My first PC was a Pentium 166MMX, bought with the proceeds gained from a savings account in a building society turned bank between my first and second years of university, circa 1997.
This was right around the time of Quake, and while I definitely liked it, I can’t say that it had made a particularly huge impression on me.
That is, until I saw GLQuake.
My PC had a STB Nitro 3D video card which could render GLQuake, though attempting to move was painfully slow, but oh did it look good – the resolution was doubled in both dimensions leading to much smoother images.
I had pure, unadulterated technolust and I had it bad. One hike to the dodgy computer hardware shop out in the west end of Edinburgh and I had my sweaty paws on a 3dfx Voodoo 1. GLQuake was mine and it was good.
When various friends saw how good it looked and ran, they went out and bought their own 3D cards and so in my own small way, I contributed to the headlong rush towards 3d acceleration.
What goes around comes around though, so now part of my day job is managing a compute cluster comprising hundreds of GPGPU cards which have a lineage back to those original Voodoo 1 cards, because a very bright spark realised that those 3d cards for gaming were really good at performing matrix maths which underpins a host of scientific computing algorithms.