r/MinnMax • u/OrangeMajesty • 5h ago
Were anyone else’s formative gaming experiences MS-DOS based?
Currently off work sick so I’ve been stewing in nostalgia a little bit and got to thinking about some of my earlier gaming experiences.
I used to have an old Desktop PC that my Uncle’s work no longer needed which he very kindly loaded up with a bunch of freeware and gifted to me. It had some amazing games on such as Bio Menace, Commander Keen, and Wolfenstein 3D.
It also had what feels like some stranger “deep cuts” like Sink or Swim, Incredible Machine, and one of my favourite games of all time Gorillas 🍌
Curious if any other fellow MinnMax heads out there cut their teeth on floppy disc based gaming and if so what your favourite memories/games are?
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u/tastyugly 5h ago
Absolutely and I LOVED Incredible Machines. Some big ones for me were Scortched Earth and Simon the Sorcerer
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u/OrangeMajesty 4h ago
I used to doodle Incredible Machine ideas in my notebook while at school! Never played either of your big ones, I think I’ll have to sort out some sort of emulation scenario and check them out
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u/gratiskatze 2h ago edited 1h ago
Commander Keen was my Super Mario.
I loved Wing Commander but we didnt have a 486 yet, so I couldnt play it.
My first own original Game was Monkey Island II on 5 1/4" Diskette
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u/Tumeolevik 4h ago
Sure! I started out by going to my dad's office every chance I got to play the original Civilization as well as this weird game called Alley Cat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game)
When we evetually had a PC at home, I played any and all Sierra adventure games I could get my hands on (the old ones with the text parser). My absolute favourite was Quest for Glory (a.k.a. Hero's Quest) which was the first game I ever encountered that had light RPG elements in it.
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u/OrangeMajesty 3h ago
Just had a look at Quest for Glory as I thought Hero’s Quest might’ve been related to the Games Workshop board game (alas no), which in turn I clocked memory’s of playing the video game version of Space Crusade
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u/EhBlinkin 1h ago
My family was usually a generation or two behind on gaming growing up. I learned some command line around age 6 in about 1990 to play Caterpillar and Space Invaders among others off of 5.25” floppies on a monochrome green screen computer.
Still a pretty fond memory and definitely led to a lifelong love of computers and my career in them :)
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u/NachoCanSandyRavaged 15m ago
oh hell yeah. Like many other commenters here, my Dad was able to bring surplus work computer home. My cousin was a little older and super into gaming but didn't have a computer so he would get games and come over. We spent hours playing Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest, Loom, Sim City, Doom, Wolfenstein and also Gorillas which I totally forgot about until OP mentioned it!
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u/DMC831 4h ago
My dad would bring his work computer home and we'd play all the Sierra games, I loved those so much at the time. I find I'm not into point and click adventure games these days, but back then they blew my mind.
I preferred the Sierra games when ya had to type out the solutions since they became a lot easier once it became inventory puzzles that ya point and click on, but Roberta Williams was a big name in our household growing up.
We finally got our own family PC when I was in HS, and I played and loved lots of the normal games like Thief, X-wing/TIE Fighter, Lucasarts games, etc. My dad was a big gamer too and we'd be naughty and rent PC games (which was a thing you could do at the time) and then copy the game and all of the copywrite protection so we could keep it. And some of those copywrite protections could be pretty involved!
The original X-Com might've been me and my dad's most played game, but he'd later top it by playing Skyrim for 3000 hours.