The Game of Life, the free game from a cereal box
We did not have money for games, so a free one mattered. The Hasbro Game of Life came on a real CD inside a cereal box, I still have it, and I loved its art enough that I eventually took the whole thing apart to see how it worked.
A running theme of my childhood, and of a lot of these posts, is that we did not have a lot of money. So when a game was free, it lodged in my brain in a way the expensive ones never quite did. The Game of Life is the purest example I have.
This was the Hasbro Interactive version for the PC, which came out in 1998, a digital take on the old spinner-and-little-cars board game. The way I got it is the part I love: it came free in a cereal box. Not a demo, not a trial, the actual full game on a real CD in a real jewel case, the kind of thing you would have paid for on a store shelf, just sitting at the bottom of a box of cereal. I still have that CD. I got it right around the time I finally had my own computer to run it on, in sixth grade.
I played it constantly, and honestly I still boot it up once in a while, mostly for the art. There is something about the look of it, the bright little world, the spinning wheel, that has aged really well to my eye. It was cozy. And it was one of those games I could play three ways: by myself, online over the MSN Gaming Zone, and even on a local network with my friend Mike, the same way we played everything else back then.
There is one more chapter to this game that I am going to save for its own post, because it deserves the room: at some point, being the curious kid I was, I reverse engineered it. I dug into how it was put together and turned up all kinds of secrets, hidden debug modes, the bones of how it was programmed. I do not have all of that loaded in my head at the moment, so I will come back and write that one properly later. For now, just know that my favorite free game became the first one I ever truly took apart, and that tells you a lot about where I was headed.