What were your go-to Games (or programs! We're all nerds here) from your childhood

Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, GoldenEye 64, Super Smash Bros, Deus Ex, Toejam and Earl, Tetris for Gameboy, Carmageddon, Quake, Unreal, Betrayal in Antara, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, Super Mario Bros 3, Sonic

In no particular order: Age of empires, HoMMs, Disciples, StarCraft, WarCraft, Dark Reign, Battlezone, Red Alert, Dune, Lula, 3D maze screensaver, strip poker, Duke Nukem, a virused version of that desktop mayhem thing that let you smash it in all kinds of way and many others that will be mentioned in other comments.

Games that give you a lifetime of fun.

I grew up with some of the first games. Loved Sierra's library. Played some of the more eclectic games like Battle Beast and Howie's Great Word Adventure. As far as programs went, I didn't get much into it until later. But, I do remember using the Microsoft Works Creative Writing Program. That was fun to do designs on.

Commander Keen! We had 1, 4, 6 and Dreams. Probably all of them Shareware. Those games made me want to get a pogo stick.

Might and Magic 4+5: World of Xeen waa what I considered our first "real" game. I didn't really understand it at the time. It's turn based but I played it like it's real time. I still play it every other year.

Okay, so I think this impacted by the platforms I owned, which was:

1. Commodore 64
2. Game Boy
3. SEGA Master System
4. SEGA Genesis
5. A bunch of DOS/Windows PCs
6. iMac

If I were to consider my favourite games across all these systems, they would be:

• Lode Runner
• Great Giana Sisters
• OutRun
• Super Mario Land
• Tetris
• Sonic 2
• Road Rash
• Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
• NHL 94
• Earthworm Jim
• MDK
• SimCity
• Civilization
• Heretic
• Marathon
• Escape Velocity
• GeneForge
• Tomb Raider
• Earth 2140

Off the top of my head: Savage Empire, LHX Attack Chopper, Operation Wolf, Lemmings, some German football manager game (I forgot the name, just Zuruck and Weiter are etched into my brain), Supaplex, ...

Ultima IV, Elite, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Kikstart II, RC Pro Am, Racing Destruction Set, Zaxxon

But the first was ….

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APF_TV_Fun_series

Played this for hours.

Yeah I’m old.

My absolute first PC game I ever remember was Math Blaster lol I loved it

Total annihilation was my jam. Especially when I started finding mods and new units online.

My family used to put in hundreds of hours into Civilization 2 and once we were a little older we played Red Alert spending even more time building maps for ourselves to play. We could never figure out how to set up a LAN growing up, but it was a lot of fun all the same.

I spent a lot of time playing Sonic Mega Collection on gamecube. At least before maybe 6th or 7th grade when I got Borderlands 1 on xbox360.

Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2 (shout-out to OpenRCT!), Island of Dr Brain, Oregon Trail 3rd edition, Math Blaster, and a bunch of little educational games that nobody else has ever heard of from Ohio Distinctive Software.

Outside the super common ones like Mario, Zelda, Quake, etc...I'll list some pretty early ones.

River Raid
Comixzone
Flashback
Castles

A good chunk of my early pc games were demo disks from magazines

Monkey Island, Master of Orion 2, Commander Keen, Heroes of might and magic, Diablo, Warcraft.

Zoombinies and Ski

I loved Speedy Eggbert and played Oregon Trail. Also played Math Muncher.

Eventually started playing StarCraft, Warcraft, Red Alert, Quake, Doom, UT, Half Life. Then didn't bother with educational stuff on my PC until I tried Blender and tutorials had you trying out generating models with Python

Well, Deluxe Music and Deluxe Paint when it comes to programs; and oh so many Rainbow Arts games: Giana Sisters, Turrican 1 - 3, X-Out, Mad TV. But also the classic Civilization and Sim City.

Norton Commander, edit.com, the Wacom C/C++ compiler, pmode/w and upx. I had a peculiar childhood.

Boulderdash 2, Kickstart 2, Jumpman jr, Hawkeye and Flimbo's quest. And probably tons of others I've forgotten about unfortunately.

Anim8or

Thanks for this. Just recently I was trying to remember what this program was called. I remember doing the egg plant tutorial.

Heroes of Might and Magic III (but also 4 to a lesser extent and 5 briefly) were mainstays as hot-seat multiplayer when hanging around at somebody's house. Always a good time.

The other real defining game of my childhood was Diablo 2. We played that on and off for probably over a decade growing up, every couple of years people would get the itch again and everybody would tag along. Was a real cultural touchstone in school.

Mega Man X
Played it for like 6 hours straight when I first got it. Took me over a year to beat Sigma.

Mega Man Legends
Also took me a while to finish, especially because it took a few months between getting the PS1 and buying memory cards

I did spend a lot of time with RPG Maker 2000 too, I did probably some 3 different games, never finished or published any of them.

The biggest ones for me were the Marathon series, and a lot of old shareware RPGs (Realmz, Exile).

The 3rd title in the Marathon series came packaged with all of the tools they used to make the game, with which you could very easily make new maps and wild mods adding or changing weapons, enemies, mechanics, etc... I spent an absolutely unreasonable amount of time fucking around with that.

The maps were very rudimentary 3D (think Doom style), and they weren't really 3D spaces so much as just corridors and rooms connected to each other. You could have a corridor that turned 90 degrees 3 times with no elevation change, and passed "through" itself, without actually having the two intersecting corridors connect in any way, which let you make some really wild maps with some pretty unique features that would be challenging to pull off in modern games. (There was even a multiplayer map called 5D Space that really showcased this interaction.)

Monkey island 2. Any of the original lucasarts point and click graphical adventures.

Runescape and Diablo 2. Soul Caliber was also a favorite with my friend group a little bit later.

Had none, didn't own a device capable of gaming until I was 14/15 and even then didn't start playing games till I was 17/18.

I'm 21 ( soon 22 ) now.

Backyard baseball, my first encyclopedia, some lemonade stand simulator, pokemon yellow, dragon warrior monsters, eclipse mmo maker.

Crystal Quest

mleb mleb oooOOoo

As an 80ies kid: Impossible Mission on my Commodore 64... "Another visitor... Stay a while! Staaay foreveerrr!"

Programs are software. Technically, games are also software, but they evolved into their own genre.