It's been one heck of a thirty-year ride, give or take a few years depending on when you came aboard. For me, it started in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the Wal-Mart on the corner of Markham and John Barrow. One day, coming home from school, I wandered in like I often did. But this time, there was a stand-up arcade machine called Space Invaders. The rest is, as they say, history.

But regardless of where it started for you, we all share moments when it changed dramatically, moments when a bar was raised, a cliché was shattered, or something new was discovered, and you knew it would never be the same again.

After the jump, read the ten moments that changed videogaming forever.

10) World of Warcraft hitting 10 million subscribers
You might remember a time when MMOs like Ultima Online were novelties with unfulfilled promise, clunky toys mired in the MUD. When Blizzard changed that and achieved the kinds of numbers that should have been impossible, they launched a global and maybe even mainstream phenomenon.

9) Seeing Tomb Raider running on a 3D accelerator card
This was the leap computer games needed to start going photorealistic. It was a watershed event for graphics whores. And except for you guys playing Dwarf Fortress, we're all graphics whores to some degree or another.

8) The credits for Portal
This wasn't just the icing on the cake. It signaled to gamers and game-makers that short games can be a huge commercial, critical, and creative success.

7) The reveal in BioShock
Which I'm not about to spoil. Besides, there are a couple of them. But after BioShock, there is no excuse for good writers to not take command of a game without compromising the gameplay.

6) Coming out of the ship in Unreal
This is where you could see what 3D graphics were going to achieve. You could argue that your first time with Doom or Wolfenstein 3D were amazing, but splendor and beauty weren’t a part of the equation until you broke out of that prison ship (appropriate, yes?) and saw the waterfall.

5) Wing Commander's cut scenes
Here is where computer games first demonstrated that they could learn from movies: pacing, excitement, characters, plot twists. Up to this point, computer games had to tell stories on their own terms, often with text and bleeps. Wing Commander changed that, and proved that the medium was ready to tell stories on Hollywood's terms.

4) The Half-Life tram ride
The inclination in a shooter is to jump in and start, well, shooting. But whereas another game might have printed a page of exposition in the front of the manual, Valve essentially said, "Okay, first, we want to show you something. Trust us." And, boy, did they show us something.

3) Firing the shotgun in Doom
From this moment on, "visceral" would be a buzzword every bit as important as "fun".

2) Taking up that little plastic guitar in Guitar Hero
Here was something completely different, and something everyone could relate to. It was partly a game, but it was mostly a way to interact with music the way we'd always wanted to when we listened to music. And now it's a genre.

1) The first time you played online multiplayer
Whether it was World of Warcraft, logging into battle.net, fussing with Kali, or even hooking up two computers with cables to play Doom, there was nothing quite like being in a game world with someone else in there with you. Perhaps more than anything else, this has changed the way videogames are created and played.