Impossible Mission (Commodore 64, 1984):
This seminal platformer was the first game I ever beat. Looking back on it, it probably wasn't the hardest game of its time, but neither was it a pushover. Impossible Mission sees you play the role of a svelte secret agent who must infiltrate the underground lair of one Alvin Atombender. You literally had only six hours of real time to beat the puzzles and each time you got zapped by a robot or fell to your death you lost 10 minutes of gameplay time.
I remember playing the game incessantly for weeks on end trying to pick up all 36 pieces of the master puzzle which, when collected, had to be manipulated to create the all-important password key. One of the best features of Impossible Mission was that the levels were randomly generated each time you played, so while the individual rooms didn't change all that much, the order in which you explored the lair was different every time. This made the challenge all the more satisfying. Pixel-perfect jumping and timing was needed to beat the robots and environment, and Impossible Mission hooked and reeled me into the world of platformers like no other game has done since.
"Stay awhile... stay FOREVER!"
Street Fighter II (SNES, 1992)
I've always fancied myself as a bit of an arcade beat-em-up specialist particularly with games like Double Dragon and Golden Axe ranking among my personal favorites. The Commodore 64 did a great job of planting the seeds of my fighting addiction with titles like Way of the Exploding Fist and International Karate Plus, but it wasn't until Street Fighter II hit the arcades that I knew something very different had come along. Not having regular access to a SF2 arcade machine made it hard to get any regular playtime, but when I finally saved up the equivalent of $150 I imported an American version of the game for my SNES and subsequently lost a good few months of my social life to the antics of Ken, Ryu and Blanka.
The level of competitiveness that I experienced playing countless rounds of Street Fighter II with my friends paved the way for my current-day passion for online multiplayer action. Before such times I was more than content to play single-player games by myself. I think Street Fighter II is easily one of the most influential games ever made and I look back on those days of hadokens and shoryukens with great fondness.
Quarter-circle forward a few million times, blisters on thumbs.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES, 1992)
Even though I'm a bit ashamed to admit this, A Link to the Past was the first Zelda game I ever played. I didn't own a NES you see, and I had just made the transition from computer gaming on the Commodore Amiga to the wonderful world of videogame consoles with the SNES. A Link to the Past completely floored me. It appealed to my RPG sensibilities and my twitch action gaming desire. The story, the graphics, the sights and sounds were unlike anything I'd played before, and it was with A Link to the Past that a new obsession with the Japanese gaming culture was born inside me.
It's not a particularly hard game to beat for the average player, but rooting out every heart piece, moveable gravestone and little secret (like tugging on that portrait in that house in Kakariko Village) is a great personal achievement. A Link to the Past cemented my love of all things Nintendo (which sadly has waned over the last five years or so) and made me a fan of pretty much everything Shigeru Miyamoto put his hands on.
Remember the old dude under the bridge that sold an empty bottle?
