Should add I had a visceral reaction watching the Quazatron mini game on that video. I played a lot of that game as a kid and my subconscious remembers 
My favorite game from 80s Commodore gaming was Mail Order Monsters:
You designed a monster with various abilities and pit it against other monsters in gladatorial combat. Hugely fun for my brother and I.
I’ve never played it. But I’ve heard great things.
I do play The Movie Monster Game. Pick a monster. Pick a scenario. Pick a city. Smash buildings and eat cars. Words fail to describe my love for this game.
My school had just gotten its first computer lab with Apple II computers. My friends and I would go in after school (or on free periods) and play Castle Wolfenstein.
FWIW…the much more recent reboot (a few years ago now) is actually pretty great too (completely different as an FPS and not a platformer).
Dark Castle:
I played that game on Apple II circa sixth grade. Never made it very far. My school library had a copy of it.
I just remembered BBS games that I used to love back in the 90s. Anybody else play Trade Wars? I remember manually plotting sectors on graph paper to create a map, which was surprisingly difficult.
I used to play a few of those old school BBS games. TW 2000 was one of the big ones and there was another called Red Dragon Inn I liked. There are a few whose names I simply can’t remember though. I enjoyed playing one where you were a gladiator in a fantasy world having to challenge others. And of course the graphics on all these games were top notch on my dial up 9600 baud modem. ZPack for life!
Thanks for reminding me; that definitely counts as part of the massively multiplayer space game genre I mentioned. With Elite: Dangerous still around, we can’t say the concept is completely forgotten.
BTW remember when George Lucas had an independent video game company? There were Rescue on Fractalus, Ballblazer, Maniac Mansion, many many others. That subsidiary has long since been shut down/the IP sold, I believe.
Oh, yeah. Day of Tentacle, Curse of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Curse of Atlantis, and of course a myraid of Star Wars games.
They made some really great games in their day.
I miss those days.
It’s Secret of Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Also, LucasArts is very well remembered, so probably doesn’t count. Though nobody talks about Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders very much.
Funny, I was going to come into this thread after finishing up some work to mention Mail Order Monsters vis a vis Racing Destruction set, both freaking great games for their time with their customizability. Loved them both, back in the day. Mail Order Monsters fight scenes also remind me of Archon, another great game, though I don’t know if that’s really something most people don’t remember or not. I mean, sure, MOST people literally don’t remember it, but it’s iconic for its time.
My friend and I played Archon a LOT. Good times.
It may have seemed vintage to her. Those arcades, with period machines, sure are fun, aren’t they? My first encounter with them was this one, when I lived in the area in 2011-12.
There’s one in my city but I’ve never been there, although it’s in the bar district which has terrible parking.
In the late 1970s, there was a pinball/foosball/air hockey place that had a great game called “Exidy” that always had a line to play it. It was one of those solo games where you climbed in and sat down and played it with buttons on a steering wheel, and evaporated space ships that came at you in 3-D. Never seen it since (and TBH I probably wouldn’t fit into that machine now!).
It was made to resemble an old school game and when I saw it I did a double take. It took me a few seconds to remember it wasn’t a game in the 80s, so I don’t blame someone in their mid-twenties for thinking it was a vintage game.
Some I have fond memories of:
Sundog: Frozen Legacy. A game with a bit of everything; space combat, ground combat, black market deals, cargo trading, repairable/upgradable ship, etc. Hampered by being made with 1984-era technology, it was still good and ahead of its time in a lot of ways.
Killing Time: A very atmospheric FPS set in a haunted 1920s estate.
PO’d: Which got mixed reception, but I liked it. A wide variety of monsters and weapons, interesting environments, and various ideas I didn’t see elsewhere for some time.
Midwinter: A strategy/first person game set in a frozen future world where you fight a guerrilla war against invaders.
Mutant League Hockey? I played it a bunch when I was assistant manager of a video store in the 90s, and video game rentals were complimentary. I think a friend and I were the only ones to ever check it out.
From the high school Apple IIe computer lab, all green on black:
- The Bilestoad. Controls like QWOP, framerates around 1.5 if both players are on the screen at the same time. But axes, shields, limb loss, and a 1-note-per-frame soundtrack! Für Elise! In the Hall of the Mountain King! “It’s just a flesh wound!” references if I’d seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail before college!
- I don’t remember the name, but you controlled an anti-aircraft gun on a platform in the bottom middle of the screen. Bad guys (helicopters? planes?) would fly across the top and drop paratroopers. When hit, the aircraft debris would take out other aircraft and paratroopers. It was possible for your shots and the debris to hit a paratrooper’s chute only, causing them to fall to their death (and to the death of any paratroopers immediately below them). When 4 paratroopers landed on one side of your gun, three of them would make a pyramid next to your gun platform and the fourth would jauntily hop on their heads, land on your platform, and blow you up, ending the game.
- Archon I, but not II
- One On One: Dr. J. vs. Larry Bird, but that’s hardly forgotten
- Jeopardy!, also unforgotten