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[Arozay]

My main favourites were Crusader: No Remorse and Dungeon Keeper. Everything else like the old DOS and Lucasarts games have already been mentioned.

I never played Dungeon Keeper 2 though, I have a copy somewhere. How does it stand up to the first one?

 

[Jarmel]

Those early The Learning Company games. Seeing the box art brings back hours of joy and charm.

Oh wow. This. So much nostalgia.

 

[Randolph Freelander]

One more for Oregon Trail, assuming people have mentioned it. It's the only PC game I was aware of as a child, thanks to those three or four days in any given school year when we would go to the computer lab.

 

[soundtrack]

One more for Oregon Trail, assuming people have mentioned it. It's the only PC game I was aware of as a child, thanks to those three or four days in any given school year when we would go to the computer lab.

For my typing class in middle school, once we finished all the lessons the teacher had assigned for the entire semester, we were allowed to play OT for the remainder of the class. Needless to say, I completed everything in like a week.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

if you're on firefox or chrome, do yourself a favor and download the imgur extension/add-on

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imgur/ehoopddfhgaehhmphfcooacjdpmbjlao?hl=en

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/imgur-uploader/

simply right click and hit 'upload', it's almost too convenient

thanks for this!

*sigh* What I would give to go back to the late 80's and early 90's when all of the games in this thread were in their heydays. I know this is rose tinted glasses and childhood nostalgia speaking, but browsing through this thread makes me depressed that I will never be so engrossed and immersed in games as I was during this era.

Perfect user name for this thread!

Oh man we had this on our Apple IIGS. Maybe just my young age but I remember the game being really huge, I felt like I'd find new areas all the time.

I remember I used to be slightly terrified by the crooked man in the crooked house

 

[xn0]

Sorry for the massive post there were so many great memories:

Elementary School:

Odell Lake (I would finish my assignments first so I could get to the library machine with this installed)

Math Munchers (Strangely I was the only kid in 2nd grade that wanted to play with the computer..mostly this game)

Super Solvers (I used to play this at a friends house at night. I remember this game scaring me)

Middle School:

Sopwith (Remember endless hours in science club playing this)

Oregon Trail/Prince of Persia (of course)

Gorillas.bas and Nibbles.bas (When I wasn't playing with Qbasic Sound)

Lemmings (I would stay late at school to play this)

Where in the world is Carmen SanDiego (Hit it Rockapella)

Falcon 3.0 (My first struggle with Himem.sys)

High School

Doom/Doom II (I met my best friend playing this and my first experience with multiplayer over IPX)

Kali.net (Late nights on the Diablo channel)

Myst (My first and only PC game I ever got my Dad to play)

Quake 2 (I saved up an entire summer of lawn mowing for 2 Diamond Monster 3D ii cards. MIND BLOWING GRAPHICS)

UO (I ruined my grades)

Tanarus (Turned me nocturnal for a summer)

Yahoo Chess (I used to get my score really low, then join tournaments, force play high ranked players, load up chessmaster on Kasparov and play their moves while I watched X-Files)

 

[Immortal Technique]

Yeah dude, this is what I used to consider a "class based online multiplayer shooter". Probably the most fun I had online right up until TF2.

This of course is SubSpace, a game I wish everyone was aware of. It was incredibly ahead of its time in its massively multiplayer-ness (200+ people in one arena, going at it in real-time in 1996), and had amazingly tight controls. You wouldn't know it from the screenshots but the skill you needed to play this game on a high level was crazy.

 

[antitrop]

Quake 2 (I saved up an entire summer of lawn mowing for 2 Diamond Monster 3D ii cards. MIND BLOWING GRAPHICS)

Brofist, this was my first graphics card as well, although I only had one. My father bought it after we got Rainbow Six for Christmas, I played Quake 2 soon after.

I also got Trespasser and StarCraft 1 that Christmas. Trespasser was one of the most garbage games I've ever played to this day, I think I played it for maybe 2 hours at most and uninstalled it. It actually was a game that looked and performed worse with a 3D Acceleration card than in Software rendering, look it up on Wikipedia. What a disaster. I had StarCraft and Rainbow Six to play so I wasn't too bothered by it, so many hours in those.

 

[MrCunningham]

I havent seen ecstatica mentioned here and would like to add it
this game has haunted me for almost 20 years now, I still think about it from time to time

ecstatica was an incredibly atmospheric survival horror game in a medieval setting, it was released in '94, two years after alone in the dark

it had very unique graphics and was quite brutal for that time.

there was also a sequel, which was more action oriented and more accessible, typical for what we would call "casual dumbdown" today. but it wasnt bad either.

I have seen this game in magazine articles before, but I have never played or seen it in action. For the rendering technique they were using, the characters moved rather smoothy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqGeOsBccrQ

I always liked 3D games from that era, because there were no set standards for 3D graphics yet. Most developers were still experimenting with different graphics techniques to approximate 3D, so you would see all sorts of weird mixes of rendering styles, like voxel, sprite based, sector based (like Doom), quadrilaterals, partial polygon engines and stuff like in the video above. But that all went away after triangle based rendering and graphics accelerators became the dominate in the PC market. Not that I am complaining about what we have now, but I miss that time when developers really had to be experimental.

 

[Updawgs]

So many good memories of an easier time:


Chuck Yeager's Ace Combat (no idea what I was doing)

Battlezone

Star Wars: Rebel Assault

Original Unreal Tournament

Liero (Worms clone)

And of course, the almighty Alt-Tab to hide everything.

 

[Dereck]

 

[MysticX]

In the long gone days of the 90's, before all this new-fangled cable internet and Skype, I used to play Duke Nukem 3D direct modem-2-modem connection while simultaneously using the second phone line of the house to talk to my friend while we deathmatched.

Shit, sure glad it isn't that complicated anymore.

me and some buddies used to spend entire weekends hotwiring 2 computers together with a serial cable to multiplay

 

[ambientmystic]

And of course, the almighty Alt-Tab to hide everything.

Use to take ages to Alt-Tab between the game and the desktop those days with limited RAM in PCs causing massive disk swapping to occur which leads to the HDD chugging as the OS loads back into RAM lol...

 

[spekkeh]

I havent seen ecstatica mentioned here and would like to add it
this game has haunted me for almost 20 years now, I still think about it from time to time

YES. That wolfman was terrifying. Really creepy atmosphere, much more so than Alone in the Dark which went the classic haunted mansion route. I couldn't get very far, because of the crappy controls and dat wolfman, but absolutely wonderful. Looking at it now, it's pretty bad, but oh well.

 

[Noogy]

*sigh* What I would give to go back to the late 80's and early 90's when all of the games in this thread were in their heydays. I know this is rose tinted glasses and childhood nostalgia speaking, but browsing through this thread makes me depressed that I will never be so engrossed and immersed in games as I was during this era.

This sentiment pretty much sums up how I feel about modern gaming. Everything these days looks amazing and there is no shortage of good games. But back then it was truly magical, and I don't think that can ever be recaptured.

 

[Zyrusticae]

I don't know if anyone here remembers this game (it didn't last very long before they pulled the plug), but it absolutely blew my mind at the time:

Silent Death Online

 

[espher]

Came for TIE Fighter, MechWarrior II, Star Control II (and SubSpace), and Links.

Was not disappointed.

Bonus points for UT99/DAoC mentions (though those were technically after my childhood).

My contribution to this thread is the plethora of BBS Door games (for which I do not have screenshots). Trade Wars 2002, Barren Realms Elite (and the fantasy one), Legend of the Red Dragon, Exitilus, etc.

 

[mkenyon]

X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Civ, Civ II, Civ II expansion, Doom II, HoMM, Scorched Earth, lots of others mentioned in here. My personal highlights.

My first taste of online competitive FPS. Yeah, we had to rebind everything in the console. This game probably molded my taste for competition above all else. Fucking LPB snipers.

My first addiction. Not in the sense of hyperbole, but a truly unhealthy addiction that took up a good portion of my free time as a 13-15 year old. Dark and Shattered Lands. Seriously good game, that I still insist, has the best character creation system which links up with the PK (player kill) system beautifully to create a wonderful community where meta changes like Dota. The game is still awesome.

To say the game was rough would be an understatement. But the core strategy game underneath it all is a brilliant piece of design taken straight out of the Birthright D&D books. RTS battles, insanely complex TBS system, and even party based (really buggy and crappy) quests all tied together for a single experience. Sunk a lot of hours into this one.

 

[spekkeh]

The Discworld MUD. So nerdy, soo good (and funny)

I see it's still running, twenty years later. Can't really imagine anybody still being interested in playing a MUD though.

 

[Kageshinzo]

The game that made me realize the PC can be a legitimate gaming platform. I must have been 13 or 14 at this time.

 

[papercamm]

Beating Spy Fox without anybody's help.

 

[OminousShadow]

I have very fond memories of all these games.

 

[Chamai]

starcraft, counter strike and diablo 2

 

[Nyx]

Donald Duck's Playground

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLY_HHC-mEA

 

[spekkeh]

Donald Duck's Playground

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLY_HHC-mEA

Always interesting to see games in full color at a time when I and most other people still had monochrome screens. Kind of feels similar to seeing those rare World War 2 films shot in color.