My very, very first character ever made in EQ was a dwarven paladin. I had NO IDEA what a MMORPG was at all. All I knew was that I really liked playing SSI's Pools of Radiance back in the day on my Commodore 64, and I saw a magazine article talking about this EverQuest game that you create a character and you develop it over time. I thought it sounded cool like the old SSI games where you would take your characters from game to game as they came out.
So, I bought the game, installed it, created an account, logged in, and said "wow this game is ugly." I hopped around on tables, ran around a few rooms, and logged out.
A couple weeks later, I thought I would load up the game to give it one last shot before my free month ran out. As I was running around on my dwarf, the game froze. Just before I was about to do a hard reboot of the computer, it unfroze, and I was in a different area. I had no knowledge of a zone, so I had no idea that the "freeze" I experienced was the game loading up the next zone over. At that point, I was thinking, "hey there's more to this game than I thought."
I ran around until I somehow managed to get outside in Butcherblock mountains. That's where I encountered my first mob. It took a bit, but I figured out how to attack the thing, and I spent the next twenty minutes killing anything that moved. In all that time, I did not loot one single mob that I killed because I had no concept of "looting a mob".
Then the weirdest thing happened. A dwarf NPC ran up to me and said hello. I was like wo.... this game has some sort of AI. I said hey to the dwarf, and it said some more stuff. I was literally thinking, "holy shit this game has really good AI." The dwarf told me about right clicking the mobs I kill to loot what they drop. That was mind blowing.
Then... it hit me... like a ton of bricks.... THATS NOT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!!!! I was actually talking to someone else somewhere else in the world playing the same game I was playing. Holly... Actual... Fucking... Shit. Mind blown.!
It's been 20 years now,. Just think. I was one login away from uninstalling EverQuest and never experiencing any of the past two decades.