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Your fondest childhood PC game memories
- Thread starter Alucard
- Start date
derExperte
Member
Getting Day of the Tentacle to run on my first PC (IRQs, DMAs and all that took a bit of trial and error) which came with ten bundled games like Comanche, Indy 4, MI2, X-Wing, Tornado and Syndicate. Gaming bliss after the Amiga was at the end of it's life in 93. Also later building elaborate config.sys and autoexec.bat files with multiple confiurations to choose from. Damn Origin games, I think I had one specifically for Ultima 7. Strike Commander was no joke in that regard too.
Good one and so strange with all the insect stuff. Al-Qadim from the same developer was great too.
Good one and so strange with all the insect stuff. Al-Qadim from the same developer was great too.
TestMonkey
Member
Damn kids making me feel old... What you know about this?
Scorched Earth, yes, absolutely. I'm only 27 and I played the shit out of that.Damn kids making me feel old... What you know about this?
Clearing out the slums in Pool of Radiance. I loved that game mechanic of slowly reclaiming the city.
This was the first PC game I ever got, as an 8th grade graduation gift from the neighbors. Of course, I got my computer in 1995 shortly before the release of Chrono Trigger so it was already pretty dated (the game is from 1988 I think?). And I wasn't used to the total nonlinearity of the game (it was my second western RPG since Ultima 3 on NES) so I didn't ever make it very far. I did enjoy the battle system, though.
Some other memories:
When I was about 10 or so, going to a family friend's house and playing the original Police Quest with the text parser... and being pretty blown away that you can do stuff like "take off all your clothes" (and lose the game for flashing in public!), we also tried to solicit a hooker in the game.
Seeing Wolf3D at a friend's house on his brand new 386. He was the only one I knew with a computer since his dad worked at a printing company. Back then I didn't know about the Holocaust or Hitler since I was still pretty young, I just thought "holy shit 3D and blood!". A few years later, same friend showed me DOOM and my jaw hit the floor. Still one of my favorite FPS games.
Wandering into Costco and seeing one of the Kyrandia games running on their computers they had for sale. And just totally digging the MIDI music.
Middle school computer club, had some 386's with Rise of the Dragon installed. Thinking it was such an awesome game and then we discovered the "Pleasure Dome" are, where the teacher running the club got wind of what we were playing and shut it down. In hindsight, probably my first experience with cyberpunk... and it reminds me I need to pick up the SEGA-CD port one of these days.
This fucking guy:
It's weird, I never really got into the Lucasarts adventures (aside from Maniac Mansion on NES) back in the day, I was always about Sierra though.
Wow, you're the first person on here who even remembers that game, when I namedrop it! I made it fairly far then kept on hitting a bug with Win 3.11 rendering it unplayable. This was before having the internet or patch downloads so I just gave up and shelved it. SSI made a lot of old PC RPGs, especially the Dungeons and Dragons games... whatever happened to them?
Yeah I remember having the Apple IIe in my 4th grade classroom and thinking it was the greatest thing ever, playing games in school! We had Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego and Odell Lake too. I remember flipping the hell out when seeing the Otter in Odell Lake, and I'll never forget Oregon Trail - naming my characters after PSIII characters and then when dying engraving "Genesis Rules!" on my tombstone. (SEGA fanboy for life baby!)
Jawmuncher
Member
As a kid I have very fond memories of a few PC games, though I forgot some of the names.
Jurassic Park MSDOS was a fun game and personally better than the SNES version.
Some little critter game still have the tune stuck in my head. But no idea what it was called.
Some high school character movie maker. It was basic but for a kid a hell of a lot of fun since it was easy to use.
Clueless the oldest game probably for it on PC, not the new one. This along with some Barbie deep sea adventure game I remember playing with my sister and still having some fun with it.
Lastly though was Command and Conquer.
That shit was just awesome back in the day. To bad after Red Alert 2 the series hit a decline its yet to climb back up.
Jurassic Park MSDOS was a fun game and personally better than the SNES version.
Some little critter game still have the tune stuck in my head. But no idea what it was called.
Some high school character movie maker. It was basic but for a kid a hell of a lot of fun since it was easy to use.
Clueless the oldest game probably for it on PC, not the new one. This along with some Barbie deep sea adventure game I remember playing with my sister and still having some fun with it.
Lastly though was Command and Conquer.
That shit was just awesome back in the day. To bad after Red Alert 2 the series hit a decline its yet to climb back up.
Deified Data
Banned
Seeing as I wasn't a childhood PC gamer, my fondest PC memory was playing this circus game at Infant and Junior school in the early 90's. All I can remember was that you had to fire canons in one of the games, but at a certain trajectory to hit the goal.
No idea what it was called though.
No idea what it was called though.
Lactose_Intolerant
Member
Playing multiplayer star control II over at my friends house. We would also play single player. One would be in charge of the game and the other would be in charge of using the damn map that came with the game and finding the solar systems, lol.
Dungeon Master was my first pc RPG. Was so much fun choosing who to put in your party and crazy stuff by today's standards like eating and drinking.
Dungeon Master was my first pc RPG. Was so much fun choosing who to put in your party and crazy stuff by today's standards like eating and drinking.
someguyinahat
Member
I played lots of Sierra games (Space Quest, Police Quest, Hero's Quest, Crossfire) and Broderbund games (Carmen Sandiego series, Wizard of Wall Street) as well as the original Rogue. My fondest memory?
Tapper. A friend of mine had this too. I loved this game so much - played it on a C64 at first, then that friend told me it was on PC too, and saw it was easier because of smaller sprites. I got so good at it, that the friend who told me about it challenged me to it at his birthday party, and I made it to levels he hadn't even seen before. His friends cheering ME on. Probably the only time I felt like one of those guys at the arcades who play for hours on one quarter. After that day, I played it a bit more, made it to like level 47, realized it wasn't getting any tougher and left it at that. But still, good times man.
Tapper. A friend of mine had this too. I loved this game so much - played it on a C64 at first, then that friend told me it was on PC too, and saw it was easier because of smaller sprites. I got so good at it, that the friend who told me about it challenged me to it at his birthday party, and I made it to levels he hadn't even seen before. His friends cheering ME on. Probably the only time I felt like one of those guys at the arcades who play for hours on one quarter. After that day, I played it a bit more, made it to like level 47, realized it wasn't getting any tougher and left it at that. But still, good times man.
Castle of the Winds, fuck yeah.
oh i like you
Brought my Pentium 75mhz and 8MB RAm to its knees.
I had a great few years with my first computer, a Pentium 133mhz, playing shareware titles like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Sim City 2000.
Moving onto consoles shortly afterwards I regret missing out on the golden mid-to-late-90s era of PC RPGs and point-and-click adventure titles, but playing through them in the last decade has been amazing. Thank you GOG, thank you!
Moving onto consoles shortly afterwards I regret missing out on the golden mid-to-late-90s era of PC RPGs and point-and-click adventure titles, but playing through them in the last decade has been amazing. Thank you GOG, thank you!
Rex Nebular - one of the best adventure games ever created outside of the Lucasarts/Sierra greatness.
Ultima VII - still unsurpassed in the amount of freedom you had to shape the world as an open RPG.
Space Quest 1 (VGA) - the first game I bought for the first computer I officially owned.
Ultima VII - still unsurpassed in the amount of freedom you had to shape the world as an open RPG.
Space Quest 1 (VGA) - the first game I bought for the first computer I officially owned.
someguyinahat
Member
Castle of the Winds, fuck yeah.
Fun as hell. I seem to remember finishing it only to be told it was the demo/first episode (kinda like Wolfenstein) and I was actually interested in finding the others but never did.
Had this game but never knew its name, so thanks for that. Yeah, it was hard, mainly because it was mostly in French and it didn't explain what the powers did. "Alcool de Fortran? What the hell is that? Oh, okay the robot's going backwards now..."
I'm pretty sure that was 99% of the people who played CotW, yes. Haha.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
I do! I remember trying to download a 27 MB demo of Mortal Kombat. Took me days to get it to download without crashing
I played this on a Voodoo 3 for the first time and it literally was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Not even Crysis was as astonishing compared to the jump to Unreal.
The multiplayer in this game was amazing. You had one commander on both teams and the rest of the players acting as units, and the commander would delegate orders and provide new units and weapons for the players to use. Required a really high level of coordination.
It's very true that game design and storytelling have regressed pretty hugely since the 90s
Zyrusticae
Banned
Oh, gawd... I spent SO MUCH TIME on that game... so many memories!Castle of the Winds, fuck yeah.
That and Ski Free... Plus Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and all of that stuff.
Gawd, this thread, I've never been hit with nostalgia so hard before. Damn.
HOW DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS?!MicroMan! Fuck yeah.
I didn't even remember this game until I saw the image... and then everything came flooding back. Holy crap.
I remember trying to download the StarCraft demo over and over again, only to never have it finish on a dial-up connection.
That's when I learned about GetRight.
Despite my rampant drug use, I still have a great memory.
That's when I learned about GetRight.
Despite my rampant drug use, I still have a great memory.
derExperte
Member
I think I got it years later through one of those 'here's 15 games, good luck finding one that isn't total shit'-compilations and the morphing mechanic was pretty novel so I kept playing. Turning into a bee and buzzing through the beehive of an endboss was definitely something.
Alex Connolly
Member
Dare To Dream by Cliff Bleszinski. I tip my hat to you, sir. Very fond memories of a strange atmosphere that permeated that great little adventure game.
Cryo's Dune strategy-adventure RPG of sorts. Blew my young mind, and I count it as one of my most seminal gaming moments.
Pepper's Adventures in Time was a quaint game, quite fond of it.
Mean 18 Golf. If only for the groundhog on the menu screen!
Many more. This is a great thread that serves to warm the heart.
someguyinahat
Member
oh wait, since nobody's said it yet:
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
So many games, so many memories. Main ones would be
I've been playing Commander Keen since before I can remember. I actually recently found the original 5.25 inch floppy disk for the first episode at my parents house. I still replay and enjoy them thoroughly. It was just so amazing having a side-scroller on PC that ran so amazingly well, had awesome level, enemy and character design and was challenging in the later stages. All 6 (7?) episodes are classic side-scrollers.
This is one with a lot of fond memories attached to it, mostly of me and my sister laughing uncontrollably after a Holy Hand Grenade or Banana Bomb had just gone off. The physics in this game were amazing. Watching a land mine slowly trickle down a hill towards one of your worms was so nerve wracking, but amazing at the same time.
A classic and one of the few shooters that my sister played when we were younger. I can still remember the first time we came across mecha Hitler, with his double chainguns and then his other form with QUAD chainguns!!! Had an awesome time running along walls looking for hidden passages and stashes.
Most of our family friends had 64s, so everyone always had enough controllers for 4-player and it was absolutely brilliant madness, every time! Nailing someone with a green shell just metres before the line was always amazing and would often result in howls from the rest of us or even a wrestling match.
I've played and loved all of the "classic" NFS games, but Porsche was the one that me and one of my close friends became most addicted to. Our goal was to unlock every aspect of the game and we got damn near close. There was just so much to do with all of the classic Porsche models and long tracks and circuits, especially with some of the earlier, much slower models. I was pretty disappointed by the Underground series and most of the games that have followed. I would give anything for a High Stakes or Porsche style NFS again.
This one is probably up there as my GOAT. I don't even want to think about how many hours I've put in to UT over the years. The maps, the mods, the mutators, the TCs. So much content! And the vast majority was community driven. But even if you peeled all of that away, the base game was fucking amazing. Classic maps with amazing weapons that had secondary fire and a nice mix of hit scan and non hit scan. The player models might not have been the most varied bunch, but they looked good and had some funny voice acting.
I still love CTF-Face with Unreal4Ever mod and nuclear arrows being shot from the tops of the towers.
And Infiltration, one of the greatest tactical games of all time, that featured a lot of hardcore realism features long before any full release games had them.
Utterly brilliant.
Now this game was synonymous with addiction for me and a close friend back when it first came out. We would literally play all day. Wake up, hop on with some breakfast, get some lunch a few hours later, then power on in to the night and finally get off for some dinner. Looking back, I don't know how I did it, but it did result in some amazing parks and roller coasters.
I almost forgot this utter fucking classic. What a game. I don't know if there's much else to say, but this game was just amazingly fun, gory and down right hilarious. One of the best fps games ever.
There have been many other games, but these are the main ones that I think of when I look back on my earlier gaming years.
I've been playing Commander Keen since before I can remember. I actually recently found the original 5.25 inch floppy disk for the first episode at my parents house. I still replay and enjoy them thoroughly. It was just so amazing having a side-scroller on PC that ran so amazingly well, had awesome level, enemy and character design and was challenging in the later stages. All 6 (7?) episodes are classic side-scrollers.
This is one with a lot of fond memories attached to it, mostly of me and my sister laughing uncontrollably after a Holy Hand Grenade or Banana Bomb had just gone off. The physics in this game were amazing. Watching a land mine slowly trickle down a hill towards one of your worms was so nerve wracking, but amazing at the same time.
A classic and one of the few shooters that my sister played when we were younger. I can still remember the first time we came across mecha Hitler, with his double chainguns and then his other form with QUAD chainguns!!! Had an awesome time running along walls looking for hidden passages and stashes.
Most of our family friends had 64s, so everyone always had enough controllers for 4-player and it was absolutely brilliant madness, every time! Nailing someone with a green shell just metres before the line was always amazing and would often result in howls from the rest of us or even a wrestling match.
I've played and loved all of the "classic" NFS games, but Porsche was the one that me and one of my close friends became most addicted to. Our goal was to unlock every aspect of the game and we got damn near close. There was just so much to do with all of the classic Porsche models and long tracks and circuits, especially with some of the earlier, much slower models. I was pretty disappointed by the Underground series and most of the games that have followed. I would give anything for a High Stakes or Porsche style NFS again.
This one is probably up there as my GOAT. I don't even want to think about how many hours I've put in to UT over the years. The maps, the mods, the mutators, the TCs. So much content! And the vast majority was community driven. But even if you peeled all of that away, the base game was fucking amazing. Classic maps with amazing weapons that had secondary fire and a nice mix of hit scan and non hit scan. The player models might not have been the most varied bunch, but they looked good and had some funny voice acting.
I still love CTF-Face with Unreal4Ever mod and nuclear arrows being shot from the tops of the towers.
And Infiltration, one of the greatest tactical games of all time, that featured a lot of hardcore realism features long before any full release games had them.
Utterly brilliant.
Now this game was synonymous with addiction for me and a close friend back when it first came out. We would literally play all day. Wake up, hop on with some breakfast, get some lunch a few hours later, then power on in to the night and finally get off for some dinner. Looking back, I don't know how I did it, but it did result in some amazing parks and roller coasters.
I almost forgot this utter fucking classic. What a game. I don't know if there's much else to say, but this game was just amazingly fun, gory and down right hilarious. One of the best fps games ever.
There have been many other games, but these are the main ones that I think of when I look back on my earlier gaming years.
Ah, yes. Who could ever forget Mr. Bones' Wild Ride?
Now this game was synonymous with addiction for me and a close friend back when it first came out. We would literally play all day. Wake up, hop on with some breakfast, get some lunch a few hours later, then power on in to the night and finally get off for some dinner. Looking back, I don't know how I did it, but it did result in some amazing parks and roller coasters.
This thread reminds me so much of my childhood.
My old man would go to PC trade shows and come home with boxes of freeware/shareware games for me. Many of them can be found in this thread, but if I were to sum it up in one picture:
oh god, the memories... i feel like i can smell the faux-wood paneling of my old house...
My old man would go to PC trade shows and come home with boxes of freeware/shareware games for me. Many of them can be found in this thread, but if I were to sum it up in one picture:
MicroMan! Fuck yeah.
oh god, the memories... i feel like i can smell the faux-wood paneling of my old house...
Is the broken link supposed to be a commentary on your childhood?This thread reminds me so much of my childhood.
My old man would go to PC trade shows and come home with boxes of freeware/shareware games for me. Many of them can be found in this thread, but if I were to sum it up in one picture:
Nightstick11
Banned
Damn kids making me feel old... What you know about this?
Wow. Brings back memories
roller coaster tycoon 2, still fun though the people are still jerks. Why do they keep whining when I drop them in pits which I then cover with a ride? It makes my rating plummet the jerks, who are they complaining too anyway? They are by themsleves in a pit.
Man played this game so much when I was younger. So when is three coming anyway?
Man played this game so much when I was younger. So when is three coming anyway?
Hope someone can tell me the name of this game.
It was a colorful, cartoony, humorous 2D World War 1 dogfighting game. It was like Red Baron's Flying Circus or something like that. Or a made up name that was supposed to be imitating the Red Baron. Something along those lines. Like some super-German stereotype kind of name.
It was a colorful, cartoony, humorous 2D World War 1 dogfighting game. It was like Red Baron's Flying Circus or something like that. Or a made up name that was supposed to be imitating the Red Baron. Something along those lines. Like some super-German stereotype kind of name.
haha, no my childhood was lovely. fixed, and thanks for the memories.
KillerMan91
Member
Playing Heroes of Might and Magic II without understanding a word of english (not my motherlanguage). Good times.