Here are mine.
The New Mutants: An X-men based forum RPG I played in from the years 2004-2011 or 12. I legitimately couldn't tell you a thing about the mechanics (I think it was based on GURPs?) but it was incredibly fun. I have a lot of strong memories of that period because this was essentially the internet community I ever became deeply embedded in.
There are two people from that game I'm still friends with after all these years. Sometimes we still text about memories from that period of our lives.
I won't say who, but recently I saw the name of someone who played on that forum in the solicits page for a mainstream comic book. It made me so happy to see that they had made it! Like damn, they really did that they set out to do all those years ago.
And there have been many times where a player in a game I'm running or playing in creates a character that just vividly reminds me of a wacky mutant someone rolled on that forum.
Last year I ran my regulars through at least three X-men themed sessions and I can't pretend it was for any reason other than trying to recapture that old feeling.
The Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening: There are a couple of games that could fight for this spot; the Gen 1 or 2 Pokemon, Ocarina of Time, Skyrim, Perfect Dark; but I have to give it to the first game I truly fell madly in love with and still adore to this day.
I'll never forget the time I spent in the back seat of my dad's car, on the couch at my cousin's house, huddled up against a rack while my mom was shopping, face in my Gameboy trying to collect those instruments and free the Wind Fish.
Now that I'm old enough to have seen (most of) Twin Peaks, I just have a completely different appreciation for Koholint Island and its wacky inhabitants.
I've also been lucky enough to re-experience the game a lot in the last few years. First in the form of a much improved GBC experience thanks to some great quality of life patches made over the years. And then watching my wife play through the fantastic Switch remake during the pandemic. Something about seeing all those puzzles and dungeons through her eyes just made fall in love with the game all over again.
I've failed more than succeeded but whenever I try to create a setting for a tabletop game, Koholint Island is what I'm striving for.
The Black Hack: 2016 was a weird year, wasn't it? It was essentially the end of politics as we knew it as we were dragged into a fully post-truth reality. And The Black Hack hit the Google+ streets like a ton of bricks.
This was the game that introduced me to the world of ttrpgs outside of 5th Edition. It was the game that made me feel comfortable being a GM. And it's the game that inspired me to create my own content and throw it out there to the world. It still really tickles me when I get Google Drive requests for some class or hack I created back in the day.
I kinda cringe at a lot of what I wrote now. The idea of playtesting it never really crossed my mind, but it was so fun just being in community with people who were inspired to use this game as a jump off point to create their own stuff.
Maybe one day I'll turn The Hero Hack into the fully fledged game it was meant to be. But I'll never forget a friend of mine introducing to me their friend who played in a campaign as a Batman pastiche whose parents were killed by a car (so they were an anti-car instead of anti-gun vigilante.) Knowing that someone was out there having fun with something I wrote to disassociate out of grad school still makes me happy.
Sometimes I even forget that my regular weekly-ish game started with a TBH session on Twitter Spaces in...2020 or 2021. The Black Hack has been a stalwart companion for years. It's not flashy, it's not perfect, but it does exactly what you need it to do.
And don't get me wrong, I fully mean 1st edition.
Running the 2nd edition has truly never appealed to me (and I don't understand how it has an even worse armor system) but this is really my favorite way to run some quick and dirty dungeon crawling adventures.
But I'm not sure I'll be able to say anything about The Black Hack that isn't covered in this fantastic post.
And I quote:
"When later games like Knave, Cairn, and Bastards emerged, they all owed something, whether consciously or not, to that little black booklet that proved you could reinvent the old school without betraying it. It’s no exaggeration to say that The Black Hack laid the groundwork for the NuSR movement, those games that embrace OSR principles but dare to experiment with tone, mechanics, and format. It’s the missing evolutionary link between Moldvay and Mörk Borg."
Damn.
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