Found while looking up publication dates, and a good warning for not putting random user reviews into your search result snippet:
In some ways, Zork III: The Dungeon Master is the original Myst clone.
There’s really only one reaction: lol wut
This post is where listicle and annotated bibliography collide as musings over some computer games I played long ago. *blows gently upon dust* It’s another post mostly for me, with the utility in seeing what I could pull from memory.
Most of what I’ve played, whether listed here or not, was enabled by others. I wasn’t supposed to have computer games after ~1990, lest they detract somehow. Enabling thus bears relevance for several effects: the use of attrib +h instead of deleting things as bidden; the cathexis of gameplay as a covert experience, silenced and rendered marginal several ways; and, most meaningfully, the formation of a discontinuous, diachronic community (in medievalist Brian Stock’s sense of textual communities). Most of my enablers cared less about these games than I: classic dichotomy of plenty/scarcity. Something crucial about capitalist consumption’s influence upon identity formation is imbricated here—a potential for the corporatization of chance inclinations, especially—but let’s not be too cynical or, um, too full of fancy jargon.
…I turned up the jargon for fun, because I can. It doesn’t recur below.
Though my memory traps extra things sometimes (and sheds others almost without my noticing, alas), relative scarcity is what makes assembling the post possible at this remove. Relative scarcity has made me possible, I suppose.
1993–94
—after summer 1993, the world changed[*]
- Ultima Underworld 2 (1993): think I bought this one. Later, I went to grad school (and served on a sadly useless “computer committee”) with its lead writer, randomly. His novels Invincible and You are good!
- Heaven and Earth (1992): mentioned by friend AM (who then dropped out of undergrad because focused college was too weird after years of being a working actress; she returned two years later and became a psych prof), and supplied by friend …B, I think. For its seasons-oriented card game, I missed a few weekend dorm meals by accident.
- Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992): supplied by friend B, who’d also introduced me to CopperMUD the year prior and who enabled U7.5 the year after.
- Civilization (1991): supplied by friend E? E definitely waxed rhapsodic about FreeCiv later.
- Star Control II (1992): played two-player with A on one keyboard, his.
- sprinklings of Infocom games I’d missed: bought by me in form of Lost Treasures CD collections.
I couldn’t afford Myst upon its release. Not sure when I played it, courtesy of A—1995?—but I remember failing later to click on a crucial QuickTime animation near Riven‘s end for 45 minutes because my aging Toshiba laptop (Pentium 120) could not cope. Those minutes come with visuals for the room I was in—not before 2001—which means I finished Riven a handful of months before Syberia, probably unlike anyone else interested in such games. Notice the lags between publication date and play date below.
Also: B, M, P, and R (not to mention A) majored in computer science in college. E chose physics, but it doesn’t matter in that most of E’s working years have been as a coder. You have one guess for them en masse: male or female?
1992–93
- Jill of the Jungle (1992): dl’d from a WWIV BBS after friend M sold me a slow, cheap modem. Here are OST .ogg files. I didn’t see the cover art until this week *coughs* but it was a keyboard-controlled platformer! which meant my console-lacking self could play it! and it was 2D, so I could see everything properly! and thus I finished every level.
- After Dark’s port of Asteroids, Mac-only: on favorite HS teacher’s classroom computer after I’d graded quizzes or stuffed envelopes—a Mac Classic, I think.
- Ultima: Martian Dreams (1991): bought by me.
- Wishbringer (1985): completed collaboratively ~5 a.m. on friend J’s computer during a sleepover.
- top-down scrolling aircraft/air-to-land shooter that I can sort of visualize but not name: supplied by creepy guy from whom my father had bought a couple of x86 CPUs by then and who traded GIFs with him. Why yes, I uploaded those GIFs for BBS transfer credit so that I could dl games. WTF else were they good for.
Wish I remembered this game’s title—I spent a lot of time with it, and it was useful conversationally all through college with guys who didn’t believe I’d played real, non-arcade computer games. Arcades didn’t count because of mini golf and Chuck E. Cheese—and anyway, I was only passable at Centipede and pinball machines. Those take practice, which meant a lot of quarters I didn’t have. - Solar Realms Elite: a WWIV door not unlike Taipan!, q.v., and first played on friend R’s BBS.
summer 1992, bff’s parents’ sheep farm’s office computer
- Ishido: The Way of Stones (1990): fun yet kind of awkwardly orientalizing.
- pre-release cut of SimFarm (final release 1993): if you could save enough $ to plant apple and orange trees, you could walk away and the game would keep making money. That bug felt strange in a tiny office amid the northern reaches of midcontinental prairie, stranger given that the main sheep farmer was also a telecom VP.
1991–92
- Tetris for Windows (1990?): supplied by creepy guy mentioned above, who thought my father lacked for diversions or something. Creepy guy’s provisioning was useful, although my father never touched these tossed-in freebies.
This specific Tetris port wrecked or built something in my brain re: variants because its colors differed from both the DOS version (q.v.) and the arcade versions; I’ve always played it by color, not strictly by shape. The L shapes for this port are purple and yellow.
1990–91
- The Bard’s Tale II (1986): supplied by friend P, and left unfinished despite my hand-copying the hint maps onto graph paper (nowhere nearby to Xerox—in 1988, one teacher still gave us dittos with purple text). BT2 taught me that I needed a isometric reference point or I’d become hopelessly lost in 3D, though I did manage Descent (1995) in 1995.
- Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990): likewise P. That was a lot of discs. Until Morrowind, it was my favorite CRPG despite remaining unfinished due to a blocker bug. If you wander around for too long, Lord British vanishes and the game can’t be completed. Oops.
- SimEarth (1990): purchased via birthday/holiday gift money that I wasn’t allowed to use for books. It was oddly satisfying to achieve sentient ferns and uplift cute little robots.
1989–90
- Zork II (1981): purchased by my mother, after much pleading. At least it was completable with InvisiClues help!
- Arkanoid (1988 = Apple IIgs): purchased by my mother.
- Rogue (DOS 1984): supplied by creepy guy. Hello, Rodney, who was never allotted a vocative comma. I used to imagine that Rodney and the Zork III sailor were part of a potions trade, and then I met nethack and web-based hints in college and realized I’d never seen even half the potions that Rogue offers.
1987
- Marble Madness (1986 IIgs): purchased by my mother.
- Tetris (1987): supplied by creepy guy. It was the freebie for the household’s first IBM-compatible, an XT on which my mother was to learn Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect 5.0 for her bus-ad degree. Learning WP5.x was useful for me: the job I took to stop teaching near the end of grad school used WP/Win, and all the keyboard shortcuts were still the same.
1986
- Taipan! (1982): supplied by friend H—actually her older brother, but H and I played it way more than he did, across several years. Two different adaptations went onto my new PalmPilot a decade later.
- Zork III (1982): purchased by my mother—it cost $39.95 in 1986. Its subtitle, “It all comes down to this,” remains perfectly apt now, especially since it sat unfinished for ~15 years due to yet another blocker bug as well as my then-insufficient cognition.
What about consoles? Exposure thereto was only two things: a few hours of Super Mario in 1987 one fine day at friend W’s house, and brief moments of passing around Tetris on someone’s Gameboy during bus rides to/from youth orchestra retreats. I had two early clamshell portables (Nintendo Game & Watch), Donkey Kong II and Mario Bros.; one was broken during an adult’s fit of pique, and I replaced it somewhat later (though well before eBay/similar). I think the G&W clamshells are still in a box somewhere. Mine take SR44/LR44 batteries, same as the bicycle speedometer/odometer I used to have.
No console controller = poor platformer reflexes and in-game depth perception. It turns out that that’s a thing, like the difference between learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car as a young person versus as a middling to older adult. Longtime console players learned to see artistic conventions indicating depth, and the rest of us didn’t (but I still finished God of War in 2005, rented cartridge, on D’s PS2).
* Footnote from the top, re: “the world changed”—
Until 1993, for music I had the radio, three pop albums on cassette tape, a few musicals I’d copied onto tape from library CDs, and sporadic access to one parent’s CDs/tapes/records. The end. The three albums: Heart’s Bad Animals and two gifts from friend H—Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors and Erasure’s Two-Ring Circus. In spring of 1993, I subscribed to Columbia House and picked up a few CDs of my own, mostly Enya and (trad not newage) Clannad, but the world really changed dramatically after that summer.