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favorite early computer games

I guess the first computer "game" I got to play was our F-111 Flight Simulator in the Air Force:



$35 million worth of video game with motion base, I had such a great job as a sim tech!

But for someone who worked with a variety of microprocessor-based systems in industry, I was a late bloomer on PCs, kind of like the way the barber's kids all need a haircut.

(And PCs were so clunky in those days, I wasn't so keen on "story-driven, text" type games, but I did play several arcade games like Galaxian and a couple years later Defender... big Defender fan!)

The first PC game I played was "Zeus" I believe, set in ancient Greece of course, it was kind of fun except they bombard you with "messages" throughout the game, "pester" you really to build things yo0u may or may not want to build.

Then, another annoying thing was the frequency at which your buildings fall down, about 5 minutes playing time after you put them up... where's the "fun" in that?

My main games are still Diablo 2 and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, although some day I want to get Planet Coaster.

I'm still having fun with RCT-3 though, here is my latest build, a modest office building for my Manhattan park.



Thx :)
 
rjay said:
Duke Nukem anyone?
Click to expand...

"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Dungeons of Doom TI99

Carmageddon

Heretic whenever I played with my friend, and I got turned into a chicken, my wife would come running.

Mechwarrior 2 I bought the very first gaming card, and that came with it. "It's 5am AM, you're cold and you've got a thermonuclear reactor strapped to your back, now don't you wish you did your homework."

Descent. Somebody is bringing that back with updated graphics. The combination of 3 degrees of freedom with the crude graphics of that era could get quite disorienting.

Red Neck Rampage RC cola and moon pies instead of health and energy boxes.
 
My earliest computer game was Command and Conquer back in the mid-90s. It is pretty dated now, but I bought them all a few years ago for nostalgia purposes. Got me hooked on the RTS genre. Myst was another early game for me, but some of the puzzles were a little too difficult for my 3rd grader mind.
 
Gaius46 said:
My pleasure. My first job out of college was at DEC. I was hired in large part because I had experience on the 20s. Spent 12 great years there playing with VAXen and PDPs before finally leaving ahead of a massive round of layoffs after the HP takeover.

It was an great place to work and we engineered outstanding hardware and software. Sad what happened to her.
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We did jobs for HP too back in the day, big printer cartridge job for their Boise Peripherals plant.

That was back when HP meant something, but nowadays, if their PCs are any indicator they are just building junk!

(Next time I go back to Dell! :D)

Thx :)
 
Gaius46 said:
My pleasure. My first job out of college was at DEC. I was hired in large part because I had experience on the 20s. Spent 12 great years there playing with VAXen and PDPs before finally leaving ahead of a massive round of layoffs after the HP takeover.

It was an great place to work and we engineered outstanding hardware and software. Sad what happened to her.
Click to expand...

Check out this old advertisement...

image url upload

"$8,500... Complete!" :cool:

(probably built of nothing but quad NAND gates, lol!)

We did the IBM 360 at that time, I believe the job we did for DEC was for the "Data Cartridge" system, they sent us a cartridge.



In fact, I believe I cut the first CNC parts for the proto-type we sent to them.

It's scary when I realize that the world's computer infrastructure at that time went through our company, if we got it wrong, the world financial system etc, etc, etc, would collapse, lol.

Thx :)
 
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Redress said:
Random note: If you are interested, the people who made that game made a later game called Tyranny, which is free to play this weekend on Steam. I have not tried it, but supposedly the same kind of gameplay(I have played Pillars of Eternity, which is even more recent RPG from them, and while it does have the old Baldur's Gate feel to it, I did not get into it much).

Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/362960/Tyranny/

ALso note that Cities: Skyline is free to play this weekend, and supposedly it is Sim City with better graphics and UI: https://store.steampowered.com/app/255710/Cities_Skylines/
Click to expand...

Cool, thanks. Looked like those are up my ally, well-reviewed, and on sale so I went ahead and got them. I've been working my way through a number of Steam games lately anyway.



Just finished a first pass through Lords of Xulima, a turn-based RPG. Enjoyable despite a number of flaws. I'd tentatively recommend it if one enjoyed the old Wizardry games. It's not quite as complex, though and by the end it feels a bit repetitive, but still...

Just started Divinity:Original Sin Enhanced, which promises to be very good and complex. And it's also the first birds-eye view RPG I've played where you have full 360 degree camera movement, which you actually have to use regularly. I haven't played much but anyone who enjoys and RPG should take a peak. Seems to go on/off sale with some frequency.

Intend on then doing Pillars of Eternity (the first one; the second one seems to have worse reviews generally).
 
Thx said:
Check out this old advertisement...

image url upload

"$8,500... Complete!" :cool:
Click to expand...

I"ll bet that ad came out of Byte magazine. Ahh, yes, the good old days when computers didn't come with an OS, or even a HD.

Did you ever read Jerry Pournelle's column in Byte?
 
Helix said:
i was thinking this morning about early computer games that i used to dig when i was a kid.

model : TRS 80
era : 1983ish
Oregon Trail
B52 Bomber*

*i can't find evidence that this game exists, so it might have been locally programmed. basically, you flew a monochrome pixellated plane over a monochrome pixellated city dropping pixels until the pixel buildings were gone or you ran out of fuel.

model : Tandy 1000
era : 1990 - 1993
Space Quest series
King's Quest series

model : CompuAdd 386
era : 1990 - 1994
Populous
Ween : The Prophecy (i think that i played this one on the 386, but probably also on my first Pentium.)
Wolfenstein 3D

the list is fairly long, but those are some of the the standouts. what are your favorites?
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I had the TRS80 also cassette loaded...164k total mem

my favorite game was written in basic

Santa Paravia...i believe was its name

land was in hectares....strive to be king....pretty boring game, until we learned to write in basic...and changed it to Santa Perverted

had random events like dragon attacks that would waste half your farmland....locust attacks....we really screwed with the intent of the game

we played that thing for well over a year, and kept changing it....i think we spent more time writing code than playing the game

it was our intro into computer games, and the world of technology....

havent left it since....that was 1981 or so....maybe 1980
 
gdgyva said:
I had the TRS80 also cassette loaded...164k total mem

my favorite game was written in basic

Santa Paravia...i believe was its name

land was in hectares....strive to be king....pretty boring game, until we learned to write in basic...and changed it to Santa Perverted

had random events like dragon attacks that would waste half your farmland....locust attacks....we really screwed with the intent of the game

we played that thing for well over a year, and kept changing it....i think we spent more time writing code than playing the game

it was our intro into computer games, and the world of technology....

havent left it since....that was 1981 or so....maybe 1980
Click to expand...

the one that we borrowed from school didn't have a cassette drive, but it was still pretty cool. i learned GW-Basic years later, and had a lot of fun with it. thought about majoring in computer programming, but the Turbo Pascal class for freshman was really hard. i got an A in it, but i chose a different major.
 
late said:
I"ll bet that ad came out of Byte magazine. Ahh, yes, the good old days when computers didn't come with an OS, or even a HD.

Did you ever read Jerry Pournelle's column in Byte?
Click to expand...

No, I was looking for the DEC Data Cartridge and came across that ad.

Yeah, I commented flippantly that that computer was probably built of quad NAND gates, and it probably was.

The first computer system I worked on in the civilian world was Motorola, 6809-based and ran a now obsolete language called FORTH.

Thx :)
 
Thx said:
Check out this old advertisement...

image url upload

"$8,500... Complete!" :cool:

(probably built of nothing but quad NAND gates, lol!)

We did the IBM 360 at that time, I believe the job we did for DEC was for the "Data Cartridge" system, they sent us a cartridge.



In fact, I believe I cut the first CNC parts for the proto-type we sent to them.

It's scary when I realize that the world's computer infrastructure at that time went through our company, if we got it wrong, the world financial system etc, etc, etc, would collapse, lol.

Thx :)
Click to expand...

An RL02! I haven't seen one of those in ages. Man does that bring back memories. Did you guys have anything to do with the RP06? I loved those disk drives. The disks were a removable stack of 6 platters (if I recall) and the disk drive itself looked a lot like to top loading clothes washer. When there was lots of I/O to the drive it would literally start to shimmy across the data center floor.

The other looks like a PDP 8. We had a contract with the NY Fire Department and for years had one in each of the fire houses in the city. I didn't work on that project so I'm not sure but I think they were part of the fire departments alerting system that dispatched fire engines.
They were still using them as of 1998. I know a guy who had one of their big brothers, a PDP 11, in his garage. He eventually got rid of it because it used tons of electricity and was driving his electric bills through the roof.


Some great memories. The pay wasn't great but it was the best place I ever worked at. I would have loved to have spent my entire career there.
 
Gaius46 said:
An RL02! I haven't seen one of those in ages. Man does that bring back memories. Did you guys have anything to do with the RP06? I loved those disk drives. The disks were a removable stack of 6 platters (if I recall) and the disk drive itself looked a lot like to top loading clothes washer. When there was lots of I/O to the drive it would literally start to shimmy across the data center floor.

The other looks like a PDP 8. We had a contract with the NY Fire Department and for years had one in each of the fire houses in the city. I didn't work on that project so I'm not sure but I think they were part of the fire departments alerting system that dispatched fire engines.
They were still using them as of 1998. I know a guy who had one of their big brothers, a PDP 11, in his garage. He eventually got rid of it because it used tons of electricity and was driving his electric bills through the roof.


Some great memories. The pay wasn't great but it was the best place I ever worked at. I would have loved to have spent my entire career there.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure exactly what DEC drive it was for, we sent them a proto-type around 1987. Often times we weren't privy to a model number.

We were well into the IBM 360, as far as I know we were the only ones producing a special and critical part for them, made of a specially processed material.

(In fact, the set-up for this was situated behind my bench and ran continuously, 24-7, 365.)

I imagine the folks at DEC took a 360 apart and said "Hmm... I wonder where they got this stuff from?" and through word of mouth traced us down. (The proto-type we sent them ended up being fabricated of the same material as the IBM 360, lol. Different design, but the same exact stuff. :))

We generated customers almost purely through industry word of mouth, the only "advertising" we had was a modest spot in the Thomas' Registry.

Our company did all the mini-drives through the 1980s as well, Connors, Seagate, MiniScribe... we were making a fortune for awhile there.

Thx :)
 
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late said:
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Dungeons of Doom TI99

Carmageddon

Heretic whenever I played with my friend, and I got turned into a chicken, my wife would come running.

Mechwarrior 2 I bought the very first gaming card, and that came with it. "It's 5am AM, you're cold and you've got a thermonuclear reactor strapped to your back, now don't you wish you did your homework."

Descent. Somebody is bringing that back with updated graphics. The combination of 3 degrees of freedom with the crude graphics of that era could get quite disorienting.

Red Neck Rampage RC cola and moon pies instead of health and energy boxes.
Click to expand...

I actually have a ti-994a in my closet, not sure if it still works but it is in excellent shape. The only computer ever made with coffee warmer(ok not literally but the cpu got so hot it could warm coffee and it happened to be on a flat spot where coffee would sit nicely) and also endorsed by bill cosby back when he was only accused of grabbin dat keyboard and showcasing the ti994a.
 
Is interesting realizing the age of the people here by what games they liked.

I am probably going to list many that nobody in here ever heard of. And I am going to ignore arcade games. Mostly, I am going to list the ones I thought were groundbreaking for the time that I played regularly at the time.

First, was probably Colossal Cave Adventure, in 1977. And at the same time frame was also Pyramid, Hunt the Wumpus, and a few other games played on an IBM 360 mainframe. Games on computers back then were simple at best, generally 2 word parser text adventures, or a turn based fantasy or Star Trek game.

In the early 1980's when I got my first computer, it was almost all about the Scott Adams adventure games. He wrote over a dozen text adventure games, ranging from fantasy and horror to spies and western.

Then there were the various Rogue clones, including Telengard.

M.U.L.E. was especially fun, as it was one of the few that allowed 4 people to play at the same time. A fairly simple economics game, in order to really win it all of the players had to work together to help the colony succeed, not just be out for themselves to the detriment of the others.

In 1985, The Bard's Tale changed a lot of games for me. A city to explore, multiple dungeons, and characters that could be exported from one game and imported into the next. No need to start all over again when you finished one game and wanted to move to the next. And a 3-D look ahead viewpoint, with graphics far ahead of Ultima or Wizardry.

I played many afterwards, but the first to really get me spending hundreds of hours after that was Wasteland. It shared a lot of the gameplay with Bard's Tale, but was set in a post-apocalyptic world (the creators later got into a dispute with their distributor EA, and Fallout was born).

But in the next 2 years came 2 games that changed everything for me. First in 1990 I got my hands on Sim City. Really the first "God Game", where there was really no way to "win". A game you played for the enjoyment of playing, not really trying to "beat" it. Then in 1991, Civilization.

That is the one game I have probably sunk more time into than any others. Probably tens of thousands of hours, easily. From the original on, I still play it fairly regularly.

But there are so many I could never list them all. Populous, Roller Coaster Tycoon, 7 Cities of Gold, Starflight, Star Control, F-19, and Balance of Power.

That last is unique, because it not only came with a thick booklet explaining a lot of how international diplomacy worked, but because it was the first Windows game. Every copy came with a stripped down copy of Windows 1.
 
Wolfenstein
Duke Nukem
Doom

I haven't played these games in years. I might have to blow the dust off the cds to see if they're compatible with a Win 10 computer.
 
Lets see...used to have an old Texas instrument console game that played what was essentially a Pac man knock off. Had fun with that as a little kid. Went from that to AD and D gold box, had Pools of Radience, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Secret of the Silver Blades. Great games. Stuck with those for a looooong time, played also Pools of Darkness, and the savage frontier series. Then I got my first console, the super Nintendo.
 
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