I was chatting with my gf last night and we got to thinking about ancient computer games. I was immediately assaulted by memories of games that owned me many years ago. What were your favorite computer games back in the 80s? Don’t start telling me how hard core you are that you played Doom, or even Wolfenstein 3D. I want to hear about the games you loved before computers came with hard drives.
For starters, I’ll give you my favorite. Hands down. If I died only having played this one game, I would have died a very happy man.
Broderbund’s Alice in Wonderland. Something of a combination arcade adventure/rpg, you navigate Alice through Wonderland, a truly enormous and interactive gaming environment. The graphics were excellent as far as the Commodore 64 went, as was the gameplay. But the game itself was to die for. As Alice, you traipsed all over Wonderland, completing various quests and picking up items in whatever order you wanted to. Only with the right combination of items and hints from other characters in the game could you complete it. I remember you needed the magic parasol to fly, you needed to ingest the potions of growth and shrinking in the proper order to do something or other, and you needed to sing songs with the Dormouse to get another vital hint.
About ten or twelve years ago, this game veritably kept be up at night. I beat it over and over and over again, doing something different every time, or discovering another secret area. I still remember the thrill when I happened to be flying away in a totally random direction and discovered the White Knight and the Bread-and-Butterflies carousing in the middle of the air, far offscreen. The game was pure and utter genius.
The only problem was the unbelievable load time. Those with Commodores will remember that you could launch a game, go off and paint your house, and return just in time for the game to finish loading into memory. Well, with Alice in Wonderland, you had time to paint every house on your block. But the game was worth it all the same.
If anyone knows where I can get this gem in PC emulation, he/she would have my undying gratitude.
Let’s see. My dad and I were addicted to Ultima, and that counts because I rememeber having to switch the furshlugginger disks every time we entered a new area.
I was all about some Choplifter…think Apple IIe, around 1982. And when we got a joystick…whoo-ee! Dad also bought an RF modulator so we could hook up the computer to the TV and actually play games in…COLOR!! I mean, DAMN! Talk about state-of-the-art!
I also remember taking about a week to really get the concept of a hard drive through my head. You mean we copy the floppies to it and then we don’t NEED them? How the hell are we supposed to play games without the disks?
I played ultima II, choplifter, swashbuckler (fencing), Conan The Barbarian, Microfocus Flight Simulator (no version number- it was the first one.), Microsoft Flight Simulator v.2.0, Wizardry, Castle Wolfenstein, and Zork II were all played on my Franklin Ace (an apple II clone) with 64Kb of ram and DUAL floppies and a 8 pin dot matrix printer. I also got a COLOR monitor.
I still play this on my Big Mac (a circa 1985? Apple Macintosh with no hard drive, a single 800k floppy drive and a whopping 512k of RAM):
Scarab of Ra
I was also addicted to Daleks, Iago and Gun Shy.
I can still play some of these games on my IIsi,
but other favorites ike MacYahtzee crash the poor little
thing. One reason I have yet to buy a modern Mac is that I fear it can’t run Scarab of Ra.
When I was a wee little sprout, I was all about Zork on my cousin’s Apple II+.
On my first computer(C64), I was all about Mail Order Monsters(my pick for best of all time), and Ultima III and IV. Bard’s Tale was a close second in the fantasy game realm.
I used to like Beachhead & Beachhead II, and also Space Taxi.
Y’know, games just aren’t that fun anymore(with the possible exception of some Blizzard games).
I rememeber playing Loderunner for hours on my old Apple IIe, along with Bard’s Tale I and II. I had Pool of Radiance for that machine too. I especially enjoyed Loderunner. It even came with a level editor, so you could make your own.
I had a Vic 20, then upgraded to a Franklin Ace, same as Wonko. Let’s see…
Lode Runner, Choplifter (boy, I almost forgot about that one), and some game where you played an Indiana Jones type character running through underground dungeons that I forget the name of.
The Wizardry series was a complete addiction. Don’t even mention Bard’s Tale. Color?!? Graphics other than line drawings?!? Heaven on earth!
Surprisingly, I never really got into Ultima (at least not until Ultima Online).
Zork was great, as was the Space Quest series. Boy, I remember thinking that games couldn’t get better than Space Quest. The graphics! The sound!
And let’s not even mention the first Civilization. I guess I had a PC by then… that must have come out in what? 1989? 1990? Has it really been that long? Me and my roommate in college played Civ I basically all the time.
(<sigh> I love games… I just ordered Half Life, 2 copies, so SO and I can play together…)
Anybody remember M.U.L.E. for the C-64? That was the first game I fell in love with. Now that I think about it may have been the first graphical resource gathering and management game. I can barely remeber a thing about it, but I played the thing for hours on end.
I have a collection of Infocom games at home. I played them on a Tandy 1000 with 128K of ram! I also really liked Kings Quest. I had the original before the made some changes to it. But the BEST had to be Montazuma’s Revenge! great game, I played that all the time. I wish I could get that game to work on the newer computers.
Shhez… was I the only one playing Jumpman? That plus Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were my favorites. I’d also go over to my friend with the Apple IIe to play Serpentine.
Aw geez- games I spent weeks huddled in front of my Commodore 64 with? Too many to mention.
But a few favs…
Murder On The Zinderneuf (generates a random murder mystery each time you play. Kicked ass, even if I never could get a top rating in it.)
Adventure Construction Set (anyone remember this? Build your own dungeon-crawl, play one of the two pre-created adventures, or just tell your computer to create a random game for you, wait three hours, and then oodles of fun!)
Balance of Power (I had to mooch off of a friend with a Mac to play this geopolitic simulation; I’d crawl through a desert to have this one again.)
Heart of Darkness (Explore Africa! Flee natives! Find secret Elephant Burial Grounds! From the people who brought you Seven Cities of Gold, also one of my favs.)
Starflight. I played it on an old Tandy 1000EX with 16 colors!!! You had to explore the galaxy and find better technology so you could save your culture from the ever expanding radiation from the galactic center (or some such – it’s been a while).
Another fave was Detroit. You were the head of an automobile factory and had to design and market your cars all over the world. Some concepts were difficult to figure (advertising, for one) but it was a lot of fun anyway. I no longer have a copy of that and am still hoping that it becomes available again (or an updated version by anyone).
Oh yeah, I remember - Robot Odyssey. You wired up these robots to go and fetch tokens for you so you could ride the subways. I think it was pre-hard drive, although I’m not certain.
I also was a Scarab of Ra addict for a long time. I’m pretty sure it still ran under System 7 - I haven’t tried it with 8.
I remember fondly a text game called Cranston Manor. I played it on our neighbors homemade Osborne or maybe his Apple (the original one) If anyone could locate a copy, I’d be eternally grateful
I used to play Adventure Construction Set as well. That was one great, great game.
Also, I really enjoyed this adventure game whose title eludes me. The point of the game was to run around the Lower Planes evading undead and evil creatures by dropping crosses everywhere you went. Anyone remember what that one was called?
Or how about that great gladiator game, where you could fight with a great variety of weapons against silly monsters?