Archon was a big C64 favorite of mine, as was the Pinball Construction Set. Put a lot of hours into fine tuning my pinball machines.
They also shared the same sprite for the Archon evil pawn caveman guy and the Mail Order Monsters random map encounter guy.
I’ll go with Project Firestart, a Commodore 64 game that was one of the earliest survival horror games. You played as a researcher sent to a distressed space ship to find out what’s going on. From one of the very first rooms where you find a dead scientist who wrote “DANGER” in blood from his arm stump it certainly made an impression in the 80s. After that, it was a lot of getting stalked by the space monsters, using a laser pistol with very limited ammo, trying to solve the mysteries, rescue the woman researcher and looming cut scenes showing the hatching of a super-monster alien. You had multiple possible endings based on your actions and it was quite the complete modern package for a game from its era.
It’s had a few attempts at a remake but nothing “real” (more fan work) and I never see it referenced these days though I’m sure, of course, some people remember it.
Also, the very first application I ever used on a computer back when I was 6-years-old (not really a game, but…):
Before there was Scorched Earth, there was Tank Wars. Scorched Earth took Tank Wars to 11.
Before Tank Wars, there was Artillery Simulator. A simple physics-simulated game with only two tanks and only a single shot bullet each turn. You adjusted the angel and the “bags” [of gunpowder] (i.e. power of the shot) relative to the wind and shot at each other. Tank Wars expanded upon that by allowing more players (up to 10) and adding more weapons.
OK, some do, even my daughter, at the tender age of 17 or 18, picked “Wreck It Ralph” for the AKC registered name of one of our German Shorthaired Pointers. That was about 10 years ago.
A far cry from most of the games mentioned in this thread, I had a game as a youngster on an Apple II+ that (can’t remember the name) had the player doing different surgical procedures, starting small (an appendectomy, IIRC) and getting progressively more difficult. (Let’s see - first computer in '78, so would have been '80 or '81 probably)
And I still miss Carmageddon on the PCs.
Life or death it had a sequel
Believe that was it, was later than I remembered it. Getting old is not for sissies.
The very first computer I ever bought (from Sears, from like $3,000 (128kRAM, 30Mb drive, if I recall)), I bought so I could play Stunt Island. Of course, I had to buy a book and learn how to allocate virtual memory first but I digress. It was this flight simulator / film simulator thingie. There were missions you could fly, but the fun of it was setting up your own stunts and making your own mini-fims. It was all really rudimentary graphics and staticky audio, but otherwise it was pretty robust, with eight different cameras you could film with and edit together. I have a copy, downloaded from freeware, but it doesn’t really translate to 20 year later.
The other one I loved - another movie making game - was The Movies, where you ran a movie studio, built sets, hired actors and directors and cameramen, etc. You’d “write” scripts by cobbling blocks of set videos together. The set videos could be located in any set, and the actors re-skinned, so you could really get creative. Again, there were missions, but the fun of it was just making movies.
I’ve got freeware copy of this one too, but it doesn’t run very well - it tends to crash unless you run it on low graphics, which is stupid for a 15 year old game.
Another 80s computer game I loved: Adventure Construction Set:
You could make DnD-like adventures, though they could be any setting you could imagine – i.e. sci-fi, fantasy, modern, historical, etc. It was a lot of work to make a good one, though.
Imperium Galactium, Temple of Apshai, Pharaoh’s Curse, Crypts of Terror, Tapper, Blue Max, Star Raiders, Preppie!, Behind Jaggi Lines, Alternate Reality, Shamus, Infocoms, Eastern Front, Seven Cities of Gold, Kingdom, Miner 2049er, Soccer (Thorn Emi), Gunfight, QBert, Encounter…
Ooh, that was a tough game on the Commodore 64. Very unforgiving and a lot of fun. It also didn’t allow for pausing or re-starts. So it took a lot of focus to reach and complete the higher levels.
ACS was awesome. You could even have it auto-generate adventures that weren’t especially dynamic or as creative as a person could do but would still be playable and fun. The one knock against it were the glacial loading times across multiple disks that took foooooreveeeeer, even by Commodore 64 standards.
ACS was fun but I never made anything half decent. Racing and Pinball were better.
Never messed with Pinball but Racing was fun. Though it usually degenerated into me making giant ramps and setting the gravity to Io within a half hour or so.
BTW, welcome back! Hadn’t seen you around these parts for a while.
the first game I played on an actual computer(as opposed to a video game console) was a text adventure game where I ended up in a “maze of twisty passages, all like”. (Obviously one of the versions of the 1976 game Colossal Cave Adventure.)
I haven’t heard anyone talk about text games in decades --I don’t know if anyone is still making them.
They make so many of them, in all genres, you would literally not know where to start. I guess most people don’t remember 
I think Counterfeit Monkey came up when someone was looking for a word puzzle game. Anchorhead was an atmospheric horror game. Spider and Web won some prize way back when.
….Agent USA, Dropzone, Karateka, Spy vs. Spy, BC Quest For Tires, Crystal Castles, Fort Apocalypse, Gauntlet, Hardball, Montezuma’s Revenge, Impossible Mission, One on One, Realm of Impossibility, Up n Down, Gateway to Apshai, Summer Games, California Games…
Oh yeah, although I only knew it as “Adventure” at the time and only had the chance to play it once. I think I still have a roll of computer paper somewhere recording the session.
Which reminds me of another old game I liked (although the only similarity is the name); Adventure for the Atari 2600. I played a lot of that.
As for text-based games there seems to have been a minor resurgence. Check out the “Choice of” games on Steam; I like Choice of Robots quite a bit.
…Autoduel, Alley Cat, Stealth, Pitfall, International Karate, Jumbo Jet Pilot, Submarine Commander, Joust, Great American Cross Country Road Race, Zombies!, Voodoo Castle, Infidel, Jumpman, Rainbow Walker…