My marriage and a good chunk of my career trajectory can both be traced directly back to having "grown up" playing AC and writing/coding for Crossroads of Dereth. It's a little scary to think how different my life would be if I hadn't picked up that box--possibly the only copy the EB Games in my small English town would get--and gone "huh, looks cool".

I think growing up during those years of transition, right before the Internet became mainstream and ubiquitous, was a huge boon. Sure, the early MMOs were far from the first international social forum enabled by the Internet, but they were right at the technological frontier at the time. There was something special about inhabiting this massive, 3D virtual space alongside people from across the world, and having that experience be just as novel to everyone else as it was to me.

You couldn't replicate that today, and growing up with the world at your fingertips on a pane of glass as a taken-for-granted fact of life must be a very different experience.