A question on Quora made me reminisce about old computer games that make me feel somewhat nostalgic.
I’ve been involved with computer games both as a player and in a professional capacity for a very long time.
Long before I laid my hands on a personal computer, I was an avid player of Trek on a PDP/11. This was a game written for text terminals, simulating the mission of the Starship Enterprise through Klingon-infested space:
Another game of similar vintage, which I used to play on a peer-to-peer QNX network, is Hack:
Then there was the Commodore-64. Here are two Commodore-64 games that I remember fondly. Impossible Mission:
And Jumpman:
After the Commodore-64 came the Amiga. One of the first games I played on the Amiga 500 was the absolutely surrealist Mind Walker:
Very weird game. Memorable, algorithm-generated music. Ahead of its time.
Moving on to the PC (actually, I first played these on the Atari ST), there are the classic INFOCOM games. (Yes, I am taking the liberty of classifying pure text adventure games as “video games”.) Best known perhaps is Zork:
But there was also the unforgettable apocalyptic story of Trinity:
The equally unforgettable A Mind Forever Voyaging in which you get to play a disembodied artificial intelligence:
And the hilarious Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with its fiendishly impossible puzzles:
Still on the text game front, back in 1991 I began playing what was for me the first multiplayer online game, British Legends, aka. MUD (Multi-User Dungeon):
Meanwhile, on my PC, I was busy playing Duke Nukem, its platform versions first, eventually moving on to Duke Nukem 3D (which exists to this day in a community supported 32-bit high-resolution version, complete with NSFW imagery):
And then came Myst, the “killer app” for CD-ROMs:
Last but not least, a game that gave me tremendous amounts of joy, Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny (with none other than Patrick Stewart lending his voice acting skills to the CD version):
I remember all these games very fondly. And they are all still eminently playable, and very enjoyable, to this day.