Computer Games of Yore
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Unlike many people my age, I did not have a Nintendo or other gaming console while growing up. Sure, I had plenty of friends who had a gaming system, so I was able to play my fair share of games like Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, The Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, and NBA Jam. However, I had to turn to the family computer for my entertainment needs when I was at home. This article presents a few of the titles that I spent quality time with “back in the day”.
Commander Keen
Robots, smiling slug-like aliens, lollipops, cans of Pepsi, pogo-sticks, ray-guns, slices of pizza, and teddy bears? It must be Commander Keen. Racing to reacquire his stolen rocket parts, Commander Keen must defeat his Vorticon enemies in order to make it back to Earth before his parents get home and find him out of bed. Commander Keen is a goofy platforming game geared towards a younger audience. His ray-gun allowed Keen to zap his enemies, and his pogo-stick allowed him to jump higher than normal, letting him get to out of the way areas. The game has very cartoony sensibilities from Commander Keen’s yellow and green football helmet to the comical “Zot!” that appears whenever Keen zaps his enemies.
Note: Above screenshot is from the Commander Keen sequel, Goodbye Galaxy.
Duke Nukem 1 & 2
Whenever Duke Nukem is mentioned, most people initially think about Duke Nukem 3D. However, Duke first appeared in a pair of side-scrolling platformer games made by Apogee Software (now 3D Realms). Both games required Mr. Nukem to save the world by climbing and jumping through levels while zapping any enemy that gets in his way. Duke could pick up many different character and weapon power-ups to help him “kick butt, and be on my way”.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
When talking about modern games, one of the aspects often discussed is what the graphics look like. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not one of those games. HHGG is a text-based adventure in which you must type commands to accomplish anything you want to do, kind of like an interactive Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. This game is arguably the best text adventure ever made, and it is also known for being very intricate and unforgiving. Some tasks required you to input a very specific sequence of commands with a limited number of tries to do so. Even if you took advantage of the built-in hint system, the game was still very difficult to complete without re-trying certain sections several times.
Lemmings
Lemmings has spawned almost as many different iterations of itself as there are of the little creatures in any given level, but the original release is still a great puzzle game. Each level presents you with the challenge of getting a certain number of Lemmings to the exit door. You are given different types of upgrades for the little guys to help them get there. You must dig holes, build bridges over gaps, use umbrellas to survive long falls, and direct Lemming traffic. If you find that you have screwed yourself over and need to restart a level (or are just in need of some mildly sadistic fun), you can just blow up all your Lemmings en masse and start again.
MegaRace
In retrospect, this game isn’t really that good, but it has a certain sense of B-movie charm to it that is hard to deny. Instead of trying to describe it myself, I shall defer to the Master of Cheese himself, MegaRace host, Lance Boyle.
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One Must Fall 2097
Who doesn’t like fighting robots, especially when they are hundreds of feet tall? One Must Fall 2097 is a traditional 2D fighting game that pits giant robots against each other in varied arenas. Each match you win earns you money to upgrade your bot or buy a brand new one altogether. The game has a very catchy synthesized soundtrack that fits the game perfectly. One Must Fall 2097 was made by then Epic Megagames, the same company that went on to create a couple of small gaming franchises you may have heard about, Gears of War and Unreal Tournament
Sierra’s Quest Games
Other than perhaps Lucasarts, Sierra Entertainment was king of old school adventure games, embodied by the several “Quest” game series. Personally, I spent a lot of time with the Police Quest and Space Quest games, although I have played some of the King’s Quest games as well.
Space Quest follows the misadventures of Roger Wilco, Janitor Extraordinaire. The original game begins with Wilco missing an attack on his spaceship because he was taking a nap in a closet. When he wakes up, he must escape the ship to the planet below, make his way across the desert to a small town, find out where his enemies went, buy a new spaceship (and a robotic pilot), and track the attackers down. Each game after the original got progressively goofier as they went. The first game required text inputs, but the games would later adopt a point and click interface.
Police Quest 2 was the first Quest game that I played. It follows Detective Sony Bonds as he tracks down escaped convict Jessie Bains, the criminal Bonds arrested at the end of the first Police Quest. The game has several different sections to it including a scuba diving portion that you would only participate in if you picked up your diving license from your desk drawer early in the game.
Rick Dangerous
Rick Dangerous is one of the first computer games that I ever played. At the beginning of the game, Rick’s plane crashes in the jungle, and you have to guide him past rolling boulders, vampire bats, angry natives, and different varieties of booby traps. Rick has a six-shooter and sticks of dynamite to help him defeat enemies and clear passageways. After escaping the jungle, Rick must make his way through an Egyptian pyramid, a Nazi stronghold, and a secret missile base. The game is made very difficult by only giving you a very limited number of lives, and I used to sneak out of bed at night to see if my dad had reached a level I hadn’t made it to yet. Rick Dangerous was made by Core Design, making it a semi-precursor to the early Tomb Raider games.
Scorched Earth
Scorched Earth is a DOS-based, strategic tank command game. You take control of a tank, judging the angle and power of your shots in order to take out the other tanks on the screen. There were a ton of special weapons to unlock, including ones with multiple warheads, larger explosions, and even a weapon that exploded in a ball of dirt, allowing you to bury yourself or other tanks.
ZZT
Even further back in Epic Games’ history is a little game called ZZT. Created by Tim Sweeney, one of the founders of Epic, ZZT is a DOS-based adventure game in which the graphics are entirely made up of ANSI characters. In the main game, you play as a smiley symbol making it’s way through four different worlds. Along the way you must kill or avoid enemies (such as bullet-shooting tigers), unlock doors, and solve fiendish puzzles. However, ZZT is mostly known for its ground-breaking level editor which even included its own object-oriented coding language. The level editor is so powerful that there are still people making ZZT levels to this day.
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Book of the Month
Scott Pilgrim Vol. 1-6From writer/artist Bryan Lee O'Malley comes the story of Scott Pilgrim, the 23 year old slacker who's precious little life is turned upside down when he meets the girl of his dreams (literally), Ramona Flowers, and discovers that in order to be with her, he must fight and destroy her seven evil ex boyfriends. Buy all SIX volumes and qualify for free shipping from IST!
I couldn’t really justify including two Youtube videos in my article, but if you are interested in hearing the main theme from OMF 2097, you can listen to it here (along with seeing some footage from the game):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15bvpznQP5M
My big Computer Games of Yore were:
Sim City
Sim Ant
Lemmings
Scorched Earth
Theme Park/Sim Theme Park
and Total Annihilation
Granted, a couple of those are probably closer to the end of the SNES era than the NES era, but still. That’s about as far back as I go.
After finishing this article last night, I kept coming up with more titles that I played, so I might do another GoY article next week as well. I should add Sim City 2000 to the list….
OMG total annihilation blew my mind when it camer out
It is my favorite RTS not made by Blizzard. Gunships were freaking nasty. And one of my favorite tactics on matches where Commander deaths didn’t end the game was to sneak the commander into the enemy base, and suicide him. *drool*
omg i love commander keen!
I remember playing Scorched Earth and H2G2.
A man after my own heart today Polygon Wizard!
Commander Keene was the funnest! Me and my sister would sit in front of the computer taking turns on levels with it. But we only had a demo version, so we could only play so many levels… still haven’t been able to find the whole game of it.
I watched my brother play these games so much as a kid that I feel like I played them too. I remember his computer being so slow that whilst waiting for a character to exit the room we’d go outside, play with the dog, come back in and it’d STILL be trying to come out of the room. So funny, a bit aback I dl’d a pack of these old games and apparently my computer now is too fast to run these games. Oh, the irony…
And, seriously, they need to resurrect Sierra Online so badly… Some of their more hidden gems include a really righteous Robin Hood game called “Quest for the Longbow” and a King Arthur game. And seriously, how the hell were you supposed to find the horse’s bridle in KQ4??? I STILL hold that that was in the game to force people to call their tip hot line.
Okay, ten bucks if anyone can recite from memory the song they tried to make a pop hit from King’s Quest 6.
Anyone ever play the Kyrandia games? They had a lot of filler to them, but that labyrinth in the first game was the biggest bitch ever.
I spent just about every weekend up all night on my friends old pc playing rounds of one must fall, and an ASSLOAD of scorched earth.
For me, Scorched Earth was a high school game. We had 3 computer labs at my school. The good computer lab, the writing lab with all the craptastic old Macs (Sorry, but those things sucked. “So…in order to eject the disk, I put it in the trash?”), and then the “Math and Science lab” (Which was really just another name for the crappy 486 lab. So, every year in high school I had a computer class. But occasionally, classes would come in to work on projects, so we would be strong armed back to the Math and Science lab. Which was ironic, since usually it was the math and science classes that stole our good lab.
Anywho, since we got shoved back there frequently, we would have a grand old time playing Scorched Earth. Lots of fun. By the time I left, they had redone the computers in those labs 3 times. The final incarnation saw the Math and Science lab thrown away in favor of a TV studio (For the morning “News”), handicap computers (With touchscreen monitors), and a few other solid computers. It was a definite improvement over our previous lab, for sure.
Of course, by that point, not many classes stole our computers. They either went to the Writing lab, which also got a facelift, or they used their own computers. By that point, each class had at least 2 computers in it.
I was a lot of fun to live through the Computer boom in high school. Not to mention, there was that big computers for schools program that happened during the Clinton era.
Oh man, I remember being one of the last grades in my school to have woodshop. Over the summer they decided to convert it into a computer lab. I remember telling my Uncle this (I went to the same school as my mother/uncles) and his face falling.
I also remember in 5th grade seeing a cd-rom for the first time and thinking it high technology.
But my first memory of computers was in Kindergarten in ‘88. Our school just had a bunch of old Apples (I’m terrible at model names, forgive me) donated (I think that was a big thing Mac did back then, right?) and they were OBSESSED with trying to figure out what a bunch of little five year olds could even DO with a computer. It was a lot of fun. I remember some kind of game with Kermit and Miss Piggy that taught simple math and reading schools. Since I was 6, I was more “Oh! Miss Piggy!” Than fun learning.
I also got to see the internet in our school library for the first time in 6th grade. I think all we could find was, like, a site that had some upcoming movie news in all text. But I had seen War Games, The Net and Hackers by that point and was trying to get my nerdy friend to show me how to hack and all that, lol.
Oh and how could I forget Rick Dangerous, I had that on my Amiga 500
I’m a young pup, so old school gaming to me is Crash Bandicoot
“I was there, at the dawn of the First Age of Gamingkind…”
Old school gaming to me is Pong and Space Invaders. I remember the Quest series, and the Infocom text adventures (there is still a community of folks writing those games with stuff like the Inform engine).
I was more or less the opposite of Polygon Wizard… I only played most computer games at my aunt’s or various friends’ places, or at school (often instead of lunch, during breaks, or after school), since my home computer at the time was a TI-99/4A, which was already nearly obsolete when we got it. That didn’t really change until I got the Amiga 500 that served to get Saberj and myself onto the budding internet.
I was considerably better off, console-wise, up to that point. I’d had, at one time or another, almost every major console (and several minor ones) from Pong through the SNES era (the ones that I didn’t were mostly flops, or that forerunner of the PS3 pricing model known as the Neo Geo).
This may be where Randy got his original preference for console gaming, but then again, by the time he was getting his own systems, we no longer lived in the same place.
I found a website not to long back that allowed me to play H2G2, it was great fun.
They have it in several places around the net, including the Douglas Adams website:
http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html
Speaking of old PC games, did anyone ever play on Heat.net or Kesmai? At the time, they were huge online free multiplayer game sites. They had a ton of games. Some of them weren’t great. I didn’t particularly like the Godzilla game they had. But I ate up Battletech: Solaris, and Air Warrior at the time.
I remember playing Karate Champ on the Commador 64. It took 15 minutes to load that sucker off the floppy. BUt the game I played ALOT of back in the day was the Ultima series.
My brother loved the Art of War series.
oh, and http://abandonia.com/ has alot of old school games if anyone is interested.
Loved Police and King’s Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry
I also really loved Sim City and Civilization.
and of course Doom and Wolfenstein.
I was a big fan of Quake, up until Arena, which sucked, IMO. It replaced Doom for us at school. It was nice being able top play with more people. Unreal Tournament was also a big hit for us.
I await the epic “Hugo’s adventures” artical that I hope to see someday.
LOL! I remember those!
Ooh, I forgot about Where in the World is Carmen San Diego
I’m such a nerd.
Commander Keen, Duke Nukem and Lemmings. Those were the days!