Gaming on Windows 95 was where PC gaming started getting serious. Before this, most games were stuck in DOS, but Windows 95 brought DirectX (first version dropped in September ‘95), which made it way easier for developers to build games that actually worked across different setups. That opened the floodgates—stuff like Doom, Command & Conquer, SimCity 2000, and Myst ran smoother, looked better, and didn’t require you to edit config.sys files just to get sound. By the time DirectX 5 hit in ‘97, you had full-blown 3D graphics support, and games like Quake II and Tomb Raider were pushing limits. It was the era of chunky CRTs, beige towers, and trying to get just one more megabyte of RAM to make a game run. If you gamed on Windows 95, you were part of the golden age before patches and microtransactions took over.