I still play Zangband which I’ve been doing on and off for best part of 20 years. Never got close to winning. So someone download it, win, and then tell me what to do.
This.
And this.
And THIIIIIIIS
And this.
And this.
Right on. Vectrex rocked.
My gaming period was 1982-1986, so my favorites will always be Adventure (the text version – twisty little passages…), Aztec (on an IBM PC or an Apple III), and (at the end of that period, on a friend’s Atari-like console), Archon.
Also, I played the very first Flight Simulator, when the landscape was a simple ten-by-ten white grid on a black background (plus a single simple “mountain”), and the enemy planes (if you chose that option) were a few white pixels. Seemed pretty primitive even then – the jump to the next version (Meigs Field), I think around 1987, was huge.
I’m a little off on some of my dates: SubLogic’s Flight Simulator – the primitive one – was released in 1979. Microsoft bought the rights, then released the vastly improved Meigs Field version in 1982 (while SubLogic developed it further as well, for different hardware).
Oops… Little Nemo was referring to the 1990 Red Baron, while I was alluding to the 1980 vector graphics arcade game of the same name.
If console games count then for me it’s a no-brainer. The one, the only, Herzog Zwei. I played this with (against) a buddy for countless hours in the early 90s, before the concept of RTS games even existed. So good.
A fellow Zangband fan! I never got close to beating it, either.
In addition to Civ2, MOO and Sim City, I spent hours upon hours playing Autoduel and Pirates, and never got bored of either one.
Gee, when you were talking about old computer games, I thought you were referring to OLD computer games.
Anyway, here’s an “oldie” - my version of “Bagels” in which you have to guess a randomly chosen number and you are told how many digits you guessed correctly and how many are in the correct position.
Digitally Correct
Yes, it is my website and you really don’t have to go there. (Nobody else goes there either -LOL)
Older? OK, the first computer game I recall playing (not at school on an Apple II) was . . . Empire? You started with a single unit (an army) and one city, and had to defeat the computer which started with the same somewhere else. You could set cities to build different types of military units and so could the computer. The graphics were all single characters, your units were capital letters and the computers were lower-case.
I played it on my dad’s work laptop, which in the late 80s had a green monitor.
Probably Grim Fandango. But I also loved Star Trek: Borg–enough that I started a project to make a playable YouTube version–until I heard they were phasing out annotations.
The city building games were all my least favorite. I hated when I was young enough to be tricked by the fancy graphics on the box to think I was getting a game. I’ve never liked strategy games. I don’t like having no direction.
Solitaire Deluxe. We bought it at best buy in the mid 90’s. It has several variations of the game.
So far, it’s run on Win 98, XP, and Win 7 computers.
https://goo.gl/images/BsA66z
We had a lot of fun with “Seventh Guest” and a few others of that period.
I got pretty good at resolving multimedia issues on Windows 3.1…
I somehow missed this the first time through? Huh.
Anyways, if you’re setting pre-2000 as the limit, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 was released in 1999 and is probably my favorite PC game of all time, regardless of era. Still go back to it every year or two, for sure - GoG has been great to make that as seamless as possible.
(The first Everquest was released, like, a month later. Alpha Centauri was about two weeks before. Early 1999 was strooooong for PC games in genres I like.)
Various.
Jones in the Fast Lane
SimCity Enhanced (SimCity with advisor FMVs. This predated SimCity 4 by more than a decade.)
Hoyle Poker (1997)
Curse of Monkey Island
Shadow Man
Final Fantasy VII and VIII (even though 8 is a few days within 2000)
DOOM, DOOM II & Final DOOM (which is nicer with the Brutal DOOM modification).
Postal (1997)
Duke Nukem 3D
Monopoly, Sorry, Scrabble and The Game Of Life before 2000 (Monopoly’s WestWood Studios release was pretty good).
MDK & MDK2 was pretty good.
NBA Jam Tournament Edition on the DOS was pretty cool- it had good quality audio, right down to the announcer (was Midway going to release this for DCS in development plans? The audio quality seems ripped, but ripped off a higher quality release…)
Clue (1996) was pretty interesting for an FMV game, despite it not having a scenario making usage of 324 combinations- although I could understand the size of the game if that happened).
There’s probably more I can’t think off the top of my head. For your information, I found these classic games via a source I know on the internet.
Yep. I still occasionally play the original Colossal Cave Adventurewhen I’m feeling nostalgic.
Plugh.
Yeah, I was playing the hell out of Alpha Centauri while most of my friends were starting to play EQ. It took me a month or so after release to get my mind around the subscription fee, and after EQ I hit up HOMM 3. All are among my favorite games of all time.
You can play Seventh Guest and Eleventh Hour on Windows 10. I have a copy of each on Steam.
They work fine.
Maybe someone already said this, but Chip’s Challenge is available via Steam. 
checks
Not only Chip’s Challenge, but the long-awaited sequel! Yay!
checks again
Windows-only for both. Boo!
Three distinct periods of computer gaming in my life (prior to 2000):
-
Pre-Macintosh: TRACON
A nifty game that resulted from simulation software developed by a company for training air-traffic controllers. I spent WAY too much time on the computers at my office playing this game (at the time, I had no computer in the house). When planes crashed, I always felt really awful and depressed…
-
Macintosh (from 1990 to 1998): Probably SimCity. SimAnything, really (SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, SimFarm, etc.) I loved any game that involved trying to handle real-world pressures of budgeting, building, etc. (A-Train was one of the best!). But SimCity captured most of my hours.
-
IBM PC / Microsoft DOS/Windows (fall 1998 to end of 1999): Alpha Centauri, hands down. Civ 2 was wonderful, but Civ 2.5 was out of this world (
). I STILL crank that sucker up and play it from time to time, and get frustrated by the annoying Sister Miriam Godwinson, the pesky Col. Corazon Santiago, and the economically sanctimonious CEO Nwabudike Morgan. Me? I’m almost always the tree-hugging Lady Dierdre Skye. And I can quote most of the wonder, building, and tech quotations by heart (which led me to learn about Li Bo, Søren Kierkegaard, and Jim Jones).
There were other games at the time I played a lot (Everquest, Age of Empires (I and II), Homeworld, Seven Kingdoms), but SMAC and SMAX were by far and away my favs at the time. It wasn’t until 2001 that a little noticed (at the time) game series began stealing my heart: Europa Universalis.