I mostly play video games on my Switch now, or my phone, if at all. One thing I didn’t expect before I wrote this list was how many entries would be computer games. The first computer in our house was some sort of used Apple II which I mostly used as a digital typewriter. The first new computer I remember getting was some sort of Hewlett Packard with its own custom interface layer on top of Windows 3.1 with a house/room metaphor. Anyway, I fell in love with computers and computer games before we ever had a home video game console (the NES), and because of their cost we never owned more than a handful of games. Computer games were easily found on clearance, or used, or pirated, and boy have I played plenty. Here are seven I loved and about which remain sentimental.
1) SimCity 2000
This was the SimCity for me. I think I spent as much time with the terrain designer as I did playing the main game. At some point I had it on our computer at home. I also remember playing it in some sort of “tech lab” class in 7th grade that sprang up in a vocational slot we could take in lieu of learning actually useful shop skills. I still don’t really know how to set a table saw, but I do know that a digital city needs a lot more fire stations than you’d think.
2) Dark Forces: Jedi Knight
Dark Forces was a first-person shooter game in the style of Doom or Quake, but with laser swords and force powers. It was incredible. I played it a lot and was honestly very good at it. The Dark Forces / Jedi Knight series of games, along with the Timothy Zahn novels, were a big playground for my imagination and early fandom instincts. I’m enjoying the new Star Wars trilogy but I do kind of miss when the canon was smaller and it felt like there was more room to invent your own stories.
3) Commander Keen
My parents and I would often stop at Best Buy on our weekend trips into the Big O when I was growing up in the country. Dad was quite the technology geek then and we had fun at Best Buy, looking over all the computer stuff together. At some point they started filling the middles of the aisles with bins of shovelware on loose 3.5” floppies (that’s the save icon to you youngin’s) that were mostly shareware versions of games and accounting software, but occasionally contained complete games. I want to say they were $0.99 each, maybe two bucks. That’s how I came to find the Commander Keen series, which starred a kid that always felt like a rip-off of Spaceman Spiff from Calvin & Hobbes, which I was totally fine with.
4) Some game with lots of keys and dungeons for Apple IIE
I’ve looked through every archive I can find and none of the games I can find seem like the one I remember. So perhaps my memories of it have changed over time. We had one computer in my third grade classroom. I got to use it a lot because I kind of peaked in third grade, academically-speaking, and would get tests and assignments done much quicker than the rest of the class and my teacher was kind. My favorite game was a sort of dungeon explorer with puzzles. You had to do a lot of picking up keys from one section and taking them to another. I can still access the feeling of sitting at that computer and it’s a very calm and happy place.
5) Star Wars: TIE Fighter
TIE Fighter was one of the games included in a box set of Star Wars games for the computer that is probably one of the best Christmas presents I ever got. Thanks Mom!
Unlike Jedi Knight, I was quite bad at TIE Fighter, and usually had to use the built-in cheat modes to get through levels. I would sometimes spend an hour or more just flying around and listening to the sounds, doing nothing. My imagination, this game, my 19″ Compaq monitor, and the Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback II joystick made for an amazing little Star Wars flight simulator. When my eyes got too bleary to play anymore I would go draw my own ships and missiles in a sketchbook.
6) Star Trek: Judgment Rites
This game was horrible, glitchy, difficult, and delightful all at once. The version we had came on many, many 3.5″ floppy disks (which I always thought of as “A Disks” because they were assigned to the A drive on our computer).
I’m certain I never finished it, and probably spent as much time installing (and re-installing to troubleshoot) as I ever did playing it, but at the time it was still just so bonkers to have a STAR TREK VIDEO GAME ON MY OWN COMPUTER. LOOK IT’S KIRK AND SPOCK AND SCOTTY AND I SHOULD PICK UP THAT STICK BECAUSE WE MIGHT NEED IT LATER.
7) Super Mario Brothers 3
It’s hard to pick just one Nintendo game for this list so I’ll go with the classic. So stylish, beautiful, creative, and fun. Easily one of the best games ever made. I remember leaving the Nintendo on for an entire week so as not to lose progress during a summer trip to a lakeside cabin with family friends.
*** Originally published as List No. 65 of the 7x77 newsletter project.