Last year at PAX east I went to a panel about archiving classic video games and arcade machines. It was run by the American Classic Arcade Museum. There were some great stories of finding old games in unlikely places. I think this stuff is really neat!
Hitchhikers? Leather Goddesses of Mars? My favorite pc games of the 80's were text based games, other than Microleague Baseball
I played a lot of Microleague Baseball and Colonial Conquest. Never really was big on video games outside of the arcade.
MY favorite Pc games of the 80's were probably the old Sierra games (King's Quest series and what not) along with various RPG games like Bard's Tale and the AD&D Glod Box games by SSI.
I remember the first PC game my parents ever bought me was TIE Fighter. I think it had 6 or 7 floppy disks for installation. Before that, all I played was that game with the snake that eats apples or whatever and that football game on the NES.
I've never been a big video game player, but the oldest ones I can remember are the Apple IIe-era versions of Oregon Trail and the Hitchhiker's Guide Infocom game. Also Cannon Fodder on the Mac Plus.
Oh man, TIE fighter was so much fun! It looked and felt so real! One of the first video games I remember playing was a little Infocom game called "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
I wish I had all of that. I played it on a cousin's computer. He had some awesome games, and a badass IBM PS/2, with dual floppy drives!
First computer was an Apple LC II. Only got to play educational games. Oregon Trail, Math Blasters, Spelling Blizzard, and the crown jewel (don't remember how I got it sold as educational) Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
I used to have a typing tutor program for the Apple IIc called "Letter Invaders." Letters dropped from the sky and you had to hit the corresponding key to kill them before they blew up part of your city.
My first games were Mario Bros - no super! - on a coin machine at our hotel in Mallorca, and three games on a school friend's C64: Maniac Mansion, where we kept getting caught in the kitchen; Bubble Bobble; and a game where you could steer a person in their home to do mundane things with written commands. Can't seem to find out what that was.
The first game I've ever played was Star Control 1 on a 386sx. A great start for a gamer career! Still waiting for a sequel/remake. SC II was absolutely brillant (best game music ever!) , but the horrible SC III killed the franchise.
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ for you jan jansen. BG1 and2. Dune1. Age of empires 1 and 2 King's quest series quest for glory wing commander ultima Commander keen. Doom1 and 2 Civ 2.
I played a lot of games on the Commodore 128: The Bard's Tale Starflight Microleague Baseball and Earl Weaver Baseball (when I got a PC I graduated to APBA Baseball) Seven Cities of Gold
Heh, I remember that game! I was much better at it than I was on Missile Command. And @Chuck: totally forgot about Seven Cities of Gold. I would pretty much always slaughter the Indians, as they seemed to have minimal interest in commerce. Did you ever play the sequel/spin-off, Heart of Africa?
Speaking of hearts, one of my favorite games ever was Heart of China. That game was fun, and I played it to death.
Heart of Africa was also fun. Those Electronic Arts games looked cool on the shelf. I liked the "vinyl album" style of the packaging.
I love old C64 games. I had Strip Poker, and when I would win the game, my opponent would show me her boobies in all their black and white, 8 bit glory.
Strip poker on the Commodore was my intro to computer porn. But the problem with that game was the long painful wait, listening to the whir of the disk drive, until the new image loaded.