No we had it at home, not at school. And we are a family of obsessive readers, so we would have read the manual if we’d had it. I have this vague feeling we received it as part of some sort of bundle.
Meh I was a geek in suburban Wollongong Australia (eg butt fuck nowhere) who got Loderunner when I was 15 and I knew there was a level editor.
i spent many hours on CIV II. The falcon series was great, Falcon 3 with the padlock view was a fave.
Lemmings for shear silliness along with Worms 2. Great voice packs and sounds that could be applied to many computer actions ( oh noooo boom , and the holy hand grenade haleluja)
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Soo many have been mentioned: Civ, Sim City, Baldur’s Gate (I only had II, so I guess it doesn’t count?), X-Wing, Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, Tank Wars . . .
We had a game I loved where you built a series of castles during the Edwardian Conquest of Wales. I think it was simply called Castles.
And there was also The Ancient Art of War at Sea. If the Duke of Medina Sidonia or Blackbeard grappled your ship it was gone!
This really is an amazing game. I don’t even typically like this genre of games and am amazed by the writing and exploratory aspects. The characterization of various alien races (the artwork, the voice acting if you’re playing that version, down to the fonts) and their personalities is just so well written. The problem is, I never quite got around to finishing it. I only started playing it about three years ago as the Ur-Quan Masters, but the game requires some concentration and note taking. I walked away from it for a few weeks, lost my notes, and completely forgot where I was in the game and what to do next. Same thing happened to me last year, but I got a little farther in the game. One of these days, I swear I’ll finish it!
Ultima IV
The Lucasfilm/Lucas Arts games: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders; Maniac Mansion; Monkey Island series, etc.
Archon
Of these games, though, Archon is the only one I’ll really replay with any regularity, as the other games are games that once you win, you’ve kind of solved it and there’s not that much interest in replaying it (except maybe Maniac Mansion, where there’s several different endings.) But I have replayed them at least once in the last ten years in a bit of nostalgia and because enough time had passed that I forgot many of the puzzles and had to resolve them.
Heh, speaking of castles, I remember my dad once bought me a game (Lords of the Realm) but it wouldn’t run on our greenscreen 16XT. Or my friend’s… I don’t remember what piece of shit they had. For literal years I read that manual, again and again, salivating at the thought someday I’d play it. It seemed so cool - you’d build castles and armies and besiege other guys’ castles and tell peasants what to do…
It wasn’t that great. 
Or maybe it’s just that the castles I wanted to build all took 999 years to complete :D. Would have been real bitches to besiege, though !
Crap, I forgot all about that one! Railroad Tycoon 1 and 2 are proof (independent of Civ) that Sid Meier is a genius.
Here’s a “Name That Game” from back in the 90s.
It was a circus-themed game, but it was seriously effed up. The clowns were evil-looking and everything was pretty “American Horror Story” like.
I remember that in order to play it you had to put in a certain word from the manual, and we lost the manual so we could never play.
Once time we magically guessed the right word and played it and we were the high-dive guy trying to jump into a little cup.
Does this ring any bells?
Oh how could I forget Hugo’s House of Horrors?! It was the first computer game I ever completed!
I remember I had gotten to the very end, but didn’t know the answer to all the questions (I was like 9 or something). My sitter knew some, but we ended up calling the library to ask who wrote Dracula. Ah, the days before the World Wide Web . . .
C64:
Pirates
The Bard’s Tale
Red Storm Rising
MULE
PC:
Civ II
Civ CtP
Railroad Tycoon
The Gold Box AD&D games
Star Control 2 is my #1 favorite old game. If you decide you want to explore all of it, here is a comprehensive walkthrough I replay every now and again. (I wrote it.)
More of my favorites include:
Age of Empires
Starcraft
EDIT: And I have all three installed on my Windows 10 machine, and still play all three. Occasionally.
Gosh, I really liked Sim City, Warcraft, and Myst.
Never got into the more updated versions of Sim City (got distracted by those other two games). Played Myst and it’s relatives through the early 00’s. Still playing Warcraft, but it’s the MMORPG version, not the 1994 version.
Fiendish Freddy, perhaps? If not, here’s a list of circus-themed games.
I hate clown games. :mad:
I could never afford mmorpg…
The whole Might And Magic series(not “Heroes Of”), from #1(“Secret Of The Inner Sanctum”-1986) through #9(2002) I loved all 10 of those games.
By Joe I do believe this is it.
Man if I could go back in time and look at that list of games I had…
Yes, Doom for me. It still has a thriving community modding for it and the game is still incredibly immersive and enjoyable.
Ah, M.U.L.E. I loved that game; the only problem was with trying to gather four players at once.
'Ware the wampus!
Starsiege Tribes…OMG this game.
Chaos Overlords, I do actually still play this one some times, (thanks GOG) its basically a board game thats to complex for playing on a board so its a computer board game that was multiplayer over the net on win95 iirc.
I sorta still play Tribes, just a different version of it.
and Everquest, only I played on Sullon Zek so I played a pretty different game than the rest of you.
Myst: Riven and Tomb Raider 2. I haven’t played Riven since about 1999, but TR2 I play every year, if I can. My Steam copy says I’ve played 230hrs, which must be at least 8 times through. That doesn’t include the disc version I played originally, which must have been three or four times.