{"id":7787,"date":"2016-05-18T15:42:18","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T19:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7787"},"modified":"2016-05-18T15:44:05","modified_gmt":"2016-05-18T19:44:05","slug":"computer-games-from-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7787","title":{"rendered":"Computer games from the past"},"content":{"rendered":"

A question on Quora<\/a> made me reminisce about old computer games that make me feel somewhat nostalgic.<\/p>\n

I’ve been involved with computer games both as a player and in a professional capacity for a very long time.<\/p>\n

Long before I laid my hands on a personal computer, I was an avid player of Trek<\/i> on a PDP\/11. This was a game written for text terminals, simulating the mission of the Starship Enterprise through Klingon-infested space:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another game of similar vintage, which I used to play on a peer-to-peer QNX network, is Hack<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Then there was the Commodore-64. Here are two Commodore-64 games that I remember fondly. Impossible Mission<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And Jumpman<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After the Commodore-64 came the Amiga. One of the first games I played on the Amiga 500 was the absolutely surrealist Mind Walker<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Very weird game. Memorable, algorithm-generated music. Ahead of its time.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cvideo games\u201d.) Best known perhaps is Zork<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But there was also the unforgettable apocalyptic story of Trinity<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The equally unforgettable A Mind Forever Voyaging<\/i> in which you get to play a disembodied artificial intelligence:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And the hilarious Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/i> with its fiendishly impossible puzzles:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Still on the text game front, back in 1991 I began playing what was for me the first multiplayer online game, British Legends<\/i><\/a>, aka. MUD<\/i> (Multi-User Dungeon<\/i>):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on my PC, I was busy playing Duke Nukem<\/i>, its platform versions first, eventually moving on to Duke Nukem 3D<\/i> (which exists to this day in a community supported 32-bit high-resolution version, complete with NSFW imagery):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And then came Myst<\/i>, the \u201ckiller app\u201d for CD-ROMs:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Last but not least, a game that gave me tremendous amounts of joy, Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny<\/i> (with none other than Patrick Stewart lending his voice acting skills to the CD version):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I remember all these games very fondly. And they are all still eminently playable, and very enjoyable, to this day.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,27,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-games","category-mud","category-personal","category-64-id","category-27-id","category-35-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7787"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7803,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7787\/revisions\/7803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}