Sometimes I still don't know how I convinced my parents to buy me certain things. We lived in an extremely rural area and were not at all "well-to-do" but we always had a computer in the house. In my teenage years, this was a Packard Bell Pentium 100. All in the space of a year or so, I somehow managed to convince them to buy me a Canopus Pure3D video card (3dfx Voodoo but with 4 MB texture memory), a big ergonomic keyboard, a Sidewinder joypad, and Tomb Raider.

The Pure3D was the real winner here, it took Quake from "meh" on the average PC to flat-out amazing. Even on dialup, I got quite a lot of mileage out of that setup.