Ask HN: What is the most memorable game you played?

Subnautica -

It’s an open world survival craft game set underwater on an alien world.

The basic gameplay mechanics of diving underwater, having limited oxygen, light and time create an immersive baseline experience. It’s scary, exciting, and fun.

The core gameplay loop is about exploration, and as you advance and get better equipment and vehicles the experience of gameplay qualitatively advances too which is satisfying.

As you go deeper and farther away you find so many beautiful alien biomes and terrifying creatures. The game provides equal parts wonder and terror.

slight spoiler warning

As you play longer, there is an incredible story that is ‘hidden’ within the game. To me it came as a surprise, like a great plot twist in a movie.

The first time I played Minecraft Classic was really significant to me.

I was around 12 years old at the time, and I was in middle school. I remember feeling extremely frustrated at the school system because I was ready for much more in terms of academics, but my teachers mostly taught to the lowest common denominator. I read books by John Taylor Gatto, and later Alfie Kohn. I was extremely interested in "Unschooling", an idea that if the school system were removed, kids would actually learn more by their natural curiosity. That idea isn't very appealing to me anymore but Montessori schools and more self-directed learning in general would probably be a good thing for the educational system.

I had found a website that allowed you to click a button and would redirect you to a random "interesting page". There was a website called "Everybody Edits" which was a 2D platformer made out of a grid of squares, and players could add or remove squares. Servers had challenges with read-only levels, and there were buttons and doors and little boost pads. I thought the game was pretty fun but I left after a couple hours playing different challenges.

I clicked the button again, and it led me to minecraft.com . That game almost immediately blew my mind. I built a little brick house with flowers out in front and I got my mom to come over and look at it.

What made it so special for me was this very tangible feeling of freedom. This was a game that allowed me to build anything, where I wasn't restricted at all by my parents, or my teachers, or any authority figure whatsoever.

After playing with the singleplayer mode, I saw there was some multiplayer servers. I don't remember much about the first (several?) servers I joined, I think they were all build-protected so nobody could grief them, and they had some pretty builds.

Then I joined a server that didn't have any build-protections at all. It kind of reminded me of a jungle? Whatever terrain was randomly generated there was completely destroyed. Minecraft classic had an extremely short height limit, I think 64 blocks. Many many people had joined the server, built a pillar directly to the top of the world and constructed a "canopy" built out of random blocks. I swam over to the only structure that existed, a brick house that was decaying. I started to fix it, but then another random player started destroying it, being kept in a constant moving state of existence.

To this day, I'm still obsessed with web games and games that allow an extremely high level of freedom. Much later in life I got a software engineering degree, I went to work for a big company with a big paycheck, I bought an RTX 3090 to play Minecraft RTX, and now I'm fulltime trying to build a pathtraced game on the web using WebGPU. The main reason why I want pathtracing isn't for photorealistic visuals, but to enable the same level of freedom that Minecraft has.

The King of All Cosmos getting incredibly drunk and accidentally destroying all the stars. Few games have a better backstory or soundtrack.

Re: Duke Nukem, I hadn't played it since Atomic Edition in 1999 or so but I recently picked up the "World Tour" expansion (bundled with the PSN version, maybe on Steam) for a couple bucks and gotta say it's a shot of steroids-- it does things with the BUILD engine nobody had conceived of in the 90s. "High Times" is memorable in its technical trickery, and was like discovering Duke again for the first time (it's also the frontrunner map; subsequent maps are good but only moving if you're into seeing IRL landmarks recreated in Minecraft). Check it out if you're feeling nostalgic.

Tangent-- modern Doom games have all been underwhelming, but the Brutal Doom mod (and non-MIDI soundtrack) for the original's WAD files evoked the same feeling of rediscovery for that franchise too. Duke has his own similar renovation project (eduke32 IIRC).

Crazy Climber. Summer of 1980 I was staying at my grandparents and the cool kid who lived next door came by and said "Let's go to the sub shop!". I'm like why would I go to the sub shop, my grandmother gets me whatever I want to eat, I'm all hopped up on Pepsi and Froot Loops. But as it turns out they had video games at the sub shop, first time I had played arcade games (my parents lived in the country at the time).

They had Asteroids and Space Invaders and a few others, but Crazy Climber is the one I remember most. There went my next four years - after I got back from summer vacation we moved into town directly across the park from a 7-11 with a game room. It was right before Pac-Man came out and things exploded and there were arcades all over the place.

The cool kid introduced me to punk rock and reggae too. Thanks!