fortune_p_dawg: good to see others like these too! great games with a ton of personality.
Indeed. In the 80s I played "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego" or some game like that and while playing it I had some ideas bouncing around in my head about how cool it would be if you could literally be *IN* a computerized game world, walk around like a real person and interact with objects, open drawers for real to search for clues etc. all basically what we now take forgranted as first-person games. No such thing existed at the time though and I just had this vision in my mind about how amazing it would be to walk around and interact with people and objects in a detective type adventure. Probably some time around 1986 or so.
Fast forward to 1994 or thereabouts and Under a Killing Moon was the big bad Game of the Year with huge cardboard posters everywhere etc. A friend bought it and brought it over to my place one night and I flipped out. After only a short time playing it I told my buddy "holy shit, this is exactly the game I fantasized about in 1986!". The only weakness was the camera-style controls rather than FPS style controls, but that only took a few hours to get used to and UAKM was an amazing experience, definitely worthy of the GOTY label. :)
That hooked me right there. :)