT 2 - Two classic, very difficult, drain your change jar games. I’d throw Mega man 2 into that mix as well.

Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary. (Chronicle is a close second)

Puyo Puyo Tsu is the greatest competitive puzzle game ever made. Such a simple set of mechanics gives way to an incredible amount of depth. I think its greatest strength relative to the rest of the genre is how much importance it places on actually paying attention to and adapting to your opponent. Some of my favorite other puzzle games are guilty of feeling more like a game I play adjacent to my opponent rather than against them, and I'll give them a pass if the core gameplay loop is fun enough, but I consider Tsu king of the genre for having the most true versus in its versus mode.

But Tsu's skill curve is terrifyingly impenetrable for beginners, it's one of the hardest competitive puzzle games to learn. Just understanding how to make chains is extremely daunting, and that is but the tip of the iceberg. Paying attention to what your opponent is up to while still being able to concentrate on what you're doing is an order of magnitude harder, and that's kind of where the real game begins.

20th shines by being the most comprehensive package full of additional content for players of all skill levels alongside the classic Tsu ruleset. There's a whopping 20 different game modes to play around in, many of which are much more immediately fun for a beginner to pick up, get hooked on, and hopefully enjoy the game enough to want to eventually learn to scale the mountain that is Tsu later.

Sadly, this game never got released in the west, and none of the games that have come anywhere close to it. And I think that's a large part of why the series is struggling to gain any kind of recognition in the west, we've never seen the best of what it has to offer.

Quake 1.

The game is kinda meh, but the modability spawned an endless amount of awesome stuff to this day. Even Half-life is basically just a Quake mod.

I'm tempted to say either The Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto V, or Metal Gear Solid 5 (if you can look past the fact it's unfinished).

All three are exceptionally polished, have huge, highly detailed world's to explore, cinematic moments with blockbuster action scenes, smooth and balanced gameplay, are suitable for gaming noobs and veterans, and has moments to goof off and dick around.

It's hard not to be biased, though I'll state I don't personally like GTAV, I think it's perhaps too ordinary for my tastes and feels too restrictive in its mission structure.