Well this will be a long post, so bear with it. (Also, you asked for it :P)
Everything is a blur before 2002, generally speaking. For me, my formative years from 5-12 are all a mash of memories with no clear winner amongst the brighter ones. I remember I used to play Dangerous Dave, Prince of Persia and Skyroads in my parents’ office when I was 5 or 6. I could never beat Prince of Persia, but the others were fun and kept me playing. I remember there was one uncle who was (for that time) a pro gamer who used to beat Prince of Persia in 35 minutes (as far as I remember, the time limit was 60 minutes)
Circa 1997, I believe we bought our first computer for a massive amount of money for its time. It was a Pentium I 333MHz god-knows-what-RAM (I did not pay attention, honestly) and I distinctly remember 333 MHz because there were LED lights in front of the cabinet that said so. It ran Windows 95 and I ran Wolfenstein 3D (better known by its exe name Wolf3D) on it. Believe it or not – my mum was instrumental in getting me into games – she specifically brought Wolfenstein from her office and installed it! Doom, Quake and others were soon to follow – but they did not have impact that two of my cherished games would.
Those two were Planescape: Torment and, a year later, Age of Empires II. I believe the years were 1999 and 2000 respectively. Both were radically different (one was AD&D RPG and the other was an RTS) and both are held in high regard in my eyes. The fact remains that though I have completely forgotten Torment (I remember nothing – coincidentally, neither does the protagonist! :P) and (though I used to pride my memory at the time) I do not remember the tech/unit-tree of my favourite civilization, the Britons (I remember why they are my favourites though – they had LONGBOWMEN!)
Cut to 2003 – I am thirteen and in class 8. Three more of my favourite games of all time landed up on my doorstep. I believe the order was Baldur’s Gate II: SoA, Warcraft III and, of course, Diablo II. I heard Black Isle had developed BGII so I got it from a friend. Warcraft III was procured after seeing the animations, skills and whatever not from blizzard.com and Diablo II was procured in exchange for Warcraft III from someone who’d go on to become one of my closest friends in school. I remember we used to spend hours and hours of the lunch break discussing either Sorceress/Necromancer skills OR what a bitch Andariel was because she killed our <insert level here> heroes in <insert any amount of time less than 120 seconds here> (I still think she was the toughest boss I had to face. In contrast, Diablo looked like a dog and acted like one too – not scary). Otherwise, we’d discuss Night Elf tactics (he’d discuss Orc tactics – we never got along in Warcraft III :P). Just a couple of months ago we decided to play D2 co-op, but never got around to doing that because the game decided not to play in Windows 7 :/.
Two other games I played in the midst of all this (and have forgotten because they were played in and around some tough times) were Fallout and Fallout 2. At that point of time I started playing them just because they were developed by Black Isle – Planescape: Torment made a heavy impression on me. Needless to say, it only doubled (and tripled) my love for Black Isle. It’s funny that I played almost all (haven’t played Icewind Dale yet) of Black Isle’s games and I only found out that I truly love them some years after they disbanded.
After that, one of my biggest achievements was saving up money for Neverwinter Nights: Platinum and buying it in class 11/12. I remember that my DVD drive was not installed because of the two slots for the optical drives, one was not functioning and the other had a CD-writer in it. I remember I uninstalled the writer and installed the DVD-ROM during a powercut while it was raining heavily outside. Brilliant day! I played through NWN twice and I keep coming back to the third expansion module – Hordes of the Underdark. It’s pretty much the best memory I have of an expansion that was done beautifully. It had a long and dark story, some very different missions and lasting impact that I find scarce in modern games.
And that’s that. I don’t think I will go into details of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, The Witcher and (recently) my girlfriend’s gift of Dragon Age: Origins. That’s left for another question ;)
P.S. I think I’ve confused what your question meant. BUT I GOT TO TALK ABOUT GAMES. So yeah. :P