what's your favorite childhood computer game?

[Cale_Hagan]

preferably windows 95 or before. but hey, i know some of us here are still younger, so ill leave it up to interpretation. my favorite was made by interplay, descent 1 and 2... i was also i huge fan of where's waldo. =P

[d_stilgar]

Day of the Tentacle! That is by far the best game ever. I remember playing it with a girl I had a crush on at her house. I asked her what it was, and we played some, but then she moved and I had to finish it alone later. Sad story? Still, it's awesome and everyone should play it.

Also, Dune 2. I played that on pirated 3.5" floppies that my aunt made for me. Haha. When Dune 2000 came out, (essentially the same game with better graphics), I played that all the time. It also started the RTS genre (seriously, first game), so yeah, awesome.

Monkey Island series.

Finally, the Myst series. I played Riven first with my brother every day over Christmas break. Then I played Myst. Both are good.

[Stonerboy779]

Well my first actual computer game was Morrowind and not only was it my favorite childhood pc game it is my favorite game of all time.

I played more sega than anything. God I loved sonic and streets of rage and can't forget mortal kombat.

[msmrx57]

Definitely dating myself here, but I remember playing a text/Star Wars game on the new fangled Apple II in the library during studyhall in high school.

[BuzzKillington]

Carmen San Diego, Oregon Trail, Putt Putt, the Magic School Bus games, Old I spy games. I wasn't on the computer much as a kid so what I played was mostly at school during free-time. :P

[NightrainSrt4]

Pre-95: I was a big fan of the skiing game with the abominable snowman.

My favorite game was my first PC game: Zork. I can't remember if it was on our Commodore or Apple II, I just remember loving that game.

[xr4man]

i'm assuming your talking about actual computer games and not console games, so all my atari 2600 games are out.

i guess my favorite childhood game would have to be impossible mission for the commodore 64. that and there was some racing game that let you make your own tracks. that was da bomb!

other than that i used to play a lot of frogger, asteroids, and space invaders on our trs-80.

[slaveofconvention]

Head over heels and paperboy on my awesome Sinclair zx spectrum 128 +2

[d_stilgar]

I remember the magic school bus game on the human body. That was awesome. I also played Reader Rabbit games (the early ones, like 2 or 3), Gizmos and Gadgets (still awesome), Carmen San Diego, Treasure Mathstorm, and some Mercer Mayer and Busytown games.

And . . . how about Hover for Win95?

[CrazyTeaPot]

The only computer games I played when I was a kid were; Jezz Ball, Chip's Challenge and Pinball.

I was a Nintendo kid. Super Mario World FTW!

Then in my late teenager years I started playing Diablo, Diablo II + Expansion and then Morrowind.

[Bopher]

Favorite computer game had to be Doom. Played that all the time. Once I was introduce to BBS's though TradeWars.

[d_stilgar]

The only computer games I played when I was a kid were; Jezz Ball, Chip's Challenge and Pinball.
.

Man! These too! So good.

[AmEv]

Don't forget Maxell's Maniac!

My mom loved Go Figure!

[BuzzKillington]

Hover! hahaha, I thought I was the only one that would remember that game. It was pointless (or I didn't know what I was doing) but I still played it. :P

[AmEv]

^I wish Hover was multiplayer.


All I could see was, it was a unique CTF game.

[TLHarrell]

Back in the old days my buddy got a nice 386. I was completely hooked on Wolfenstein 3D. We also had a blast double teaming on Mech Warrior, he would drive, I would "weapon dump" opponents in our fully decked out Battlemaster. Priceless.

[AmEv]

You know what?

Let's ask MS for the source. It never was a "pay-for" game, anyways.
And throw in multiplayer coding!

[TheGreatSatan]

My first computer game was Doom. And I spent a lot of time on C&C Firestorm

[billygoat333]

I used to play Zaxxon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaxxon) all the time. great game. Also frogger, digger, and q*bert. I remember playing wolfenstein 3d and thinking how amazing it was, also the old Commander keen games and duke nukem!! lol. I loved just about all the shareware games, though I never bought the full versions usually (except for wolfenstein and doom).

[d_stilgar]

Chex Quest. Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!

[xr4man]

Back in the old days my buddy got a nice 386. I was completely hooked on Wolfenstein 3D. We also had a blast double teaming on Mech Warrior, he would drive, I would "weapon dump" opponents in our fully decked out Battlemaster. Priceless.

oh man, i remember doing that too. the controls were way too complicated for just 1 person, lol.

[Kayin]

Chex Quest. Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest

I wonder why.

[Konrad]

Apple ][+ forever lol.

I played Elite, Rescue Raiders, Star Blazer, lots of text games from "Adam's Adventures" and Infocom, Karateka, Archon, Bard's Tale, Autoduel, Stellar 7, Taipan, Galactic Empire, The first 4 Ultima games and first 5 Wizardry games ... so many others, so many bad/cheesy little crappy classic games I've forgotten.

Pretty much all of it copied at school or downloaded from a modem BBS, back before software piracy became illegal. So many 5¼" diskettes fulla good times.

[d_stilgar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest

I wonder why.

Yeah. I never played the original Doom. I was 10 when Chex Quest came out and my mom was pretty restrictive in the violent video games I could or could not play. But when Chex Quest came out, oh man. It may be the first game I ever beat . . .

[blueonblack]

Since we've eliminated consoles, mine was Aztec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_(video_game)), played from 5 1/4" floppies (with the notch cut out with a hole punch to make them double-sided) on various Apple II systems.

This game was bleeding edge, fellas. I was proud to have my pirated copy.


Edit: I also forgot about Archon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark) for the Commodore 64.

[Konrad]

Heh, notching double-sided floppies ... we actually removed the write-detect sensor/mechanism from a couple of disk drives in the school's Apple lab so that bastard math teacher wouldn't confiscate our games. If he caught us playing we'd be like "I found the game running on this computer without a disk".

Prior to that we had to jimmy open the locked file cabinet where all the confiscated goodies were kept, and that was a real pain. Archon and Archon II rocked, back when Electronic Arts (EOA) made *real* games instead of only sports stuff.

[billygoat333]

Apple ][+ forever lol.

I played Elite, Rescue Raiders, Star Blazer, lots of text games from "Adam's Adventures" and Infocom, Karateka, Archon, Bard's Tale, Autoduel, Stellar 7, Taipan, Galactic Empire, The first 4 Ultima games and first 5 Wizardry games ... so many others, so many bad/cheesy little crappy classic games I've forgotten.

Pretty much all of it copied at school or downloaded from a modem BBS, back before software piracy became illegal. So many 5¼" diskettes fulla good times.

AHH! I forgot about Wizardry. Those games were awesome!

[TLHarrell]

Ultima Underworld took up a huge amount of my life.

[billygoat333]

Can't forget the old star wars games, like Tie Fighter and X-wing. I bought a joystick just for those games. Spent HOURS flying around. lol

[Cale_Hagan]

Carmen San Diego, Oregon Trail, Putt Putt, the Magic School Bus games, Old I spy games. I wasn't on the computer much as a kid so what I played was mostly at school during free-time. :P

Putt Putt! yes, how could i forget! oregon trail and carmen san diego, too.


I remember the magic school bus game on the human body. That was awesome. I also played Reader Rabbit games (the early ones, like 2 or 3), Gizmos and Gadgets (still awesome), Carmen San Diego, Treasure Mathstorm, and some Mercer Mayer and Busytown games.
reader rabbit and treasure mathstorm were good, too.

And . . . how about Hover for Win95?


I used to play Zaxxon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaxxon) all the time. great game. Also frogger, digger, and q*bert. I remember playing wolfenstein 3d and thinking how amazing it was, also the old Commander keen games and duke nukem!! lol. I loved just about all the shareware games, though I never bought the full versions usually (except for wolfenstein and doom).

DUKE FREAKIN NUKEM! yes. :banana:

[AmEv]

I've got Hover installed on my XP machine....

What say we mod it and make it multiplayer?

[Snowman]

Doom

[DemonDragonJ]

I played many games during my childhood, and while I cannot narrow my list to a single game, my favorites were definitely those made by Apogee Software and Epic Megagames, two companies that were very influential in the early-to-mid 1990's in that they helped to popularize the concept of "shareware." I played nearly every single game that those companies made, but some of my favorites were Bio Menace, Commander Keen, and Jazz Jackrabbit, because of their graphics, their music (and those games had some very awesome music; Bobby Prince was a very skilled composer), and the overall entertainment of the experience of playing them. Those games provided me with hours of fun and enjoyment when I was younger.

There were other games not made by those companies that I also enjoyed, notably VGA Miner (which I found to be very challenging and complex), Scorched Earth (which, despite its primitive graphics and sound, was very enjoyable), and Super Fly (a game where the player must rid a house of a infestation by flies and other vermin). That last game, Super Fly, was written by a single person, and I recently learned that that person lives in the same state as me, so I may attempt to visit them and see if they remember that game. That would be very interesting, in my mind.

[AmEv]

I have Alex Something-or-other alien-shooter-something from Apogee I got from a used computer....

Not my type of game, so tat's why I can't remember the name.

[Technochicken]

For me, it's Speedy Eggbert, which is a 2D sidescroller. I played it recently, and even though the controls are a bit clunky by today's standards, it's one still really fun.

[Cale_Hagan]

oh, and reader rabbit

[WhitePuma]

My childhood favourite was super Mario and I use to play it almost the whole day.

[Larisa Toby]

Super Mario 64 was my favorite childhood computer game. I spent countless hours on that game to try and beat it.

[Luke122]

Some of us older members (lol.. I'm only 32) are looking at things like Snes and N64 games, and thinking how "recent" those really were.

A lot of the old shareware diskette games were not where I started, Commander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit were into my teenage years in fact. I actually had a Commodore VIC20, with a cassette drive. Pacman! I also had a ColecoVision system as a young kid; the baseball game was a blast! The controllers were HUGE too. :D

I have loads of memories of playing Wolfenstein/Doom on the PC (ca. 1994, when I got my first "REAL" 486 PC), then into Quake when it came out. I was onto a P100 by then! w00t!

[billygoat333]

My first computer was a Tandy 1000. Like a boss. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Tandy1000HX.jpg/285px-Tandy1000HX.jpg

I remember spending hours playing atari at my friend's house. good times. lol

[AmEv]

I still have my first game consoles: the Sega Genesis and the Sega Master System. Both work. And with a TV tuner PCI card... hehehehehe

[f8l_0e]

Can't forget the old star wars games, like Tie Fighter and X-wing. I bought a joystick just for those games. Spent HOURS flying around. lol

X-Wing for the win! For that game, I bought a sound card with a joystick port and a joystick. I had to learn how to set the IRQ for the card and configure memmaker to give up enough conventional and expanded RAM to play the damn thing with sound. It's what got me started on troubleshooting PC's.

Too much love goes to the X-Wing in my opinion. Behind the controls of an A-Wing, there was nothing I couldn't turn into debris!

[AmEv]

X-wing..... My friend owned that game, and a similar Star Wars game!

Man, how I want to play it again!

PS: We had a USB Logitech gamepad to play it with. Too bad we uninstalled it. :(

[mathewbruce]

Super Mario was the first game I ever played, I love it a lot and my other favourite is Cornan which I still play.

[Beta-brain]

Finally, the Myst series. I played Riven first with my brother every day over Christmas break. Then I played Myst. Both are good.

Myst was the first game I played on windows 3.1 and I still have the disc 8) The first time Atrus starting talking from the book I jumped feet, it was revolutionary compared to the TADS (text adventure games) I had been playing.

http://www.fazerfetish.eclipse.co.uk/Myst.jpg

Easier to play it in Dosbox now, that music is soo haunting and you often hear it these days on TV and in films, there is also a 3D Real Myst that was released a while ago which is great, so nostalgic :)
The whole series, Myst, Riven, Myst lll Exile, Uru, Ages beyond Myst, Myst lV Revelation, Myst V, End of Ages, are very engrossing games and whilst they can drive you crazy as they are not easy games they are very rewarding when you work something out, I love the challenge of just being dropped into a game and having to sort it all out.

I don't think there are any games that are as hard as the Myst series made these days and I have been playing adventure games for years.

youtube.com/watch?v=kDN_BIm30VI&feature=related

[Snowman]

that game kicked my butt several times.

[Xpirate]

I liked Carmageddon. Carmageddon I was good. Then Carmageddon II had some improvements, but lost some of the cool things that made number I good. Then Carmageddon III put the franchise out of business.

Carmageddon III decreased the fun factor by forcing you to race instead of trashing the other cars. Number III was technically called Carmageddon TDR 2000. The only thing that made it fun was the cheat codes.

[AmEv]

Let's not forget vanilla Westwood games. They were freakin' awesome.

Tiberian sun was, and still is, awesome.

[d_stilgar]

Tiberian sun was, and still is, awesome.

I was so mad when EA bought them up. Tiberian Sun really was the best of the series. There was also Tiberium edit, which allowed you to mod pretty much everything in the game, which was pretty fun after playing through it the first time.

[AmEv]

RA2/YR is/was fun, but I admit, the units were WAY overpowered.

Especially when the base was SWARMED with rocketeers.

[TLHarrell]

Zergling Rush!

[Liquid_Scope_99]

when i was in elementary we had apple 2 s i loved Oregan trail awesome in the day

[grizzlyironbear]

The old Atari ST was my first love for computer games....Sundog: The frozen legacy, The bard's tale, The defender of the crown, and the Ultima series were my games of choice back in the day...

[slaveofconvention]

Heh - Atari ST - I remember wishing for one, or an Amiga but alas my parents declared my Spectrum 128 +2 adequate for my needs, especially as it was an "upgrade" from my Commodore VIC-20....

Yup, showing my age now heh

[Goldengfragger]

I used to play a lot of Contra with my brother.

[Twigsoffury]

Interstate '76

[Markwinstanley]

Super mario bros i used to play when i was 12

[smilinsniper]

Was a huge fan of the Mario series on the Snes and Wonderboy III The dragons trap on Sega :D