[quote]What games defined your childhood and why? What aspects of them interested you and how have they shaped your taste? And how do they hold up for you?[/quote]
[b]Doom 2:[/b] This game outsold Windows 95. Everyone had this or claimed to. I had the (registered) game second-hand, complete with manuals, so the backstory was kinda a thing to delve into to figure out what sort of moral drive is needed to push through about two to twelve hours of solid gameplay.

It was this game that forced me to learn DOS command prompts... that or Descent...

[b]Descent: Destination Saturn:[/b] Doom 2's theoretically better cousin. Wasn't as-popular due to hardware acelerated 3D graphics and computer-networking not being up to par, and people good at the game not knowing how to set those things up themselves (and vice-versa)

The music was also awesome. Can't quite talk about the TOS-1 Burritimo MLRS without thinking about the soundtrack for level 2.

That and the soundblaster test:
Seven.
Seven.
Seven.

[i]Class 1 driller can eat my shiny green ionized plasma.[/i]

[b]Raptor: Call of the Shadows[/b] K, [i]everybody[/i] over a certain age knows this game. It was a widely distributed shareware known for being pretty good arcade-style fun with good music to boot... although the goal was often to cause so many explosions on-screen to cause the sound-card to brickwall for great justice.
[b]Cannon-Fodder[/b] Kinda hits hard when you just barely manage to clear a mission, only to be confronted by all the characters that had to die because you kept screwing-up, all to somber music. Followed immediately by the mockingly-upbeat intro to the next mission-briefing.

[b]It came from the Desert / Antheads + Indiana Jones and the last Crusade (PC):[/b]
Literally the first video games I played back on my uncle's PC.