I remember spending some non-insignificant amount of time playing 3dpong, because that was the first time I got exposed to a wireframe game. I thought the formalism was delightful, it felt very cyberpunk. My first 3d game was probably Stunts, a racing game that used flat shading (there was also Abrahams tank, but I never got into it as much as some of the older people in my circle), and then there was a lot of games that used a kind of hybrid sprite, flat shading, texturing mapping approach, from wolfenstein to Daggerfall. I got 3dpong from a Slackware cd, which was also my first linux install, back when linux was cool :> I was democoding, so probably implementing phong reflection on a sierpinski cube which was a style at the time, and here was a game that established an entire 3d experience space with just a handful of lines.
(some might ask "how the hell did you not know about Elite or Tempest??" before pervasive internet discovery was a non-linear process, I think I learned about these games in the early 2000s, from the internet)
Feel like Stunts is such a sleeper retro game so many played and nobody ever talks about. Incredible fully customizable levels with massive obstacles rendered in 3D. In 1990, 3 years before doom.
I sometimes think we collectively rewrite our past for the common denominator. have people always been doing that, or it's an internet phenomenon? like maybe you listened to Andy gibb or The Bee Gees in the 70s, but you retrospectively remember that you somehow was Black Sabbath's biggest fan, even though that wasn't the circles you've spent time in at all.
I sometimes have to consciously remind myself that I haven't played chrono trigger until 2005, or that I clocked some unreasonable amount of hours playing rise of the triad, Star Wars dark forces and Ultima underworld, rather than the whatever's on the list of top 90s video games.
(some might ask "how the hell did you not know about Elite or Tempest??" before pervasive internet discovery was a non-linear process, I think I learned about these games in the early 2000s, from the internet)