10 Most Breathtaking ‘First Time’ Video Game Moments

3. Firing The Portal Gun

This moment is likely to be enhanced by the fact that the first time you played Portal, it was probably a result of desperate boredom, or the fact that you'd just finished Half-life 2: Episode Two and were just curious about what that weird 'other thing' was on the Orange Box disk. Whatever your reasons, it's quite possible that you weren't hugely excited about playing Portal back in the days when GLaDOS meant nothing to anyone. The game begins, and it starts off just like the clinical experience the back of the box made it out to be. But then you get your hands on the Portal gun, and it all just 'clicks'. It's a completely understated moment; the gun's just sitting there in the middle of the room and you grab it like the snatchy gamer you are. But as soon as you fire your first blue and orange portals at the wall and ceiling, the appeal and genius of the game becomes clear; it's all about infinite regresses and manipulating space to your will, and no other game had ever done before. Unlike just about any other first-person game involving some form of gun up to that point, Portal wasn't a power fantasy, but a pure and whimsical experience that in some ways harked back to the very earliest 2D platformers, like those wrap-around Mario 'Vs' arenas where you could jump off on one side of the screen and reappear on the other. Portal felt like a hidden bag of gaming tricks had been discovered, and the series' subsequent success shows that we'd all been looking for something like this for quite some time.