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Posted on August 20, 2010, Phil Owen 10 PC Games I Forgot Existed (LIST)



When I was a kid, I did most of my gaming on a PC that looked like that ^^^. It didn’t look like much, but it got the job done, and I played a whole lot of games on it.

Well, it turned out that I completely forget about pretty much everything I ever played as a kid except like Commander Keen and Tie Fighter. We all understand why I didn’t forget about Tie Fighter, but why did Commander Keen stay with me? Umm, it’s about a kid who goes to Mars. Billy was my role model, man.

Without further ado, here are ten games I played when I was young but which I completely forgot about when I started drinking heavily and doing meth at age 12. (I mean, I’m from Alabama. Did you really assume I didn’t do meth?)* These games are numbered from the one I remembered first while compiling this list (10) to the one I remembered most recently (1)

10

The Game: Lemmings

Developer: DMA Design (now Rockstar North!)

When It Came Out: 1991

Where Can I Get It: The original is abandonware now, so pretty much anywhere.

How the hell could I forget about Lemmings? It’s only the best game ever made about leading animals off a cliff. In this game, you direct a bunch of mindless Canadian animals with green hair through mazes of a sort in which you had to have them avoid traps and holes and burrow through rocks and stuff in order to reach the exit, which was usually just another big cliff at the end of the maze off which all the lemmings would run and presumably die. After playing this thing, I just knew I’d be a gamr4lyfe.

9

The Game: Star Wars: Rebel Assault

Developer: LucasArts

When It Came Out: 1993

Where Can I Get It: I haven’t found any retailers selling it online, so it’s likely considered abandonware.

Rebel Assault, bizarrely, was the first Star Wars game I ever played, and to this day it’s still one of the dumbest. It’s not just dumb because it completely bastardizes the entire Star Wars story by having some bro named RookieOne blow up the first Death Star after he and other rebel forces fleed from Echo Base on Hoth, which the Empire had destroyed. No, the entire concept of this game was dumb. Here’s the pitch: Let’s make a game that uses entirely pre-rendered graphics. This meant the game was a really s**tty and boring rail shooter, but it was f**king Star Wars, man, so I didn’t care. Still don’t actually. The best thing about this game is that it spawned a sequel that had live-action cutscenes. I love games with live-action cutscenes!

8

The Game: Wing Commander: Privateer

Developer: Origin

When It Came Out: 1993

Where Can I Get It: This game is abandonware.

This game doesn’t really fit into the Wing Commander story, but it is part of the universe, and there are Kilrathi. Now, the appeal of this game is that it’s an open-world game. Yes, there is a plot, but you can dick around in the world all you want in search of fame and fortune. And I spent like a year doing just that. It was awesome.

7

The Game: SimCopter

Developer: Maxis

When It Came Out: 1996

Where Can I Get It: I’m not totally sure what this game’s status is, but abandonware is likely what it is.

SimCopter was one of the many hundreds of Sim titles Maxis put out in the 90s, and in my experience, it’s the one people are least aware of. What you do in this one is load up one of your SimCity cities and then fly around in your choppah doing fun stuff like putting out fires, chasing down criminals and taking hurt people to the hospital. And that’s it. You just do the same things over and over again, but because I was a kid flying a helicopter around a big city, it took a loooooooong time for me to get tired of it.

6

The Game: One Must Fall 2097

Developer: Epic Megagames

When It Came Out: 1994

Where Can I Get It: This one is now free/abandonware.

I don’t have a clue when or how I got a hold of this shareware 2D fighting game, but it was just there one day, so I played it. And even though I never bought the full version, I just kept playing. The premise here is that rich people bought big ole fighting robots and pitted them against each other in awesome cages matches, and the cage walls were booby trapped with torches or by being electrified and stuff. So the appeal of the game to me was throwing my opponent against the wall and watching magic happen.

5

The Game: The Amazon Trail

Developer: MECC

When It Came Out: 1994

Where Can I Get It: Abandonware.

It’s like the Oregon Trail, except less fun and with a story.You travel back in time at the urging of a panther (like, the animal), and then you travel the titular trail to deliver something or other to some people. And you had to talk to people all the time to learn stuff. And travel through time some more. Basically, this game was likely the result of people at MECC thinking that kids were having too much fun with the Oregon Trail, and so they made this game. I only played it because I became a hipster douche when I was 6, and so I didn’t want to keep playing Oregon Trail like all the other losers I knew. I was cool, man.

4

The Game: Descent

Developer: Parallax

When It Came Out: 1995

Where Can I Get It: Get it and Descent 2 from Good Old Games.

Not much to this game; it’s a flight sim in which you fly around tunnels and blow stuff up. Descent is notable, to me, as the first game I played at a LAN party (OK, so maybe I wasn’t so cool), and thus it was the first PC game I played a lot against other people. It was fun because I was playing with friends, and to this day I enjoy playing online against strangers considerably less than playing against folks I know.

3

The Game: X-Com: Interceptor

Developer: Microprose

When It Came Out: 1998

Where Can I Get It: Get it from Steam.

This one is known sort of as the red-headed stepdouche of the X-Come franchise, and yet this was the one I played the most. The idea here is that you are in charge of X-Com’s push through the galaxy, and you have to administer X-Com bases and stuff and fly a starfighter and fight aliens and human pirates and research new technology and prevent the aliens from blowing up Earth with their Death Star. Now, the shooting isn’t particularly fun, but the administration part, which was pretty simple and undemanding, was very pleasant to me, and space exploration is one of those things that will always suck me in. Also, the game does that thing where it names your pilots, which meant I became emotionally invested. Aaaaaaaaaand now I wanna play the game again.

2

The Game: The Incredible Machine

Developer: A couple bros called Kevin Ryan and Jeff Tunnell

When It Came Out: 1993

Where Can I Get It: Get it and its sequels from Good Old Games.

How does one describe The Incredible Machine? It’s an engineering puzzle game. Um, it can get reeeeeeeeeally complex. Really, it’s such a crazy game that if you don’t know what it is, you probably won’t be able to figure it out from my descriptions. So here’s, instead, a video of a dude playing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6etb0_u_hk

I hope that clears things up.

1

The Game: Raptor: Call of the Shadows

Developer: Apogee

When It Came Out: 1994

Where Can I Get It: Get it here.

Raptor is not a unique game at all. It’s a top-down, Galaga-style (but scrolling) shooter, and you upgrade your ship. Simple. There are a few games like this, and I just ended up with this one via shareware because, well, I don’t really know. But it was there, and I played it. All the time. For years. And then, one day, I stopped, and I don’t know why. Long live Raptor!

*I have absolutely never done meth ever in my life. Ever.