I think early pc shooters (doom, quake, unreal, etc) had a whole legion of kids learn the basics of computing. typing commands in a console. Understanding latency, what servers meant. Installing mods and drivers. It was a fantastic, motivating introduction to system administration.
UT99 did it for me. The game had a built in IRC client. That exposed me to the community outside of the game itself. And then once I heard the game ran better under Linux… my fate was sealed.
