Back in the olden days, you know, the 20th century, I had a favorite computer game: Hellcats Over the Pacific. It was a flight simulator that ran on 68020 Macs; it was a simple, fairly crude game that was smooth and fun for it’s time. Most importantly, you could fire it up and do a mission in 20 minutes or so.
It took up 59K of disk space. How many games can you say that about nowadays?
To my short-lived joy, there is a Mac simulator that allows anyone to play the game on their browser. Check it out. See what glorious computer graphics enthralled us in the 1990s.
Oh gosh. Such flat terrain, 8-bit color, blocky objects made up of what, 10 or 20 polygons?
I can’t do it. Not after playing No Man’s Sky. It was still a great game in 1991, though.
I play mostly PICO-8 games these days.
There’s a whole sub-form on the Raspberry Pi forums on retro-gaming. I think most people there are running console simulators or PC/DOS simulators, but old Mac simulators wouldn’t surprise me. The current Pis are certainly fast enough to do so, even with the hit you get from simulating one type of hardware on another.
I don’t remember the name of it anymore, but there’s a website where you can play all the old Atari 2600 games in your browser.
I played a couple hours of Yar’s Revenge there last year, or maybe late 2022. It’s not nearly as captivating as some of the modern games, but it really did have some nice memories associated with it. I figure about half the games there are with a few minutes of play just to remember them, and there are probably 3-5 games with some good nostalgia potential for anyone who owned a 2600 as a child.
The game I would be looking for, though, was from Intellivision. It was a precursor to Civilization — sorta. Not so much in the progressing through history, but it was a game in which you slowly developed an undeveloped world. Can’t remember the name of it for the life of me. That I’d also be willing to play for a few hours, possibly more.
I think I played that game.
I had a 100% failure rate.
Color graphics in 1991?!? How bougie! Some of us were still flying in monochrome and that’s how we liked it.
in 1988 i was playing a combat flight simulator on a 386 with a super VGA screen. Hi tech!!! was a lot of fun shooting down russian bombers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-19_Stealth_Fighter
the graphics are very similar to the mac simulator.
iirc the other planes had a very vector graphics look. maybe five polygon? lol
in 1988 i was playing a combat flight simulator on a 386 with a super VGA screen. Hi tech!!! was a lot of fun shooting down russian bombers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-19_Stealth_Fighter
the graphics are very similar to the mac simulator.
iirc the other planes had a very vector graphics look. maybe five polygon? lol
I remember the Apple 2 FS1 Flight Simulator. It was quite impressive at the time. I still can’t believe they got something like that working at all on an 8-bit 1-MHz 6502. I could rarely win a dogfight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FS1_Flight_Simulator
Well, I know this is not a contest. But, if you want to really talk ‘retro’ that is still ‘flying’ ‘Adventure – Colossal Cave’ and many other text adventure games are still being played and created by a very large community. Long live Woods and Crowther! You won’t find many rtwingnuts there because they require literacy and careful thought to create and play.
@2 whheydt wrote: There’s a whole sub-form on the Raspberry Pi forums on retro-gaming
I reply: you are so right. There are even entire ‘distros’ (operating systems) you can load on a Raspberry Pi that are specialized for gaming. The latest Rpi is quite current in its hardware capabilities.
I won “Leisure Suit Larry” on an Apple][e.
You had a text adventure? I played lunar lander on a printer terminal. Type in your input, wait while the dot matrix printer zips out an image, enter another input, repeat.
And I liked it!
Myself I recall “Windogs” from the early 1990s. And “Tank vs. UFO” from 1983.
I loved Hellcats, on a 68040 it was glass smooth, and F/A-18 Hornet (also by Graphic Simulations) was fantastic too. When they released their A-10 demo it was one of my favorite showoffs to fly thru the openings of the hangar deck in the carrier floating offshore.
I started playing video games over 40 years ago. I believe the very first computer game I ever played was Star Trek on the Commodore Pet we had in high school.
While still in high school I even programmed a primitive two-player racing car game where you raced blobs around a 2d-circuit. It proved quite a hit among my classmates. Sadly that was the end of my computer game development career…
I think it’s great that so many retro games have been preserved and are so readily available today, but every time I’ve tried playing any of them, I remember just how clunky they are compared with modern games, and typically give up in frustration after a few minutes.
For those who like retro games, there are plenty of clones and remakes true the retro spirit but with modern mechanics and control systems, but even then I can’t get on with the 8-bit aesthetic some of them use. I guess some of us have been spoiled by 40 years of video game evolution.
FYI: In case anyone still doesn’t know. Epic Games continues to give away one or two free PC games every week, many of them excellent titles, some of them AAA games. And if you belong to Amazon Prime, they give away a bunch of PC games every month (currently 47 free games available), including plenty of former AAA titles, to keep even after if your Prime subscription ends.
@12:
Dot matrix? You were lucky! We had to make do with teletype printers in our computer lab. When you turned one of them on, it sounded like a jet engine during takeoff.
And one stats program we had to use for coursework required punched cards as input, so we had to write our code on coding sheets and submit them to the computer department where a member of the typing pool transcribed them to the punched cards. Then, a day later, we got to see if the program had (a) been transcribed correctly and (b) had run successfully.
Ah, the joys of 1970s university computer science. (This was actually in 1981 but it took time and money to upgrade all the legacy systems.)
Crip Dyke @3:
I think I know exactly the game you mean! I can’t think of the name either, but I bet my brother could; he played it constantly for about a year or two. Late 80s. Very visually attractive for its time. I played it a bit, but I’ve never been good at those strategy/management games. I have a notion it started with a B? not even sure about that. (texted the bro) No! Populous is the one I’m thinking of. If that’s it, it’s available on Steam.
Lots of old stuff has been resurrected on Steam. Including the best PC game of all time, Day of the Tentacle.
OK, guys, do NOT start a “Four Yorkshiremen” about computers. We’ll never get to the end of that.
PZ @12
I wrote Lunar Lander, on punch cards, for a Canolla P14 programable calculator.
There is a whole system today devoted to new text adventures called “choice of games”.
ShermanJ – hell yeah it’s a contest! :D
I played amazing (for the time) games, saw mind-boggling (for the time) wireframe graphics, and also witnessed the great med student/law student war* on one of the first-ever Internet message boards, hosting by U ILL / Champaign-Urbana. This was in the late 1970s. (Didn’t meet HAL though, at least not to my knowledge.)
*Sample exchange: “See you in court.” “See you on the operating table.”
psanity #18
That would make a “good” video game.
Quite a few of them, actually. Retro game dev is a thriving hobby; it attracts the kind of programmer who sees storage constraints like that as a desirable characteristic and an interesting challenge.
@12 PZ Myers wrote: Type in your input, wait while the dot matrix printer zips out an image, enter another input, repeat.
I reply: I agree it can be fun. That is the hardware many of us had for those early text games. I remember using a CDI miniterm with a 300 baud acoustic modem and thermal printer. It, too had no screen. Whiz-bang technology is not everything. Sometimes simple tech and creative thinking can be enjoyable, too.
@20 hillaryrettig1 wrote: ShermanJ – hell yeah it’s a contest! :D I played amazing (for the time) games, saw mind-boggling (for the time) wireframe graphic. . .This was in the late 1970s
I reply: I agree for the late 70’s. My miniterm and PDP experience was in 1970-1972
I don’t know if it was available for apple/macintosh(?) computers, but I have fond memories of playing Ultima VI in the late 80s/early 90s. The game had a huge map, and a simple but versatile interface – there were a handful of “action” buttons – stuff like your basic look, talk, use, move, attack, and a few others I forget. You could move the cannon to aim it, and use it to fire it. And, if you were persistent enough, you could push that cannon down the road to the next town over and into the dungeon to shoot it at an enemy that just completely outclassed you.
recruit that one otherwise useless character to your team, just to carry the skiff, so that the rest of the party isn’t encumbered and can actually fight. steal the magic fan from that one guy so you can sorta steer the hot-air balloon… duall wield morning-stars and wear a spiked helmet to max out attacks…
I loved that game… :)
I was a junkie for Descent in the 1990s. In fact, the only all-nighter I’ve ever pulled in my life was not for my studies, but for a Descent marathon.
Crip Dyke@3:
Funny you should mention Yar’s Revenge. I “beat” it, to the extent that such games can be beat (could keep it going indefinitely, until outside interruption like needing food or sleep). That was when I was still at a single-digit age, too.
I have an extensive collection of console emulators and game ROMs, of which the ones I return to semi-regularly are the Sonic, Mario, Metroid, and Zelda titles. The Sonic games for the Genesis are gorgeous for their time, and exploring to find all the hidden stuff is a big attraction in the various Metroid and Zelda games. The latter go in for “action puzzle” gameplay a fair bit as well, from figuring out how to access an area or get some door open to figuring out how to beat the boss enemies, which usually requires a bit more than just “dodge and dish out damage” unlike in the others. Another, somewhat more hidden gem is Blaster Master for the NES, which had a lot of Metroid-esque exploration-platforming “before it was cool”. Emulator saves also take the edge off the difficulty with many of the older (particularly NES) games, as you can save before a difficult part and avoid a ton of backtracking in games that didn’t originally have saves, or at best had a “code” system to keep major powerups while losing nearly everything else (as both BM and the first Metroid game did). Saves also save you from losing everything to a power cut or other interruption in games that lacked a native save, or whose native save was fragile (Majora’s Mask, I’m looking at you).
Oh, another underrated NES game was Faxanadu, which has again a significant exploration element. For SNES I can recommend Final Fantasy VI (the english version was released as Final Fantasy III), the Mario games (if you like platforming), the Zelda game, and a few others (Star Fox’s later levels are hard but it’s a 3D shoot’em’up from before 3D was commonplace!), not to mention Super Metroid. The handhelds mostly have emulators too, which means you can get you some Metroid II, Zero Mission, and Fusion, and Link’s Awakening, among other titles. However, handheld Metroid games tend to be more linear and less exploratory than their console counterparts, and Fusion not only has a plot railroad for most of the game but it can lock you out of 100% completion if you go near any of the elevators after beating Ridley but before getting all the hidden goodies. Those auto-sealing navigation room doors at that point are egregious and a black mark on the entire franchise, IMO. Many of the last few handheld-Metroid pickups are gated by extra-difficult puzzles, too; I think the gameplay of Super Metroid was superior in these matters. Thank
GodSakamoto they backed away from those design choices when they pivoted to 3D and made the Metroid Prime games, which are excellent.A downside of emulation is being stuck a couple of generations behind the bleeding edge. The latest stuff I have is the Gamecube Metroid and Zelda titles — anything newer either has no emulator, would run like a pig on less than a high-end expensive PC, or requires something other than a bog-standard game controller to play properly (so, no Skyward Sword for you, unless you can somehow get a Wii remote and get it to work with your PC).
But you might not be missing out on that much: the bleeding edge tends to be aggressively monetized and full of DRM. So, ads, pay-to-win mechanics, expensive DLC, and no easy way to hack it to defang the worst of these issues. The best games tend to be console games from before consoles had internet capabilities, which amounts to Gamecube-and-earlier, and PC games from before “DLC” entered the vocabulary — the earliest PC games with netplay didn’t abuse their internet access for post-purchase monetization, mainly because there wasn’t a uniform API for pulling that sort of shit until Apple invented it for their iPhones and then everyone else copied them. So games that predate the iPhone are safe: what you see is what you get, with no hidden gotchas or paywalls. Either it’s the full game, or it’s explicitly only the first episode, like with shareware Quake; you won’t have the “full game” only to run into a tollbooth after completing level four, and multiplayer won’t be tied to vendor-controlled servers that either have been in mothballs for the past decade or enforce pay-to-win mechanics. You can LAN party like it’s 1999!
There’s one exception to all of this. Some of the very early games (mostly NES and SNES era) had a “soft tollbooth” in the form of some very unobvious puzzle or obstacle that was an unsubtle push to get people to pony up for the “official strategy guide” that was being sold when the game was still newish. Sometimes there was “soft DRM” on a similar model; this time, the unobvious solution you needed to progress was in the printed manual, expected to be missing from pirated copies.
No problem, in this day and age there are scans and transcripts of all the strategy guides and game manuals a quick Google search away, and you can always resort to finding a video walkthrough on Youtube or a text one on GameFAQs. The answers to almost all “soft tollbooth” and “soft DRM” obstacles are in these, even for pretty obscure games.
You kids should do something more useful with your time instead of playing those infernal video games. You’re wasting your life away.
There! An adult in the room to give this fantasy the complete flavor of living in the 90s.
My husband was the proud owner of a Commodore 64 during the ’80s.
He had a program on it called Cave of the Word Wizard. Our kids loved it, and it strengthened their spelling abilities greatly.
We could even enter their school spelling lists into the program, and the Word Wizard would drill the kids on those lists.
That’s the way my computer geek husband persuaded me that his computer might actually be a useful tool.
@bekenstein bound:
Strong agree. I still love MegaMan2. Got a ROM of it and played all the old puzzles again. Some people love the music. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s amazing in the sense that it doesn’t drive you out of your skull with boring repeats. Given how long you might be listening to it, having it sound like actual music and be good enough that you didn’t mute your TV was quite an accomplishment.
My first real flight simulator game was just called ‘Flight Simulation’, a 16 kB program for the ZX81 computer, which was loaded through a cassette tape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60twpQJQEY8 No audio, with the screen only showing black and white (not even greys), and a screen resolution of 64*48, IIRC. Dangers such as flying into the mountains came with no warning outside of switching to the map, since the cockpit screen never showed the ground rushing up to meet you.
Ah, the memories of old computer games as a kid.. So very many.
Not sure if the Sega Playstation and Megadrive count but
wastedenjoyed so many hours on so many different games from Mortal Kombat and Streets of Rage to Road Rash and Ayrton Senna’s SuperMonaco and the epic long adventure of an Alex Kidd epic that took many months to go all the way through whose name I’ve now forgotten but was so much fun if also sometimes infuriatingly difficult and frustrating at the time for me and my brothers. Then there was the Sonic games natch, Bushido Blade, Tekken, Doom and more. All would be really dated now but cutting edge once..@PZ #12:
I played Lunar Lander on a Texas Instruments programmable calculator, circa 1980. You’d give it a burn duration, it’d return your altitude and current descent velocity, then you’d wait nervously, running numbers in your head, until you were ready to order another burn. When your altitude hit zero your velocity had to be less than 1.5m/s else it was game over, man, game over.
psanity #18
Thanks for the free belly laugh!
I remember playing Zork on a TRS-80 in the early 1980s. No graphics, but I thoroughly enjoyed all of them. I also remember lunar lander on an old printer terminal in high school. I eventually scored a perfect landing at 0 ft/sec. It felt like quite an accomplishment at the time. This was back in the Stone Age, of course, as my grown kids like to remind me. LOL
Back in the late ’60s, I took part in a pre-computer game called “Armageddon II” in which we received a monthly newsletter including a form to fill out for each session’s moves and messages to be mailed back to the coordinator.
A month later, we’d receive another newsletter, with the results of our moves and accompanying brags and lies.
One guy who understood the rules better than the rest of us stayed out of the wars we fought against each other and over two years quietly built up the economy & military of his “nation” – then conquered everybody in a massive blitz. I died in a dungeon, deservedly.
Before I lost my job this spring, I bought a Steam Deck with my tax return. As an Xer, I cut my video gaming teeth on the Atari 2600, NES, and SNES, and did some PC gaming in the late 90s. However, as the price of keeping up with the tech got higher than I could afford at the time and analog RPGs and wargames had more appeal, I set video games aside.
However, times have changed. It’s harder for me to find face-to-face tabletop groups interested in anny games other than 40K or D&D/PF. Many of the new AAA titles looked just too cool to ignore any longey. So I got the Steam Deck and the first title I bought for it was Cyberpunk 2077. I love it!