This game is probably the most astounding game Ive ever played. What game had a huge impact on you?

Starcraft.

But first, the backstory. I don't know how to explain this, but I don't feel like a "gamer" in the general sense of the word. I've been playing games since I was 5 (I'm 30, now), but I've been to about one LAN party in my life, and I never knew what the games were that other people were playing at the time. I went to a friend's house and everyone wanted to play The Secret of Mana, and I didn't know what the hell that was, or even what the genre was.

My thing was always having one or two games that I was obsessed about because they resonated with me on some personal level. I remember playing Uniracers on SNES and being driven endlessly to beat my own records. I got into a text-based browser game in high school called Earth: 2025 and I focused on that for years, trying to understand the strategy, getting involved in the community and ultimately getting way too worked up over a bunch of numbers on a webpage.

During college, I got busy, but when I was back at my parents house I rediscovered an old Nintendo game I never even bothered to play: Marble Madness. That became my ritual whenever I went home, and eventually I had the game practically memorized. Once I got out in the working world, I became a Black Ops guy simply because I loved the consistency of the game and the measurability of improvement (K:D ratio).

But Starcraft was a different animal. The mere thought of Starcraft instantly transports me back to a vision of a computer screen showing Lost Temple and a dimly lit room surrounding it. I played Starcraft off and on (mostly on) for about ten years. When I started, I was absolutely horrible. I must have had some kind of allergy to the game's strategy, because when I played ladder in Starcraft my record and rating went to lows I never saw any legitimate player get to. Still, I loved everything about that game. I loved the music, I loved the atmosphere, I came to love the strategy.

Shortly after Brood War came out, I finally found some people that could help me improve. I chose Zerg as my race and began to get better. I developed a reputation as being pretty decent in certain channels that I hung out in (nowhere near pro-gamer level), and I spent years meeting players, gaming, getting my ass kicked, occasionally kicking ass, and just getting completely absorbed into the world that was Battle.net.

The one thing that always fascinated me was the ladder system. I love records and ratings, and for me the golden number was 1500. Years after everyone stopped caring about the ladder (mainly because it was dominated by bots), I decided I wanted to start my ascent and try to get to 1500. Over the course of the next few weeks I gamed any seemingly legitimate player to try to get to that milestone. My stress levels were at an all time high, and I played some extraordinarily tough games, but I was almost there - my record was 27-6 and my rating was 1493.

I should've stopped there.

That night, one of my rivals in this quest to 1493 saw me and challenged me to a game. I'd already played too much and my nerves were shot. I drew a difficult ZvP matchup at 12v3 on Lost Temple - not the matchup you want when your reflexes are gone. I fucked up bad. Somehow I accidentally moved my army to some random location on the map, leaving me totally undefended, and I lost. I proceeded to go in a tailspin and gamed a bunch of people that night, including hackers, and lost about 8 in a row.

I never got 1500, and that number still haunts me.

Starcraft has left a huge imprint on my life. That game was absolute perfection for someone like me at that point in my life, and hopefully others feel the same way. It's not glamorous when you think about the real world, but then again, that was my world, and for better or worse, I'll never get that back.

But man, it was a hell of a ride.

/r/gaming Thread Link - i.imgur.com