[Ajaxx]

"Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons - Episode 1: Marooned on Mars"

It came with the Gravis PC Gamepad that mom got me for my (I believe it was 7th) birthday. Disappointingly, the 386XT I had at the time 1) did not have a game card for me to plug the thing into and 2) had a rinky-dink MCGA graphics card and not enough ram, so I couldn't play the game either. Ironically, to a weird degree, these things actually conspired to make me a bigger fan of the finer details of what was being kept from me than I would have been if I'd been able to just play the actual game outright. There was something extremely captivating to my 7 year old mind about the idea of some kid putting on a helmet, building a rocket out of junk and blasting off to space. I'm 32 years old now and all my most favorite heroes leading up to this point have unremittingly been space heroes.

In addition to that, Not being able to play the game also led to me fiddling around with the files in the game's directory. There, I discovered a simple ASCII-based catalogue of other Apogee games with equally enticing descriptions that I just knew I would have to look out for. It was roughly 2 months before I got to actually play that first episode of Commander Keen. And I played "Secret Agent" shortly after that, followed by "Duke Nukem I". With each new game discovered, I'd developed the habit of looking for that catalogue in each game's file directory to see what other new titles were out there.

"Wolfenstein 3D" was the first game I'd ever played with a Sound Blaster sound card and it fricking blew me away.
I've been a lifelong fan ever since.