I went through a period of 2-3 years in my late teens / early twenties in which I basically lost interest in PC gaming after having been an AVID PC gamer from the age of 22!

Until, in the early YouTube gaming days, I came across TotalBiscuit and decided to try a few of the games he had covered in his "WTF is" series. Those games were Limbo, Bastion and Tiny Bang Story, No-brainer Heroes . They were all games that would run on my outdated hardware, they were cheap and they were a refreshing break from all the Triple A games I had been playing on console.

I loved that these games were almost like the boiled down essence of what a game needed to be, instead of a big-budget affair that was flashy, but maybe a bit shallow. There was so much charm in these four very different games and they re-opened my eyes to the huge variety of games that were out there on PC from indie devs. That was me firmly hooked again!

I'd love to hear some of the games that got you back in to PC gaming!

Honestly, just building my first desktop in 2015 got my psyched for PC gaming. My Celeron G1840 and 750 Ti aren't much compared to the 9900K and 2080 Ti that I have now, but that first system got me in the door further than the pre-builts and laptops beforehand. ...Though, asking it to render out a 20 minute video was a bit much for it. My i5 4690K was better at handling video editing.

Around 2008 I had gotten really fed up with PC gaming, troubleshooting driver issues and all sorts of baloney that comes hand in hand with better performance and graphical fidelity. I switched to console gaming and didn’t look back for many years. In that time I still maintained a good gaming PC and would buy the occasional PC title when it just made more sense to play it there like Doom or the Witcher.

Sadly, nothing really did buy my love back for the platform. There are certainly moments where I prefer to play a singular game on the PC mostly for performance reasons. Astroneer is something I really enjoyed on PC and while I’m certain it’s playable on console it’s not the type of game where I want to be using a pad. The general hassle free nature of consoles is really hard to beat. Most recently I played Control on PC and was a little surprised by how much fiddling I had to do to get it running well - and the time I spent tweaking sliders to get something close to a solid 60 was honestly a little annoying. Do I drop resolution or do I drop detail? What can I lower that impacts performance the most without impacting the look and feel? There was a constant nagging sensation in the back of my mind that I’m playing a compromised version of the game because my hardware isn’t handling it. What if I dump another truckload of money and update this computer??

That’s not to say consoles haven’t had their fair share of similar frustrations that emerged with the step up models introduced this generation. Playing AC Origins on a base PS4 I was constantly reminded that I would be having a much smoother time on a Pro as the game hit low 20’s in certain fights and input delay felt like I was connecting through an animus myself instead of directly controlling the action. Games were no longer optimized for one system and base owners had to deal with being second class citizens in an ecosystem that was built specifically to eliminate that very issue.

BUT to finally answer the original question in some way - I think Doom 2016 was a big PC moment for me. I booted that game up uncharacteristically for a Bethesda/I’d joint with no technical issues, everything cranked to near max, and it both looked and ran amazingly. The ultra fast load times on an SSD combined with the accuracy of mouse and keyboard made me really think like yah, this is what PC gaming is all about.

despite having been raised playing pc games (mostly wing commander and LucasArts adventure games), i had only ever used prebuilt machines (a micron as the family computer, and my first personal computer was dell, dude).

and then starcraft 2 came out and suddenly i was building my own pc for the first time. i'm typing this out on that very machine, actually (2010's intel i7 930 people, WHERE YOU AT?).

...i think i should build a new pc.

anyway tl;dr: starcraft 2.

I've been gaming on PC since 1996, there was a period when the 360 came out where i needed PC upgrades but couldn't afford them so i went almost exclusive to the 360 (along with PC getting the shaft at that time), but i never stopped playing PC games.
With that in mind i have to adjust the question to what games was i passionate about that i HAD to get on PC, or caused me to upgrade my specs.
I remember trying to get Max Payne to work but it just wouldn't on my PC, i'd play it every once in a while at a friends house on low settings and it still blew my mind, but it took a while before i had a machine capable enough. Then it was Half Life 2, it was looking like the best game the world had ever seen and... it pretty much was, that's the first time i built a PC and while it didn't last long it served its purpose. The only other one i can think of was The Witcher 2, i started playing it but had to lower the graphics settings and the quality of the game just screamed to be played in high quality, so i stopped until i got what i needed to make that happen and it was SO worth it.
Since then i've been able to stay ahead with regards to PC hardware, i have a PS4 but have barely used it, so unless there's something incredible on a console next generation, for the first time i might not even bother getting a console.

Probably Div: OS2