I had a similar reaction in Link to the Past a few years earlier

- Take me back
  
  Beats just having it handed to you by an old man!
  
  I recommend Tunic if you want to be 8 years old again.
- What makes the OoT animation a bit cooler is that Link is older after the animation, like the beams hide him from your view and after the flash of light, he grew old (and everything else changed as well, but you only see that after leaving the cathedral)
  
  Which seems weird when you think about it. Has he been passed out there for 7 years? How did he stay alive? Where did he get clothes that fit?
- Mmmmmmmmmm
- Even as a silent GIF I hear something like this masterful rendition of the song play in my mind’s ear.

Me having my first 'open world' experience with TES Oblivion and not enjoying it until my inner monologue suddenly switches from "I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do" to "I can go anywhere. I CAN DO ANYTHING!" and then I am slaughtered by the guard for trying to kill the nearest random peasant.
-Sometime in 2007
- The chicken snitches you
  
  TES isn't LoZ, buddy.

Meanwhile 8year old me with a ps1 seeing this for the first time and thinking I can never be happy again
- Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/299/
- Why didn't you just use a Phoenix Down on her? Are you a monster?
  
  i used the last one to one shot the cave of the gi :(
- well, did you ever be happy again?
  
  Yes, but only after I collected the Knights of the Round materia just to watch the minute and an half animation of them beating sephiroth’s ass.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv9aI5RkoeQ
- playing aerith's theme during jenova life T__T
- Too soon

Lucky you. I only had Lee Carvello's Putting Challenge. I kept hitting the ball in the parking lot.
- Would you like to play again?
  
  I have selected no
- should have picked putter instead of power drive

First time playing oblivion, still in the tutorial/intro. Grab the first bow and arrow laying a few meter from a well. Of course the only targety looking thing is the well's bucket. Hit the bucket, it swing, cool. The bucket stop swinging and behold! It is now tilting on the side where the arrow is stuck in. Coming from Morrowind I had lots of gripes with oblivion, but that first arrow in the bucket feeling has been in my mind forever.
- I remember the bucket, but my moment actually came about a minute later. A skeever runs towards me and jumps at me. I put my shield in front of me. The shield shakes, the skeever dies and its body ragdolls down some steps. The bucket was an amazing technical achivement, but the shield thing made me immersed in the world.

Me, but when I gave the stripper money in Duke Nukem 3D.
- Shake it, baby!
  
  You wanna dance?
  
  "I got time to play with you!"
  "Uhh, shake it, baby!"

And OoT still holds up. Gameplay still feels pretty modern even if you play it today unlike most games on the N64 and PSX. Even the single analog stick controls with z-targeting hasn't really aged much. Also OoT and Majora's are still my favorite Zelda games, the non-Switch mainline games after the N64 era just feel derivative with gimmicks slapped on top to make it feel new even tough it still the same quests for the same items you gather in the same type of settings with the same kind of dungeons. Wish they just followed Majora's Mask and completly mixed the gameplay up for every sequel, instead of rehashing LttP and OoT in a different theme. While BotW and TotK are a breath of fresh air and they are great games, they lack that Zelda magic and feel more like sandboxes where you can fuck around rather than an epic adventure in and they lack proper dungeons.
- The divine beasts and temples aren't proper dungeons?
  
  Half baked, maybe
  Which is how I describe most Nintendo sandbox games in their entirety...
  
  I liked them, but it felt like going to the same place over and over again once you were in there. (Which is why I’ve never finished Phantom Hourglass).
  I absolutely loved the world around them though, and the lore of the characters.
  I haven’t played Tears of the Kingdom.
  I’m currently playing Wind Waker again.
- What's the best way to play Majora's Mask nowadays, PC emulator or like 3ds? I don't have original hardware
  TotK lacked proper dungeons
  How?
- The Ship of Harkinian PC port makes it even better. Free camera controls alone is a vast improvement!

See, to me it was more like the first level of Panzer Dragoon in 95, because yeah, I was that guy.
By 1998 it took a lot to blow my hair back, though. I'm not saying it was a better game, but FFVII had been out for a year, and Quake 2, Half-Life and MGS had come out already. Things had changed.
But hey, the good news is by the time I did get around to OOT, later and through emulation, I still thought it held up alright, even if I'm not on the same "best game ever" boat as a lot of people.
- Were you older? Might be that that if they were younger and didn’t have a computer to play they just wouldn’t have the same context.
  Differing opinions between generations can be largely boiled down to nostalgia and someone’s age during that period informs greatly how much they could even experience prior to [thing] to compare.
  
  Yeah, I was in my teens and by the time the N64 came out I had a gaming PC with a proper GPU in it. Between that and the N64 launching quite late over here (and doing pretty terribly) I definitely had a different experience than all the "Nintendo SixtyFoaaaar!" kids out there.
  But there are levels to it. Coming at it dispassionately in those circumstances I still played through all of Mario 64 and OoT and thought they were great and good, respectively. GoldenEye, Turok and the Banjo games not so much.
  Of course that opinion also has to do with controller support on PC being utter garbage until the Xbox 360 came out. For a long time the best playing 3D games on PC that weren't shooters or RPGs were emulated console games with a PS2 controller adaptor.

I know this probably won’t get seen much now, but man that game has a special place in my heart.
Starting with the original Zelda game, my mother and I always beat them together.
We were very poor, but she always did what she had to do to get us the latest Nintendo console. She worked as a dog groomer leading up to the release of the Nintendo 64. She would be gone for 12 hours at a time, working for below minimum wage (under the table) just to get us that console.
She got Ocarina of Time for my brother and I for Christmas. She was just as excited to play it as we were, but there was no way my dad was going to let us open a Christmas present early. We only got one big present to share, and two small presents. Sometimes if my dad had saved a decent amount, we’d get the large present (usually a game), and then we’d get something that we really wanted that we didn’t have to share.
I begged my mom, she begged my dad. He wouldn’t budge. In the weeks leading up to Christmas though, she broke. She came to me with her plan. We were going to open it every day when he went to work and play it until an hour before he got home.
By the time Christmas rolled around, we were in the forest temple. He didn’t play games so he didn’t have a clue.
It was so much fun sneaking that game out with my mom and my brother. It was so much fun. Seeing how big it was for the time, we literally couldn’t believe our eyes.
Is OoT my favorite game of all time? Not anymore. It is my favorite memory of a game though, and by a long shot.
Edit, for fun.
It meant so much to me that the only boxes I still have from my childhood are my Zelda and N64 boxes.
- As a kid with controlling parents? Fantasy and science fiction were always my escapes. When we finally got this game it was my everything. Little did I know the sequel had already been out for a while. I still have so much of the game memorized. Every few years I pull out the n64 and play it again.....
- Goated mom
- What a wholesome memory. "Making do" can be really hard, but it also makes things like this feel that much more meaningful.
  
  Haha I didn’t even notice that it was you again. Man.
  Keep rocking, bro. Thank you.

Same but the 80’s and you picked up the first Triforce.
- 6 days after Christmas to find and beat the first dungeon without the internet? Sounds about right.

I wonder if there's a timeline where Link is wearing flood pants when he first meets Rauru on that weird fountain platform in the Chamber of Sages

hey i just did this for the first time last week!
- Sweet! I'm glad people are still getting to experience it for the first time.

The coolest thing ever HAD just happened

And then you got outside, there’s a fiery volcano and zombies that make Link shit himself.
- Those zombies terrified me! They really slowed my progress because I avoided all the places with them.
  The falling hands were also scary, but I had no idea when or where they would appear so I just had to deal with them.
  
  That hand and the zombies gave me anxiety. I think I was scared of that dumb tall ghost thing with the extra arms all around. The one in the well. Also that gross blob that eats you and steals your equipment.

Same, but in Breath of the Wild, circa a few years ago.
- When you leave the cave of renewal and walk to the cliff's edge.... Oh my god, I still get chills just thinking about it!

I remember a friend of mine got an N64 with Super Mario near release date and I hadn't seen anything like it at the time. First time playing that and jumping through paintings and just playing a game in 3D

Me seeing the starting screen "These are the end-times... There was no hope of survival... This is how you died." For Project Zomboid the first time. The one and only Zombie-Survival-Game that absolutely hit the nail on the head in relation to an atmosphere of despair and gritty survival.
- I'm surprised that game is over ten years old already. I've always thought it looked really cool but I've never been able to bring myself to spend the money on it. Maybe I'll catch a good sale someday. Patientgamer syndrome here
  
  There's Survival Crisis Z, it's free but old. https://ska-studios.com/2007/09/07/just-a-friendly-reminder/
  I think it would be been more popular today, with it's atmosphere and horror.

For me it was playing Dungeon Master on Atari 520st in 1987. Well past midnight, deep inside the dungeon, I step past a corner and stand face to face with a giant scorpion and almost shit my pants.

Is this real?..
Or is it Memorex?
- Is it live*
  
  Is it safe?

Star Control 2 on the 3DO, playing that before I'd seen a PlayStation, was this for me.
And later, FF7 was this for me.

god getting to the light world forest for the first time in link to the past was a dream. the way the shadows hit everything
then going up to the master sword area and seeing all the animals go across while it was eerily quiet <3

I died sooooo many times to the zombies in the castle town.
- The ReDeads? Wooden faced shamblers that hump you to death?
  
  The very same.

Me with Bioshock when you descend for the first time with Andrew Ryan introducing rapture.
But tbf, imo that’s a modern game as in I don’t see much difference between that and the latest AAA single player game.
- It’s nearly 20 years old now bro.
  But you know what? I swear it just came out.

Thrillho

That's exactly how I felt, but with Link to the Past.

I'm not entirely sure what scene I would've said had me similar when I could still more surely remember those first years. Possibly a game I've forgotten since. Maybe one of the Bionicle Mata Nui Games or some other big online game. Or Imperium Galactica 2.
But a moment that will always stick with me is from the first Homeworld game: when you return from your first hyperspace voyage. That entire game was epic, including the intro sequence, but it's that sequence that I think can stand forever as a masterpiece.

I got the master sword in TotK around release and wasn't spoiled on the context of it. It was really cool.