This, for me at least, was the most fascinating game at the time. Even though I played more RTS (Dune 2 and later Warcraft and Starcraft) and enjoyed coding even more, TIM had something magic that flipped a bit in my brain (I was 10-12) and I always remembered that feeling. In hindisight it was aboutbuilding, degrees of freedom and composability.
Some other awesome, related early games were Scorch Earth and later Worms.
Absolutely adored this game as a child. The crazy variety of musical pieces in this game are also incredibly fitting for what amounts to a gigantic Rube Goldberg simulator.
I grew up with Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions, and the game and its soundtrack is indelibly inscribed into my memory—to this day, Pictures at an Exhibition is one of my favorite songs.
I similarly grew up with The Incredible Machine 2, and Pictures at an Exhibition haunted me for decades because I didn't know its title. Then finally, one random day NPR played it as part of a block of classical music _and_ said Mussorgsky's name, and that was good enough for me to be able to track it down and experience a wonderful epiphany 20ish years in the making.
My god the memories just flooded in. I played “The Incredible Toon Machine” version of this all the time on my family’s Gateway 2000.