What was your first videogame that made you say "Ok, I need to play this game properly: I need to upgrade my specs"?

Warcraft III. Voodoo2 wasn't cutting it, upgraded to a GeForce4 MX420.

.... which still wasn't really cutting it, so I spent every penny to my name and upgraded to a Radeon 9700 Pro like 6 months later.

Man, I loved that card. Used it for years. To this day I think it was the card I held onto the longest.

Doom - we upgraded to 16MB of RAM so we could play it through Windows 95.

Win95 wanted 4MB and Doom wanted all 8 that we had, so we had to exit, reboot, and go to DOS then run it manually.

World of Warcraft. I was on Windows XP with 512mb of RAM and who knows what graphics card but I was lagging so bad when WotLK came out.

With all the people standing at the entrance to Naxx I had to basically aim myself for the portal and lag my way in without being able to see where my character was walking due to the lag.

Probably Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

Edit- It was a Tandy Color Computer 2 circa 1986ish, went from 16K to 64K ram.

Not sure if this really counts, but I was given a copy of 'The Movies' when I was younger. Turns out it needed a DVD player to read it, but at the time I only had a CD player, so had to go out and buy an external DVD player to use it. Besides a few very lightweight PC games, I played on console most of the time and never got a true understanding of 'specs' until later in life.

Quake 4. I remember running it on a very cheap GPU and following tweakguides to get it running properly. The game that actually got me to pull the trigger on new hardware was Battlefield 2142.

I've been playing PC games since 1986. Started off with Kings Quest, and Heroes Quest. I can honestly say that no game has caused me to upgrade my PC until last year when I bought Cyberpunk 2077 because it was on sale. At the time I was running a 1080Ti, which is still a capable card, but I'm a whore for fancy graphics and visuals, and when I saw what CDPR was doing with Raytracing in that game I needed to have that. Pulled the trigger on a 4090 in January and haven't regretted it for one minute. My 1080Ti lasted me 5 years, I'm anticipating my 4090 will do the same.

Blade and Sorcery, because my PC with a Ryzen 3 1200 and GTX 970 at the time could hardly run this and a lot of other VR games. And also Cyberpunk 2077, to a smaller degree.

Half-Life 2. I remember being completely blown away by early source engine, even on low graphics to keep the frame rate above the 20s. I watched the weird little graphics benchmark animation probably a hundred times to dial in the settings. If you told me that in the future I'd be capping the framerate on highest settings to keep it from hitting the default limit of 300 I'da called you a liar.

Quake1 after voodoo came out with transparent water patch. It's so good it felt like cheating knowing some players have no idea that I can see through water. Resolution upgrade is a big enough advantage as well.(from 320x240 to 640x480 )

Then Quake 3 I upgraded to nvidia's TNT card.

I think most of time I stay roughly with the upgrades(usually 2nd place card) with the exception during the bitcoin/covid time.(I stick with my 1080 oc version until I can buy 6800XT from amd direct.)

Doom 3. It's still the only game I've upgraded my PC explicitly for.

Neverwinter Nights. I was scraping by on the 800x600 resolution and lots of slowdowns. 2006 I built a new computer with a 1080x1080 LCD and turned on that glorious high resolution text option.

Battlefield 2. My dad and I went wild building our first PC together. Good times.

Skyrim. I had that running in integrated graphics on an old gateway I got. Once I started Playing pc games I new I had to have the best. 15 years later my younger self would be jealous of the rig I have today.

Elden Ring. I really really really wanted to play it. Playing it on 8gb RAM felt like a slideshow.

Officially- Bioshock Infinite.

I was still rocking my windows XP old faithful, and Infinite required the upgrade to windows 7. My motherboard didn't support 7 though, so Old Faithful finally met its match

Age of Conan. Got one of the first quad cores. Game only designed for 2. Had to build another eventually.

I think it was either Arena or Daggerfall.

X-Wing vs TIE Fighter. Got a 3Dfx Voodoo add on, going to real 3D was such a big difference.

Duke Nukem 3D. I had a 486 SX 25 Mhz processor, but upgraded to the DX 100 Mhz processor. Can't remember if that helped and I just needed a Pentium to run it properly, but I think it worked.

I don't think it was the first time, but I vividly remember Arkham Asylum, I played for several hours thinking that fights occurred in bullet time, slowing way down as more enemies appeared on screen. I later saw a gameplay trailer where the brawls were frantic and quick action. Felt pretty stupid after that.

Heretic.

I bought a used hard drive at a yard sale in like 1996 or 1997, that contained Doom II and Heretic. The 386/40 that was my personal box wouldn't tun the latter, and I wasn't going to set it up on the family's rapidly disintegrating Packard Bell Pentium-100.

Morrowind, specifically the Tribunal expansion, and then I played it anyways at like 10fps and fucking loved it lol

I think that would've been the first Crysis.

Plenty of games have made me say it, but I can't think of a single one that got me to actually do it.

I do know that Half-Life 1 was the first time I ever looked at the requirements and was floored that my computer didn't even meet the minimum. It was the first game I tried when my family got a new computer like 2 years after it came out.

Red Faction. It's the game that made me buy my first Video Card way back when.

I guess Planetside 2, it made me upgrade my PC 3 separate times

It was Quake, but I didn't have the money to actually make it happen. That would come years later.

I mentioned in another post that Unreal Tournament 2004 was one of them for me.

Later on down the road, after I built my first gaming pc using an XFX 8800gts with a whopping 640mb vram - I tried to max out XCOM when it came out. Next thing I heard was a pop, then I smelled the smoke that was billowing out of my GPU. It was time to upgrade again!

First game was Dark Forces. Family PC didn't have enough RAM so my dad and I ventured into the world of hardware tinkering.

Most current game is most likely going to be Starfield. I built my current PC in 2020 with those first pandemic checks. My specs are all at the recommended, except for my GPU, which is the minimum. So if the game is good at launch I'm going to probably look to upgrade my GPU.

SWTOR. I did a whole new build so I could play it.

Metro 2033. I used to play it on my Dad's slightly more powerful machine until I could upgrade my machine. One of the best examples of art direction and great graphics being utilized together. Last Light looks like a PS4 game no matter what platform you play it on. Easily one of the best looking games ever.

I can't recall exactly which one of the two it was but it was either Quake 4 or Doom 3. I remember I managed to squeeze out like 14 fps using RivaTuner on the family computer. I got my first job not long after that and put together my first PC.

Oh shit, I remember there WAS a game. I believe I bought a Geforce 2 MX or sth for it...could have been an FPS, possibly Unreal Tournament.

Minecraft. It was probably the inspiration for my entire career path, to be honest. When I first played it, it ran horribly. I had an Athlon II and 4gb of ram running Windows Vista. After a few months I bought some AMD gpu that was waaaay too big for my Dell SFF case. I tried modding (read “hacking up”) my case, but couldn’t get it to fit. Wound up building an entirely new computer about a year later after scraping up all my birthday and Christmas money. After that I bought a high refresh rate monitor, then a better mouse, keyboard, and you know how the story goes from there.

Witcher 3. I played the first two on my old laptop but waited to upgrade for that one.

Kena: Bridge of spirits.

It's such a gorgeous game and I loved playing it. But the fight scenes would drop frames so badly that I couldn't finish the game because of one boss battle that requires solid timing to win.

Full Throttle.

Had a 386 and the game required a 486 so I bought a Cyrix 386 to 486 replacement. Worked decently well.