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favorite early computer games

as for old arcade games, here are a couple of my favorites :

Yie Ar Kung Fu :



they had this stand up at the old Italian Village pizza parlor. plugged a lot of quarters into that one when i was ten or so.

Gauntlet :



they released this on the NES console, and it was similar to the stand up.
 
Harshaw said:
I played Tempest not too long ago in a bar which has walls full of classic arcade games. Was surprised at how well I did entirely on 30-year-old muscle memory.
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A guy I knew in grad school gave up being a lawyer to go back to being a drummer. He was pure hell in that game because he could constantly slap the button that "fired" at the hostiles.
 
TurtleDude said:
A guy I knew in grad school gave up being a lawyer to go back to being a drummer. He was pure hell in that game because he could constantly slap the button that "fired" at the hostiles.
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I never had the digital dexterity for games like Missile Command. It's also why I could never play the sax very well. I can type 70 wpm, though.
 
Harshaw said:
I never had the digital dexterity for games like Missile Command. It's also why I could never play the sax very well. I can type 70 wpm, though.
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It goes hand and hand. a guy on my college skeet team was a well regarded spanish style guitarist who also played a 12 string well too. He supposedly won some typing contest as a HS kid in Texas with the old manual SC and it was well over 100 WPM
 
Tetris and Jezzball.
Those are several hours of my life that I will never get back, but hell, they were well spend in the stress relief they provided.
Honorable mention is that old DOS game "Gorillas", where they threw exploding bananas at each other.
 
TurtleDude said:
It goes hand and hand. a guy on my college skeet team was a well regarded spanish style guitarist who also played a 12 string well too. He supposedly won some typing contest as a HS kid in Texas with the old manual SC and it was well over 100 WPM
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Yeah, I think I'm maxed out at 70 wpm. The fingers just don't move any faster.
 
ah, almost forgot this one : Street Rod I and II.

maxresdefault.jpg

image is SRII. used to play the **** out of both of them, first on a Tandy 1000, and then on my 386 and later computers. got damned close to winning, but Mulholland drive at the end of the game was ****ing impossible. loved earning pink slips in the aqueducts and building unbeatable monster drag racers out of the proceeds.
 
Foe me, the first would have been "Adventure", also known as "Colossal Cave".

After that, primarily the Scott Adams series of text adventure games until The Bard's Tale series came out.

Until the late 1980's, when new games like Sim City, Balance of Power, and Starflight came out.

Oh, also Seven Cities of GOld and M*U*L*E.
 
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 don't remember what computer my parents first had for me to play on, i was pretty young. It had a keyboard and a joystick with two buttons on it. The games came in cartridges, like Pac Man, Asteroids, and Centipede.

Then we got some 386?/486 that could run MS DOS: that was huge. Few i remember well are The Secret of Monkey Island, Wolfenstein, Loom, Wing Commander, Comanche, Creature Shock, Mechwarrior, Master of Orion, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, Dune II, and Command and Conquer. The last great MS DOS game i played was Wing Commander: Privateer 2, The Darkening, starring Clive Owen (from the movie Children of Men)- yes, it was a MS DOS game with surprisingly good, movie-like cut scenes.

I think when i got my first 100MHz Pentium 1, that was running Windows 3.1, and all kinds of games were coming out; Doom, Diablo, Starcraft, Star Wars flight sims (X-Wing, Tie Fighter), Theme Hospital, Sim City, X-Com, Fallout 1, and what feels like hundreds more.
 
Absentglare said:
I don't remember what computer my parents first had for me to play on, i was pretty young. It had a keyboard and a joystick with two buttons on it. The games came in cartridges, like Pac Man, Asteroids, and Centipede.

Then we got some 386?/486 that could run MS DOS: that was huge. Few i remember well are The Secret of Monkey Island, Wolfenstein, Loom, Wing Commander, Comanche, Creature Shock, Mechwarrior, Master of Orion, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, Dune II, and Command and Conquer. The last great MS DOS game i played was Wing Commander: Privateer 2, The Darkening, starring Clive Owen (from the movie Children of Men)- yes, it was a MS DOS game with surprisingly good, movie-like cut scenes.

I think when i got my first 100MHz Pentium 1, that was running Windows 3.1, and all kinds of games were coming out; Doom, Diablo, Starcraft, Star Wars flight sims (X-Wing, Tie Fighter), Theme Hospital, Sim City, X-Com, Fallout 1, and what feels like hundreds more.
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Maybe the first one was a Commodore 64?

As for Wing Commander, i played an earlier version on the 386 and enjoyed it. I didn't spend enough time to get good at it, but it was a lot of fun.
 


on tape, not floppy...
 
Helix said:
Maybe the first one was a Commodore 64?

As for Wing Commander, i played an earlier version on the 386 and enjoyed it. I didn't spend enough time to get good at it, but it was a lot of fun.
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Ah- piqued my curiosity, so i started looking around. It was an IBM PCjr!! I was mistaken about the joystick, it had only one button:

84f56c106c2a9c80287e9dd52e471de0.jpg


Apparently, it was a commercial failure, the best thing going for it were the letters 'IBM'. I had no idea, i loved that machine, i played games on that thing for hours.
 
Absentglare said:
I don't remember what computer my parents first had for me to play on, i was pretty young. It had a keyboard and a joystick with two buttons on it. The games came in cartridges, like Pac Man, Asteroids, and Centipede.

Then we got some 386?/486 that could run MS DOS: that was huge. Few i remember well are The Secret of Monkey Island, Wolfenstein, Loom, Wing Commander, Comanche, Creature Shock, Mechwarrior, Master of Orion, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, Dune II, and Command and Conquer. The last great MS DOS game i played was Wing Commander: Privateer 2, The Darkening, starring Clive Owen (from the movie Children of Men)- yes, it was a MS DOS game with surprisingly good, movie-like cut scenes.

I think when i got my first 100MHz Pentium 1, that was running Windows 3.1, and all kinds of games were coming out; Doom, Diablo, Starcraft, Star Wars flight sims (X-Wing, Tie Fighter), Theme Hospital, Sim City, X-Com, Fallout 1, and what feels like hundreds more.
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I forgot about Command and Conquer! Good game.

It reminded me of the old time Avalon Hill board strategy games I used to play- Panzer Leader, Dreadnought, and eventually the best one, Squad Leader.

There was a computer version of Squad Leader if I recall which was pretty good... anyone remember the name?
 
Absentglare said:
Ah- piqued my curiosity, so i started looking around. It was an IBM PCjr!! I was mistaken about the joystick, it had only one button:

84f56c106c2a9c80287e9dd52e471de0.jpg


Apparently, it was a commercial failure, the best thing going for it were the letters 'IBM'. I had no idea, i loved that machine, i played games on that thing for hours.
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I remember the commercials for those when i was a kid. I thought that they looked really cool.
 
TurtleDude said:
Galaga was big about the time I was in grad school. The other big games were Stargate, Defender, Joust , Pacman and Frogger. the one game I was able to constantly set machine records on was wolf pack since it was exactly the same skill as skeet shooting. I sure wasted a lot of quarters 35 or so years ago and where I lived in Ohio, a local mall had an arcade that one of my brothers and I hit constantly during Christmas Breaks

another good one was called, IIRC Battle zone where you were battling tanks. the last one-one my brother ruled-had various levels where you fought off attacks on a diagram that looked like a DNA cell-normally a black screen with a red diagram-if you got beat and put a quarter in within say 30 seconds you could start at the level you were "killed on" without climbing the levels again. IIRC it was called TEMPEST and it was highly addictive.
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I liked stargate. I actually bought the machine. Had to get rid of it to much trouble to keep it working.
 
PIPEWRENCH said:
I liked stargate. I actually bought the machine. Had to get rid of it to much trouble to keep it working.
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tough game-I don't think I really ever got the hang of it

Joust, missile command, and Tempest I was pretty good at. as I noted, that wolf pack game which was pretty much the same thing as sustained lead skeet shooting, I pretty well wiped up on
 
TurtleDude said:
tough game-I don't think I really ever got the hang of it

Joust, missile command, and Tempest I was pretty good at. as I noted, that wolf pack game which was pretty much the same thing as sustained lead skeet shooting, I pretty well wiped up on
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I got so good I used to give the game to kids with sometimes over 100 lives on it. Tempest was the other one I forgot about. Pong and asteroids were the first games I played but I never really liked them.
 
Harshaw said:
Yeah, I think I'm maxed out at 70 wpm. The fingers just don't move any faster.
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I never got above 45. I took typing for 3 years in school. I got to 45 wpm my first year and never got any better.
 
Anyone play MUDs back in the day before this here internets?
 
Maybe somebody here knows what I'm talking about, but I had a computer in my room via 1990 (computer was probably from the mid 80s) and it ran dos. There was an adventure game that used all letters and characters as you went through a castle looking for keys and whipping enemies. I think it probably came with that version of dos? Anyway it was fun and I've looked for what it was called online and never have been able to find it. You win 50 swag points if you can tell me what it was.
 
jimbo said:
And Pac Man. I'd buy a Pac Man machine today if I could find one for a reasonable price.
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Just build a MAME machine.

It is not that hard, you can either gut an existing cabinet and put your computer into it, or build one with wood. Or simply get a pre-existing solution like the Tankstick and use your TV.

I built one about 10 years ago from an old Starcastle machine, but sold it when I joined the Army. Still hope to build another one someday.
 
Mustachio said:
Maybe somebody here knows what I'm talking about, but I had a computer in my room via 1990 (computer was probably from the mid 80s) and it ran dos. There was an adventure game that used all letters and characters as you went through a castle looking for keys and whipping enemies. I think it probably came with that version of dos? Anyway it was fun and I've looked for what it was called online and never have been able to find it. You win 50 swag points if you can tell me what it was.
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That is either ROGUE, or one of the many ROGUE clones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
 
My earliest computer game was a garbled version of pong with the stupid ping pong balls, but for me the fun started with Nintendo. Super Mario 2/3, super castlevania, streetfighter 2, those were fun times.
 
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