Today’s prompt is an interesting one. Let’s start with a definition for Tribute:

1a: something given or contributed voluntarily as due or deserved especially : a gift or service showing respect, gratitude, or affection a floral tribute
b: something (such as material evidence or a formal attestation) that indicates the worth, virtue, or effectiveness of the one in question the design is a tribute to his ingenuity
2a: a payment by one ruler or nation to another in acknowledgment of submission or as the price of protection, also : the tax levied for such a payment
Now, I could get very political with this post, which is the new meow for many; shoving their opinions and gripes in your face at every turn…but I’m not going to do that because this is about fun. So we’re going to pay tribute to “that game” — the game that really sealed the deal for you. The best system or setting. The one you’re playing 10, 20, 30, 40 years later. The one that inspired you in strange ways. The one that just came together right. We all have one. Here’s mine:
Dungeons & Dragons was my first RPG and the one that created a love of telling stories. I started playing when D&D was considered the gateway into satanism and possibly heavy metal music. Which one was worse, you can decide. these were the days when trying to find other players was like being a politician in a rest stop men’s room, tapping your foot under the stall…hey, kid: you like D&D?
We played the hell out of D&D and AD&D, and a bunch of other games from the other TSR offerings like Top Secret and Star Frontiers to Traveler and Universe. But the d20 system, to me, has always had serious flaws, especially for damage and healing (looking at you 5th ed!) Then in 1983, the one hit:
James Bond: 007 by Victory Games. The first system to really capture the flavor of the source material. From damage being tied to how well you did (Quality Result), to “realistic”ish damage in combat; from the product placement quality of having different guns and cars, boats and planes have different performance; to bidding for who went first in chases and rules for seduction (be still by teenage heart!); to designing your character and not randomly rolling — JB:007 was a sea change in how game mechanics worked. It was my first system “love” and I used it non-stop until the late aughties, when having worked in intelligence I was somewhat (okay, very) cynical about the business. I used it for cyberpunk. I used it for a Stargate: SG1 campaign. In many ways, the heavy research I did to try and to give our games verisimilitude led me into the field.
Space: 1889 by Games Designer’s Workshop. This game spurred y love of history, again because I wanted to get the setting right. I wound up specializing in European Imperialism for my bachelors and masters degrees in history. I ran an 1889 campaign pretty much non-stop until about 2007, when I shifted to Hollow Earth Expedition, paralleling my doctoral studies in the interwar period.
The mechanics for Space: 1889 were, to be kind, execrable — but the setting was superbly inventive and fun. With the release of Castle Falkenstein, I ported our 1889 campaign into those rules set, but with the terrible combat system replaced with a kitbashed version of the excellent Lace & Steel rules. It was rereleased in the Ubiquity rules that power Hollow Earth Expedition so returning to it wouldn’t be hard for my players. And it is a setting i keep wanting to return to; there’s just so much to run, right now!
Battlestar Galactica and other iterations of “Classic Cortex” by Margret Weiss Productions. Starting with the solidly good rules for Serenity, the first RPG set in the Firefly universe, I have loved the Cortex system second only to JB:007, and depending on the day, more so. There was some baggage from the original Sovereign Stone  ruleset by Jamie Chambers. It would power a couple of licensed product lines, including Demon Hunters and Supernatural, but for me it was Battlestar Galactica — with the change to how Traits and Complications were addressed — sealed the deal. I wound up running an epic 5 year campaign that you can find the play reports for in the blog. It was one of the best bits of GMing I have done and it was one of the most fun and engaging games I’ve run. It’s the only campaign I miss.
Cortex got “Fate-ified” when Cam Banks took over the games for MWP, and I was not impressed by the following Firefly, although the new Cortex worked beautifully for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying — which wona few awards and was killed off by the Marvel crew far too early. It combined simple basic dice pool mechanics with lots of wiggle room for using Hero Points to do things, and it captured that freeform feel that the old Marvel Superheroes game from the ’80s had.
So there is my tribute to the games that guided my play for the last…too long. If I were to crown a game the “best” I’ve played, it would be a tie between James Bond and Cortex; my favorite original setting is easily Space: 1889 (which got even better when Clockwerk had it and expanded the world with more Germanic setting information.)
So…what’s your “first one”? That game that really hooked you? That one that you want to play again, or maybe get your friends to stop whinging and try?