What game made YOU upgrade?

[YoshiM]

To be honest, I can't think of any good reason why I upgraded from my TI 99 4A to a CoCo 2 to a CoCo 3 to an 8088 to a 486 etc. etc. other than games. I was a CoCo user for the longest time as it did pretty much everything I wanted it to do. When my Dad got an 8088 I had no idea what it'd do that the CoCo couldn't. Sure it had internal storage and yeah you could use 3 1/2" floppies but it had an AMBER screen and 4 colors (well, it had like over 50+ shades of gray in Hercules mode but you couldn't tell on an orange and black screen). Ugly, a physically huge system that I wouldn't waste my meager paycheck on. Then I played Flight Simulator 2, Test Drive 2, Leisure Suite Larry and Police Quest. I was floored. Then I picked up Lightspeed by Microprose and I got knocked for a loop. I had to have a PC and I got one just like my Dad's. I got used to amber and life was good.

Then I saw a big splash in VG&CE on Wing Commander. It required at LEAST 16 colors but it was breathtaking in 256 colors. I had to get a VGA card and monitor. Then Doom came out and I had no chance in hell to play that on my 10 MHz 8088. I blew away hours on my girlfriend's PC playing this game. When I opened a Sears card when I had to replace a tire on my car I wandered over to the Home Office section and bought a 486 SX 25 for $250. Not because I needed Windows or had to get WYSIWYG word processing. I wanted to play Doom and any other cool game that came down the line.

So what game was it that got you to open up your pocket book (or sweeten the deal if you were thinking of upgrading to do more productive things) to either upgrade your existing system or buy a whole new rig?

[Darth Sensei]

I remember upgrading to a better PC so I could play the first Quake.

Also, I added a sound card to my computer to play Wing Commander when it first came out. Prior to that I played with no sound.

D

[Arqueologia_Digital]

mmm...i never upgrade my PC for a game... :P

[Raccoon Lad]

mmm...i never upgrade my PC for a game... :P

me neither. I only upgraded to my current computer when it turned out my 486 SX 33 MHZ PC with 4MB of ram and 80 MB HD had finally become terribly obsolete..... had a good 6 years or so with that machine.

[Ze_ro]

Honestly, I don't think I ever upgraded because of games. I've always waited until just about everything (including start-up, file browsing, etc) was unusably slow before I bothered to do anything at all. If my computer was too slow to play a game, then I just didn't play that game. Upgrading was always a sad time, since I never did it willingly... moving from a C128 to an 8088 was not a fun memory for me.

I'm still using a 400 MHz machine with 128 MB of RAM... so as you might have guessed, I just don't play games on it (except for emulators and some low-requirement stuff like Doom and Nethack).

--Zero

[gamergary]

Needed more space because the nt and 95 weren't cutting it. I never upgraded for a game but it is nice to be able to play the newer games.

[YoshiM]

Okay, probably the wrong question for a retro gaming board.

DOH!

LOL

[Darth Sensei]

I don't think it's a bad question, but there seem to be very few computer game players here.

D

[calthaer]

I usually upgrade once my computer is unable to play at least half of the games that are coming out that I want to play. For me, it's never just one game - it's several.

Then I usually try to find out whether it's just that one game that's poorly-optimized (like Deus Ex: Invisible War), or if it's just time to go out and get a new video card / processor.

[Flack]

One of the main reasons I upgraded from my 286/12 to my 386/40 was to run Mortal Kombat.

[IntvGene]

I remember getting a new motherboard for mt 386/16.. up to a 40 megahertz. It wasn't the game that I completely upgraded for, but I remember the first game I installed on it was Hardball III. It was all for the voice... Al Michaels..

"It's.. hit... into.. left-field...... for... a... single" :roll:

I learned that lesson well, and now buy the technology after the price wave, when things are cheap. So now Doom III or HL2 for me. But, who really cares anymore?

[mezrabad]

This is an excellent question!

I think my first upgrade was putting a Sound Blaster into my girlfriend's 286 so I could hear music and effects in Civilization.

For Ultima VII: The Black Gate AND Ultima Underworld, I upgraded from a 286 to a 386/40.
For Strike Commander, I upgraded to a 486/80 and a CD-Rom drive.
For Daggerfall, I upgraded to an AMD K5/133. I think I later added RAM so I could play Privateer 2.
For Ultima IX, I upgraded to a PII 400 and a Voodoo 3000 (It wasn't enough. :( )
For Morrowind, I upgraded to a GeForce 3 and a Athlon 1500(?).
For the record, Ultima VII and Underworld had the best pleasure/cost ratio for the money spent.

There were many other interim upgrades (sound cards, hard drives, monitors, and usually RAM), but those were the only games for which I felt compelled to upgrade. I think I play consoles now because I can't afford the PC upgrade treadmill.

[suppafly]

Far Cry

Made me upgrade my cpu, ram, and video card!

It still has the best graphics i`ve ever seen in a video game (specially if you run it with HDR enabled with the latest video cards).

[Austin]

Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness. I bought this and was unable to play it, so I was forced to upgrade.

[ClubNinja]

I upgraded for Doom.

[Dave Farquhar]

It wasn't really for a game that I moved from a C-128 to an Amiga 2000; it was 1991, and there just wasn't any new software of any sort that interested me coming out for Commodore 8-bits anymore. I wanted a hard drive and multitasking, and at that point, the 'miggy was the best there was for that. (Yes, I know, I could have gotten a PC and OS/2 2.0, but by the time you bought the 16 megs you needed for OS/2 2.0 to run well, the Amiga was cheaper, and I already had an Amiga-compatible monitor, and back then that was a significant expense.)

But once I played Railroad Tycoon and Civilization on the Amiga, I was glad I upgraded. The Amiga versions were pretty much straight PC ports, but I'd never seen anything like them on the 128.

It wasn't just a sad day when I broke down and bought a 486 to replace the Amiga; it was a bad month. The 486 was a bit faster than the Amiga (I had a 25 MHz '030 upgrade in it) but the Amiga was a lot more stable than Windows 3.1. Tony LaRussa Baseball II eased the pain, somewhat.

[cyberfluxor]

I upgraded PCs in 2000 for Diablo 2.
Did another upgrade in 2004 to play higher end games like Guild Wars and other MMORPGs.

Finally I'll be upgrading again for the upcomming release of Supreme Commander, this time with a 28" or 32" to take full advantage of high resolution RTS gameplay and FPS on the compy. Also I'll be doing some hardcore computer work next year so I'll need the raw power.

[Pantechnicon]

Another vote for Doom. Doom compelled me to go from a 386-25 with 3MB to a 486-25 with 4MB, which back in the day set me back a good $2300 @_@ . Never upgraded for a game in my pre-PC days, though.

[kainemaxwell]

Quake and Duke3d made me upgrade at the time.

[Niku-Sama]

if any one is looking to upgrade now i have 1 gig (2x512meg sticks) of 500Mhz Kingston HyperX ram i am lookin to get rid of.

[ubikuberalles]

Years ago, my primary reason to upgrade my Atari 400 to 48K of memory and a disk drive was so I could play "Galahad and the Holy Grail". It was an APX program that ran only on disk and my 16K cassette based Atari 400 wasn't going to cut it.

That's the only time I can recall upgrading for a game. Everytime I upgraded a PC it was for other reasons. Most of the time the reason I add memory to a PC was to improve overall performance (however I recently upgraded my laptop to 1Gb so I could run Photoshop CS2). I did add an ATI All-in-Wonder so I could watch and record TV shows on my PC and video gaming was only a secondary benefit.

[Geddon_jt]

That's easy, Ultima 7: The Black Gate.
I remember how awe inspiring that jet black box was when the game got released. It needed *2* megs of RAM - I only had 1MB. I was crushed!

[cyberfluxor]

I don't think it's a bad question, but there seem to be very few computer game players here.

D
:/ Ya. It would seem to be odd that there is a lack in computer gamers on the forum, or maybe they haven't come out of the woodwork yet and looked far enough down the main forum page to stumble across it.

[Ruffie]

I got a 16K expander for my VIC 20 so I could play Crush, Crumble, & Chomp.

I got a Commodore 64 so I could play Adventure Construction Set and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

The nineties was mostly consoles for me, until I heard about Ultima Online, and in 1998 I got my first PC so I could play that. Upgraded that a few years later to play City of Heroes.

Ruffie

[Necrosaro420]

Diablo =)

[Griking]

Honestly, I don't think I ever upgraded because of games. I've always waited until just about everything (including start-up, file browsing, etc) was unusably slow before I bothered to do anything at all. If my computer was too slow to play a game, then I just didn't play that game. Upgrading was always a sad time, since I never did it willingly... moving from a C128 to an 8088 was not a fun memory for me.--Zero

On the other hand, upgrading to a newer faster rig is always exciting to me. I like to go back and install games that my computer used to have problems running smoothly and play them stutter free with all of the graphical settings cranked up.

The first real upgrade I remember going thru for a game was when I upgraded from my Atari 2600 to an Apple IIc to play Wizardry and Zork.

[p_b]

Pirates Gold! I've been told from a seller (and a magazine, by the way) that it only needed 2MB RAM, which I had. So I went out and bought it. Turned out it needed 4 MB. And I had a PS/1 (iirc), proprietary junk. So now way I'm getting more RAM. I started saving money and a year later I finally got a new PC and thus the means to play Pirates Gold! It was worth it though :)

[Daltone]

The release of Quake marked the first time that I upgraded soley to play a game. Never done it again.

[VintageVGMR]

I have to side with the camp in that I didn't buy a newer PC just to play a game that my older system wouldn't support.

There were other factors involved.

The closest I came was when I saw the game Dues Ex. It required 800 MHZ and I only had a 600 MHZ machine.

And although that was the breaking point for me to get a new system, it was more the fact that I had had it up to here with windows 98 SE.

And there was no way I was gonna shell out what was around $250 for windows XP back in 2002. Okay maybe it was only $200.

At any rate. I found my nightmare in a 2 gig HP machine that after 8 months of fighting with HP to get a total replacement. They never did figure out what was wrong with the other system. It simply confounded them that something they sold could just be completely defective.

I almost upgraded my 64 Meg video card so I could play Deus Ex: Invisible War. Would have been the first PC game I ever bought full retail. Then I found out it was worthless and decided against it.

Now I am trying to decided whether to get another 512 Meg ram chip and a decent 128 or 256 Video card for my computer or go the route of new computer.