Tex Murphy - forget which game this happened with, but it was probably either Mean Streets or Countdown. Back before even soundcards were common place, these early Access Software adventure games were among the first PC games to have digitized sound and speech. I believe they called it RealSound(tm) or something like that and it worked by creating really "buzzy" sound through the tiny internal speaker in your PC.

The manual actually outlined a procedure where you could clip some alligator clips to the 2 speaker terminals inside your PC, attach a capacitor and resistor (that I bought at Radio Shack) and then run the wire out to a separate amplifier and speakers (hey kids, even before "amplified speakers" were common place!)

So I'm toodling along in the game, got the sound cranked up, hearing some crummy music and some hokey digitized speech, when all of a sudden... *BANG*! One of the characters in the game fires a gun, and I literally JUMPED UP and fell out of my chair! I'd never heard a gunshot coming out of a game before, and it scared the bejeebus out of me!

And we liked it!

For me, there's two that really stick out in my memory.

One is, of course, the ending to "Dreamfall" with Faith and everything. Very heart breaking, and then the anticipation for the next game, only to have to wait for years without a resolution.

The 2nd one is a bit stranger, but it's a scene in "Grand Theft Auto IV". When Roman is kidnapped, and Niko looses it to get his cousin back. I can hear the raw emotion in his voice, and I can really see he cares about his cousin. I don't know why, but it really touched me. <3

From most recent to oldest:

Ultima Underworld: Simply put this game blew me away when I played it seriously for the first time earlier this year. It has better atmosphere and feels more natural then most games today and is easily in my top 10.

Planescape Torment: This took my interest in the video gaming medium and made it something more. This is probably the only game that has had a real impact on my life because to me it symbolizes what games could become. I see this as only the tip of the iceberg and have made it sort of a life goal to contribute to a game that can match or surpass this on an intellectual level.

Guild Wars: Before this game my only experiences with RPGs was Final Fantasy + clones and Diablo 2. All bets were off when I immersed myself in this world. Everything just felt... right. I played this game to death and it has what led to me favoring WRPGs over any type of game today.

Doom Engine games: My dad loved violent games when I was a kid. The only reason he played them was the gibs and explosions. This was my first sampling of what gaming could offer. I remember spending hours just blowing stuff up with the Phoenix Rod in Heretic and the Rocket Launcher in Doom. It didn't matter that I was using cheats, everything died and it was bloody (see what I did there) awesome.

Oh man, that's the very scene I though of when I read the thread title...

Here's how it played out for me:

After my brother told me to leave, I immediately fled through the open window. I mean, that's what it said in my list of objectives, and in a game you do what you're told, right?
And the scene worked very well that way, it was an emotional moment, Paul was an immensely likable character.

Then, a year or so after finishing the game, I found out by chance that it was possible to save Paul. I was absolutely dumbfounded. It never occurred to me to stay and try to defend him. Again, that's just not how games work. To allow for two very different (and meaningfully different!) outcomes, in such a subtle and underhanded way...

Of course, during my second playthrough I didn't flee and that's when all the problems of video game storytelling became very clear... my heavily injured, pacifist brother turned into an invincible killing machine that singlehandedly slaughtered all the attacking bad guys before disappearing into th night. The best way to survive the encounter was actually to hide in a closet and let Paul do all the work.

Still, it's a beautiful scene that taught me more about game design than most games in their entirety. To this day I think of it whenever I come upon a similar moment in a game and then mentally compare the ways they are handled.

Wolfenstein 3D
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I played Wolfentstein 3D and Catacomb 3D around the same time. But Wolf3D had the superior graphics and it let me blow nazis away. The amount of blood in that game is still pretty nuts.

DOOM
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Knee-Deep in the Dead will forever be cemented into my mind. The Bruiser Brothers made me shit my pants, and the BFG showed me what true power was.

Command & Conquer
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Playing against my father will always be a cherished memory. He kicked my ass. Oh, and when you first meet Kane. Holy fuck! What an entrance!

Wing Commander
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Everything.

Deus Ex
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Everything. I catch myself sometimes humming the music.

Quake
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Facing my first Shambler scared the shit out of me.

Duke Nukem 3D
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Lots of small ones here. Blowing a hole in the wall, hearing Duke swear at the aliens, giving strippers money, blowing that building up on E1L2, the list goes on.

Blood
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I will never forget when I first booted this game up and right away it delivers the gore. All of E1 is a great memory for me.

Carmageddon
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Hitting my first ped.

That's all. For now.

My favorite gaming memory is actually pretty recent.

Finishing Persona 3. No other game before or since has affected me as much as P3 did, and ever since I've been looking for games that might be able to top it, to no avail.

I remember playing Chip's Challenge whenever I went to my grandmother's house when I was young. Probably one of the first games I played, among Loderunner. I still remember the music completely, though there were only two tracks. I must have played through it at least 20 times.

Got another: Max Payne... I'm playing this game that is basically all about shooting and killing (no puzzles or sneaking or RPG elements or whatever), but wait what's this? It has an awesome story, setting, tone, and everything. It became one of my instant favorites, and I can hardly think of anything that has matched what they were able to do with just a simple shooting game setup.

My great gaming memories must be with Metal gear solid 1, FF VII, Castlevania:Symphony of the night, of course deus ex, Gabriel Knight 1, Broken sword 1.
And There was that time when I played diablo with my brother in psx. In ps2 that contra: shattered soldier was great when finally we (also with my brother) finished it.
Zelda ocarina of time made huge impression (and Zelda 3: Link to the past).
Double dragon 2.
Megaman X
Star ocean: second story.
Wild arms 1.
And witcher was awesome, second most recent game that I finished. Just patched witcher 2 and I'll play that first time now (bought it some time ago) and I took hard difficulty. Hopefully it will be also great.
And mass effect 2 and one.
Crysis 1..
GTA 3. At that time I couldn't believe my eyes.

There really has been good games. =)

Also dragon age: origins.

I'm tempted to go all the way back to my Atari 2600 days but I'll skip ahead instead.

I remember walking into a local arcade and seeing a new game from all the way across the room. Even from that far away I could tell something was wildly different with that game. It looked way more "alive" than anything I had ever seen. That game was Virtua Fighter 2 and it was the first time I had ever seen a game running at 60fps. I never wanted to see a game run at less ever again.

Then there was the time I went into that arcade and Killer Instinct had just hit the streets. There was a big crowd and a line of people waiting to play. By the time it was my turn the guy playing had a 21 or 26 (can't remember which) match winning streak. He had a fancy combo or two learned and was smearing everyone. I told myself I have no idea what the special moves are or how to do a combo, so just stick to the basic moves. I beat him. Feels good to take out a 20+ winner out on your first try.(feels less good to get ousted right after)

Tomb Raider has been mentioned a few times. I remember thinking the move to 3D was happening too fast back then. 3D looked awful but running and back-flipping off a cave wall while shooting a wolf that was chasing you turned out to be real cool. The real moment for me though was when I stepped into the giant underground arena and thought "this place looks massive." It felt like I entered into something huge and epic. That's when I understood what 3D was meant to do.

There's a reasonable chance that I haven't remembered this memory completely correctly, but around the mid 1990s, I was playing One Must Fall 2097, and I remember how many times I crashed and burned against the two secret bosses in Arcade Mode (Fire and Ice, IIRC). When I beat them finally, and got that 40 million bonus or w/e, I felt a sense of accomplishment at finishing my first video game :).

Of course as a small child everything seemed more significant, so the memories are mostly from 80s:

- Seeing Space Invaders coin-op for the first time (on a cruiser where we were with my parents). I think it was the first actual video game I ever saw, and it was mind-boggling. I never got to play it though because there were some 20-30 years old bearded men (sailors? pirates???) playing it all the time, they seemed to be just as excited as me. I was just watching.

- Space Panic coin op in the local gas station (a platform game where you dig holes to catch and kill alien monsters). Before that all the video games I had ever seen were either about shooting in space, or simple Pong/Breakout variants. It seemed so odd someone would make a game where you were controlling a human who can't even shoot, not a spaceship.

- Seeing Space Invaders on Commodore VIC-20 home computer. My god, so "close" to the arcade version, you can actually have an arcade game in your home, without a pile of coins! Same happened also a bit later when Jelly Monsters, an almost perfect PacMan coin-op rip-off, which was published for the same system. It was so good rip-off that I think Atari sued Commodore/the game maker so that they had to pull the game from the market, so that Atari's own inferior PacMan game could survive on Atari VCS.

- A negative memory: reaching 1.000.000 points in Munch Man (PacMan clone). It took me 5 hours straight to reach those points, and for some reason I was stupidly expecting something spectacular to happen then. Sure it did, the six digit counter went back to 000000.

At that point I stopped playing that game for good, I felt it was too easy if I could play it 5 hours straight, and there was nothing more to achieve in it. :) A few years ago I tried to play it again on emulator, now it feels much harder than back then. :) Maybe I've simply forgotten, or reflexes and finger dexterity are not what they used to be in my early teens.

- Playing King's Quest for the first time on IBM PC color. An adventure game full of places to search and inspect, a far cry from normal arcade games I had played so far.

I think I'll put more recent memories later...

I have some faint memories of getting my original NES. But the memory that always sticks out to me most is from the SNES era.

I was a HUGE Pro-Wrestling fan growing up (I'm still a fan, but this was in the way only a child can be fanatical). And soon to be released was a game called WWF Raw. I was so ungodly excited for this game. The memory isn't even the game itself, I think the anticipation overwhelmed it.

I remember being at a house a hospital had provided for my mother, my grandmother, and myself while my grandmother was receiving medical aid for her cancer. And I had a copy of a WWF Magazine with me. This particular magazine had a two page profile for the upcoming WWF Raw videogame, with profiles and information of all the wrestlers in it.

I poured over the magazine and that profile for what had to be days straight. I begged my mother to get the game, and I imagined how the wrestlers would play. Anything you could gleam or imagine from a two profile spread, I did.

I loved the game, and still think it's fun today. But nothing matches that memory. Both because of the magazine, and because it's one of the few direct memories I have of my Grandmother before she passed.

Dungeon Master on Amiga

- Encountering the dragon in the second-last level.

- Figuring out how to destroy the last enemy in the last level.

- After completing the game, complaining to my friend how hard it was to navigate in the dungeons of the game because you never knew where you were heading, and my friend replying: "You mean to say you didn't find the compass in level x?". DOH!

I felt pretty silly at that point, but it must be said that IIRC the compass was hidden behind a secret door, that's why I didn't find it.

- Playing the original Diablo. That game made me fall in love with fantasy CRPG's. Great atmosphere, great gameplay, a lot of memorable moments, just all around awesome.

- Playing Little Big Adventure 2: Twinsen's Odyssey. Just an amazing, wonderful adventure and one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. The characters, the worlds, the music... Loved it.

- Moving on from Diablo to Baldur's Gate, browsing the character creation screen, reading the manual, exploring Candlekeep for the first time and thinking "holy shit, this is a whole different ball-game!" It was my first introduction to AD&D and the "real" RPG genre (as opposed to Diablo's Action RPG genre) and I was hooked from the get-go. It was a revelation. No game since has had such a profound impact on me.

- Finishing Baldur's Gate II for the first time after 200-something hours and almost instantly feeling sad because I wanted to play more.

- The opening sequence/level of the original Unreal, where you have to escape the crashed space ship, and then the first reveal of the world you crashed on, in all its lush beauty... I'd never seen anything so awesome-looking in a game.

- Playing Max Payne. One of my all-time favorite shooters and a game changer. Just brilliant.

There are many more, of course, but these are the ones that come to mind right now.