When I was in my late teens, we were at a relative's house for the holidays and my brother found that my uncle had Wolfenstein 3D. I had liked some of the earlier 3D maze style games, so I started to watch him play. But it was the first time I had ever seen a game in which the enemies looked like actual human beings. Watching them die when he shot them made me feel like a bad person, and kind of sick to my stomach. The experience put me off computer games in general. There was a lot of excitement at the time over games like Wolfenstein and Doom, and I remember thinking "If this is the way computer games are headed, I guess they're not for me."
I went for over two decades without paying much attention to computer games at all after that. There would occasionally be a point and click adventure game that was funny enough to hold my interest, and I also ended up trying and liking Portal 2 (though the reason I liked it was entirely due to the hilariously snarky narrators rather than the gameplay itself) but apart from those rare experiences, I didn't think I was much of a "gamer".
It wasn't until I happened to see the Supernatural pack from Sims 3 that I perked up and started asking questions. Sims 3 ended up being the first game I got really obsessively interested in.
Since then, I have taken a look around at the gaming world and have found it vastly larger and more varied than I thought it was. And I have found other games I have enjoyed like Eastshade, and Yonder: Cloudcatchers, and I've even discovered I like playing co-op with my husband in cute RPG games like Portal Knights.
For me, it was definitely the Sims games that got me to take another look at gaming after I had more or less written it off many years earlier.
