Gothic

I first saw the game in an Internet cafe, back when that was the only way for me to play online games. I had only noticed the player character had a funny jump. I then got my hands on a pirated copy and that was it, no more social life for a couple of weeks. It was the first time I got really immersed in a video game. For the first time, I was able to explore a pretty big world, I had to figure out what to do next and to git gud, because you start out really underpowered. (Of course, this was nothing compared to Gothic II, which had a bigger world and improved graphics and mechanics; Gothic III continued the trend, but it was pretty much the only game I wasn't able to finish because of bugs.) Immersion in video games has advanced tremendously, but in 2001, you could hardly do better than Gothic.