I'm sorry for this incoming wall of text. An anecdote from those days:
I think we bought our first computer in 1992 or 1993. Can't remember well. My earliest gaming memories were playing with my dad on an Atari 1200XL (could've been a 800XL)... Montezuma's Revenge, Pitfall, a Superman one - those were the games I played. I must've been 3 or 4 years old. Shortly after that, my parents bought me a SNES for Christmas (I was overjoyed!) and shortly after
that, we bought the computer. It was an Epson. Don't even ask me about specs 'cause I never knew what they were.
The thing came with Windows 3.1 (damn that was a blast from the past), which meant you had to boot windows from DOS. Bundled with the computer (actually, with the Sound-Blaster audio card) came a couple of CDs: one of them was
this, featuring "Eagle Eye Mysteries" and "Peter Pan", both colorful and fun games for kids, games I played quite a lot - despite not kowing english very well (actually, I started learning english due to videogames, yay!). The other CD was
this one... and man, it looked AWESOME. All those serious, complex, mysterious games in one CD? Too hardcore for me... yet I craved it. I WANTED to play them, but I never understood them. Only one of these would elude me: Ultima VIII. Every time I tried to install it, it said "not enough memory". No matter what I did. Not enough memory.
Time passed. I played other games. I loved Commander Keen (just the shareware episode), Dare to Dream (CliffyB's first game!), Sokoban (!!!), that pile of crap called Titus the Fox (I was a kid, what can I say), Pinball Fantasies (the sequel to Pinball Dreams!) a lot of minor titles that came in a CD full of shareware stuff. The good old days. I had fun. I was happy. But Ultima VIII was there, in the back of my mind, like a voice that wouldn't go away. And every time I tried to install it: "not enough memory".
Until one day in early 1996, something changed. I can't remember WHAT, exactly, but I was somehow able to install Ultima VIII. Finally, the day had come! I was ecstatic, I couldn't believe my eyes - the thing which had escaped my grasp for so long was finally there in front of me, ready to be played, ready to be enjoyed.
And so I did. I booted the game and watched the intro cutscene. I had never played the Ultima series before then so I had no fucking idea about ANYTHING in the game - who the Avatar was or what was that huge red face mocking the Avatar or anything like that. But I didn't care. I was absorbed by the colors and the eerie atmosphere that I didn't really care about the clunky-as-hell controls or the fact that I didn't know where to go or what to do. I was happy.
Until shortly thereafter I reached a point where the game froze. Might've been the same day, might've been the same week - but in any case, my happiness was shortlived. I panicked. I had to restart the computer and ScanDisk (!!!) came on, started to scan the drive and I waited until the thing was completed. I was already nervous. ScanDisk was instructed to automatically fix the errors it found while scanning... and so it did. I was even more nervous when the scanning finished and it sent me back to DOS. I entered the usual command: "Win".
It didn't work.
"Windows".
Didn't work.
I lost it. I was pretty much crying when I told my dad what happened. We checked and... nope, Windows 3.11 (we had "upgraded" at that point) was completely unable to start. Something was fucked up, we lost Windows completely. My dad got us Windows 95 from a coworker the next week and the PC was up and running... but it wasn't the same. It felt like I had lost something important when that happened. And considering PCs in general were only getting more and more powerful with every passing month, our own was starting to feel very obsolete. I stopped gaming on it, 'cause the machine was pretty much unable to run newer games. We didn't have another PC until 2001 - but that's another story which also ended badly.
I never played Ultima VIII again.
TL;DR - Apparently Ultima VIII fucked up my old computer.