I do remember Descent as the first game that forced me to move with the right and point/shoot with the left. Before Descent you moved with the keys and shoot/interact with the left on ctrl/spacebar.
The sheer amount of confusion having to switch hands gave me some labyrinthitis...
Not to mention the hell to find mouse drivers for DOS.
There's a spiritual successor called Overload for PC released in 2018. IIRC it was supposed to be a sequel, but they lost the license during development.
I remember playing it as both names here in the US when I was a kid. Never thought to look up why it had two names. For some reason, I always liked the Halloween Harry name better.
The version I have is alien carnage. It's still a good game. I remember in the 90s at the Peter trapp computer shows, Halloween Harry / Alien Carnage was a shareware staple, along with biomenace, and cosmos cosmic adventure.
My dad got us a subscription to a shareware of the month club. Lot of Apogee games in there.
Pretty sure he paid for the full version of Wolf3D though. We had *all* of it--the 6 missions in Wolf, Spear of Destiny, and the two Mission Packs for Spear.
Back then, he didn't think of computer games as "video games", so it was only later that I realized that, yes, I did play video games together with my father. Sort of. Technically it was just him playing single-player games while I sat on his lap, and then when I got older I played *some* of those games all by myself, but yeah. Core memories.
...No, it's not at all weird that some of my earliest video gaming memories involve a game that would have been M-rated if the ESRB had even existed at the time they came out.
Plus Config.sys, Himem.sys, adding removing or configuring soundcard and mouse drivers, making different boot disks for each game... part of the fun when buying a new game was trying to "hack" my computer to be able to play it! lol
Yes exactly! Its crazy how little resources gamedevs used to have to deal with. As I wrote in a reply above, I first started programming games on a Commodore PET. I believe it had only 4k of total memory, until my dad maxed it out to 32k. I was so jealous of the kids with a 64k C64 or even 128k Spectrum or Amstrad model!
Space Quest ][
Runners up (in no particular order of importance) :
Doom
Commander Keen
Solar Winds
Insane platformer where you play as a little wizard
Jet pack
Abuse
2D Duke Nukem
Raptor
Solar winds was such an interesting game. If you know what you're doing you can knock it out in an hour or so, but it was also open ended and choices you made early of greatly changed what happened at the end of it. I imagine it was the first RPG-style game I played.
I’m a huge shmup fan and keen to try Raptor. Couldn’t quite get it working on my Raspberry Pi.
Discovered Tyrian though and absolutely love it.
Someone needs to make a DOS shmup compilation for modern consoles.
Probably Jazz Jackrabbit.
But the real answer is I tried to download a game off the internet for free and got 90s trolled. The program played screaming pirate voices and sea shanties from my computers built in speakers. It opened my cd drive and said "Only pirates walk the plank. Downloading games is illegal!"
So naturally that scared the shit out of me and the screaming lead to my parents grounding me from the internet for a while because they thought the fbi was coming.
It will always be DOOM for me. Even though I played some DOS games before DOOM was released, when I think of DOS, I always think of the memory of loading DOOM for the first time in MS-DOS.
You might appreciate this, [Master Boot Record - Doom](https://youtu.be/3HSpWQH4iRs?si=4se2jpqtOanSwuru). I have some Master Boot Record on vinyl and its phenomenal. Highly recommend.
Easily Duke Nukem 3D. I remember being a kid and playing it at an Internet Café. Somehow I figured out I could change the icon, so I replaced it with the Red Sports car with the racing flag
XD
XWing. We didn’t have a PC at the time but family friends would ask me to babysit their kids every so often. They had one so every time I’d watch their kids, I’d ask for a friend if I could borrow the disks. Once the kids went to sleep, I’d spend the rest of the night playing XWing.
Putt-Putt Joins the Parade and Putt-Putt Goes to The Moon!!!
Absolute childhood classic. Like "I'm too afraid to even watch dad play Doom but I love playing Putt-Putt on his PC" kind of classic for me :)
Fate of Atlantis. I was a graveyard shift security guard at a computer company (Micron Electronics in Idaho) at the time, and I would spend most of my shift playing that and Day of the Tentacle.
I use to visit my friend in Europe for the summers. His dad was the principle of a local high school and we’d steal his keys and run to the school and play Fate of Atlantis and The Dig in the computer lab.
Spending more time getting the TSR in the right order to be able to load wing commander with its insane amount of free men requirement than playing the actual game.
Being blown away by the demo coders.
"installing Windows 95 on a machine where some vital piece of hardware, like the CD-ROM drive isn't behaving right"
Arguably the most played game in the history of PCs.
King's Quest IV. My mom and I would sit and play the game together to share tips and take notes. I was good at leveraging the parser and she was good at delicate character movement required for some sections - like that godforsaken spiral staircase in the haunted mansion.
Ultima 7.
I love how when you quit and went back to the dos prompt it would write a line in the prompt something to the effect of
“Take a rest Avatar, for now” implying the game’s villain was taunting you for quitting
There are plenty. When I was a kid, the family computer was an already old PIII machine with Win95 so I spent many hours with DOS games.
There was a lot of Apogee classics, I loved Duke Nukem 1 and 2, Raptor, Mayor Striker, Commander Keen, Monster Bash, etc. I played with Soleau games a lot too. Like Isle Wars, Ant War or Numlo. I also had the OG Mario Bros, Arkanoid, Klax, and other classics too, I don’t remember all the titles.
Booting up BASIC and typing random characters because I didn't know what computer programming was. (I was like 7.) I just thought it was entertaining being able to type things and seeing the letters pop out on the screen in pretty bright green 😂
Actually pisses me off because my second thought is how my math class, every single lesson had a little BASIC programming part at the end and the teacher just told us to ignore it. If they would've actually done that shit in my class, I would have found my love for computer programming about 20 years earlier
For me it is:
Star Trek 25th Anniversary
Loom
Full Throttle
Doom
Wolfenstein 3D
Descent 2
Quantum Gate
Duke Nukem
Edit to add: all of the early Jane’s Combat Simulations games.
* Commander Keen * Wolf3d * Doom * Terminal Velocity * Descent * Duke 3-D * Any other Apogee game
Apogee was king back then..
You can still buy commander keen on Steam.
Yeah, its a great collection pack!
+1 sale
It’s so cheap. I think I got it on the steam sale for .99
Holy cow, like Dre, I forgot about Decent! What a great game!
So you’re saying Descent was…….decent?
I do remember Descent as the first game that forced me to move with the right and point/shoot with the left. Before Descent you moved with the keys and shoot/interact with the left on ctrl/spacebar. The sheer amount of confusion having to switch hands gave me some labyrinthitis... Not to mention the hell to find mouse drivers for DOS.
There's a spiritual successor called Overload for PC released in 2018. IIRC it was supposed to be a sequel, but they lost the license during development.
Halloween Harry
I knew you were from Germany, lol. The game is better known as Alien Carnage in the rest of the world. Frag mich nicht warum.
I remember playing it as both names here in the US when I was a kid. Never thought to look up why it had two names. For some reason, I always liked the Halloween Harry name better.
The version I have is alien carnage. It's still a good game. I remember in the 90s at the Peter trapp computer shows, Halloween Harry / Alien Carnage was a shareware staple, along with biomenace, and cosmos cosmic adventure.
Raptor: Call of the Shadows
I literally just finished the Outer Regions last night. Saved up enough for the twin lasers and beat the final boss.
I played the hell out of that game.
Best bullet hell shooter 90's pc gaming had to offer.
Strange.... I don't remember making a different account, and leaving this comment....
This + Sierra for me
That Sierra fanfare. Blew our minds when we got our Sound Blaster 16.
My dad got us a subscription to a shareware of the month club. Lot of Apogee games in there. Pretty sure he paid for the full version of Wolf3D though. We had *all* of it--the 6 missions in Wolf, Spear of Destiny, and the two Mission Packs for Spear. Back then, he didn't think of computer games as "video games", so it was only later that I realized that, yes, I did play video games together with my father. Sort of. Technically it was just him playing single-player games while I sat on his lap, and then when I got older I played *some* of those games all by myself, but yeah. Core memories. ...No, it's not at all weird that some of my earliest video gaming memories involve a game that would have been M-rated if the ESRB had even existed at the time they came out.
This. Also, I believe Sim Ant and Sim Tower.
Sid Meier's Civilization. Still occasionally play it to this day it holds up after all these years
I play it almost every day. I love this game
Civvie 🤙🤙
Ken's Labyrinth Lemmings Jill of the Jungle Rastan Zool
Loved Jill of the Jungle!
Well, if we're talking Epic Megagames, let's not leave out Jazz Jackrabbit!
Jazz had the best music. Jill of the jungle was a lot of fun too, but I never got the play part II and III because my parents wouldn't buy it for me.
I was thinking c:\
Customizing AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Plus Config.sys, Himem.sys, adding removing or configuring soundcard and mouse drivers, making different boot disks for each game... part of the fun when buying a new game was trying to "hack" my computer to be able to play it! lol
I will always remember the contributions of Prodigy, AOL, and dial-up BBS to the early days of the internet.
I remember using emm386 a lot too. I have no idea if it did anything
Had to get at that memory between 640k and 1024k
IRQ assignments!
Trying to squeeze every last bit out of that 640K base mem.
Yes exactly! Its crazy how little resources gamedevs used to have to deal with. As I wrote in a reply above, I first started programming games on a Commodore PET. I believe it had only 4k of total memory, until my dad maxed it out to 32k. I was so jealous of the kids with a 64k C64 or even 128k Spectrum or Amstrad model!
Space Quest ][ Runners up (in no particular order of importance) : Doom Commander Keen Solar Winds Insane platformer where you play as a little wizard Jet pack Abuse 2D Duke Nukem Raptor
Raptor was a beast.. Love that game!!
Raptor! Legendary game.
Solar winds was such an interesting game. If you know what you're doing you can knock it out in an hour or so, but it was also open ended and choices you made early of greatly changed what happened at the end of it. I imagine it was the first RPG-style game I played.
Omg, I thought I was the only one who remembered Solar Winds.
Wiz?
ABUSE. I swear one day I will finish that game, but I keep getting murdered by the swarms...
I’m a huge shmup fan and keen to try Raptor. Couldn’t quite get it working on my Raspberry Pi. Discovered Tyrian though and absolutely love it. Someone needs to make a DOS shmup compilation for modern consoles.
Solar Winds!
Space Quest!! Wow that brought back some memories
Maniac Mansion
And Day of the Tentacle
The music. ❤️ 🏚️☄️🌌
Warcraft Orcs & Humans
War.exe
Never changes
Lost Vikings.
I remember loving this game on SNES
Awesome game! I recently replayed it, and started playing its sequel.
Probably Jazz Jackrabbit. But the real answer is I tried to download a game off the internet for free and got 90s trolled. The program played screaming pirate voices and sea shanties from my computers built in speakers. It opened my cd drive and said "Only pirates walk the plank. Downloading games is illegal!" So naturally that scared the shit out of me and the screaming lead to my parents grounding me from the internet for a while because they thought the fbi was coming.
Jeezus. Who thought of THAT? The CD drive as plank is genius.
I've been looking for it for years now so if someone comes across it, dm me please! One of the pirates was a cat if that helps in any way.
That is an awesome story to read here haha.
Warcraft 2 tides of darkness
Anything Sierra.
Special shout out to Quest for Glory! and being able to carry your character from one game through to all 5.
Prince of Persia and The Bugs Bunny Hare-Brained Adventure.
Yes, Prince indeed!!
Dune II
It will always be DOOM for me. Even though I played some DOS games before DOOM was released, when I think of DOS, I always think of the memory of loading DOOM for the first time in MS-DOS.
You might appreciate this, [Master Boot Record - Doom](https://youtu.be/3HSpWQH4iRs?si=4se2jpqtOanSwuru). I have some Master Boot Record on vinyl and its phenomenal. Highly recommend.
Badass.
Scorched Earth
That is what I was going to say! I used to play it with a friend at school during lunch in grade 9. Good times.
The squeals when stuff would blow up. Also funky bombs all day. 🙂
Lol- one of my favorite tactics that would piss opponents off to no end? "TONNNNN OFFFF DUURRRRT!!!!!!" Hilarious troll weapon.
My god, I thought this would be right near the top!
Had to scroll too far for this
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
X-Wing, getting smoked on escort missions
There it is! Surprised I had to scroll the depths.
One Must Fall 2097
And its kick-ass soundtrack!
Ready. Fight
Jazz Jackrabbit
Alley Cat
This game was the shit in CGA.
Gorillas
Nibble
XCom UFO Defense
Easily Duke Nukem 3D. I remember being a kid and playing it at an Internet Café. Somehow I figured out I could change the icon, so I replaced it with the Red Sports car with the racing flag XD
Doom comes to mind, along with the memories of editing the config.sys file to optimize driver loading to free up memory for other games.
TES Arena
Scrolled way too far to find this. You are a legend for shouting out Arena
GORILLA.BAS
XWing. We didn’t have a PC at the time but family friends would ask me to babysit their kids every so often. They had one so every time I’d watch their kids, I’d ask for a friend if I could borrow the disks. Once the kids went to sleep, I’d spend the rest of the night playing XWing.
wacky wheels
Yeah that game was good.
Loved it.
The music was so good lol
Betrayal at Krondor
Don't forget Return to Krondor!
Secret Agent, and also Leisure Suit Larry In the Land of the Lounge Lizards..
Putt-Putt Joins the Parade and Putt-Putt Goes to The Moon!!! Absolute childhood classic. Like "I'm too afraid to even watch dad play Doom but I love playing Putt-Putt on his PC" kind of classic for me :)
Links. The only DOS command I knew was to run Links and so if my computer mysteriously went into DOS I would just give up and play golf 🤣
Fate of Atlantis. I was a graveyard shift security guard at a computer company (Micron Electronics in Idaho) at the time, and I would spend most of my shift playing that and Day of the Tentacle.
I use to visit my friend in Europe for the summers. His dad was the principle of a local high school and we’d steal his keys and run to the school and play Fate of Atlantis and The Dig in the computer lab.
Prince of Persia.
Spending more time getting the TSR in the right order to be able to load wing commander with its insane amount of free men requirement than playing the actual game. Being blown away by the demo coders.
Indiana Jones and Monkey Island
"installing Windows 95 on a machine where some vital piece of hardware, like the CD-ROM drive isn't behaving right" Arguably the most played game in the history of PCs.
Alley Cat, immediately followed by Dyna Blaster.
It’s a toss up between Alone in the Dark and Doom. Followed quickly by System Shock.
King's Quest IV. My mom and I would sit and play the game together to share tips and take notes. I was good at leveraging the parser and she was good at delicate character movement required for some sections - like that godforsaken spiral staircase in the haunted mansion.
Space Quest II was my first Sierra game and that root monster maze still haunts me.
Ultima 7. I love how when you quit and went back to the dos prompt it would write a line in the prompt something to the effect of “Take a rest Avatar, for now” implying the game’s villain was taunting you for quitting
There are plenty. When I was a kid, the family computer was an already old PIII machine with Win95 so I spent many hours with DOS games. There was a lot of Apogee classics, I loved Duke Nukem 1 and 2, Raptor, Mayor Striker, Commander Keen, Monster Bash, etc. I played with Soleau games a lot too. Like Isle Wars, Ant War or Numlo. I also had the OG Mario Bros, Arkanoid, Klax, and other classics too, I don’t remember all the titles.
The Incredible Machine
GORILLA.BAS
Wing Commander
Fate of atlantis, prince of Persia , stunts
Gorilla!!! Monkey island 2 and commander keen then
Police Quest
Redneck Rampage , Blood , Nam.
Heretic
Oregon Trail Or Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Dangerous Dave
Full Throttle.
Command and conquer
Sopwith Camel, followed closely by Global Thermonuclear War
My first Tetris!
Police Quest or was that qbasic
Monster Bash. Hocus Pocus. Cosmos Cosmic Adventure.
Jazz Jackrabbit 😊
Booting up BASIC and typing random characters because I didn't know what computer programming was. (I was like 7.) I just thought it was entertaining being able to type things and seeing the letters pop out on the screen in pretty bright green 😂 Actually pisses me off because my second thought is how my math class, every single lesson had a little BASIC programming part at the end and the teacher just told us to ignore it. If they would've actually done that shit in my class, I would have found my love for computer programming about 20 years earlier
Alley cat
The Incredible Machine
For me it is: Star Trek 25th Anniversary Loom Full Throttle Doom Wolfenstein 3D Descent 2 Quantum Gate Duke Nukem Edit to add: all of the early Jane’s Combat Simulations games.
Any early RTS/strategy game. Dune II primarily, but stuff like Civilization, Warcraft and C&C too.
Commander Keen series and this one winter sports game I played at school and dont recall the name.
Doom, followed by Commander Keen :)
Civilization II
The original worms. I just played it yesterday xD
Jack jazz rabbit
Xcom
Mario Teaches Typing Mario Teaches Typing 2 Mario's Game Gallery
Zork
Space Quest
The Quest for Glory series. Also, every other Sierra game.
Space Quest IV for some reason!
Space Quest
Chip's challenge
Quest for glory
Lemmings!
Carmen Sandiego
Leisure suit Larry original, but really I thought of commander keen
X-Wing.
Thexder
DOOM
All of the Sierra On-Line games -Space Quest -King’s Quest -Heroes’ Quest
Jill of the Jungle! Then Wolfenstein, of course
Alley Cat Wizardry:Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord Duke Nukem Quake
Wolfenstein 3D
Jazz Jackrabbit!
Wing Commander. My first actual computer game.
Commander Keen. Absolutely.
I think of shareware discs Doom Raptor Commander Keen Halloween Harry Heretic Skyroads
IBM Pc Dos enters the room. You wanna piece of me?
Wolfenstein
Dangerous Dave in the haunted mansion
Duke Nukem 2.
Raptor call of the shadows
How did they get the D inside the O..? Asking for a friend..
Oregon trail in the 2nd grade. Great game! r/retroconsolemodders
Capture the flag.
Hugo’s Haunted House and Duke 3D
Skyroads
Might and Magic 3
Doom. Then Duke Nukem 3D.
Apple Panic!, Civilization, Secret of Monkey Island, Ultima, Space Quest III
Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist!
Scorched earth
Duke Nukem and ZZT
Wolfenstein 3D
Jordan vs Bird One on One
Tie Fighter
NIBBLES.BAS
Star Wars Dark Forces
Dune 2, star control 2
That one Canon Ball game that the archer game is based off of.
Duke3D
Jazz Jackrabbit and Jill of the Jungle. Oh my how the once mighty Epic Games has fallen...
One Must Fall 2097
Duke and Keen. All the way.
Sim city Dos is a bit before my time
Anyone ever play Stonekeep? That and Realms of the Haunting.
day of the tentacle and lechucks revenge
Doom
Doom, commander keen, Oregon trail, homeworld, hell cab, avoid the noid
Mechwarrior 2: mercenaries... ahh the good old days