The big one for me was Ultima Online.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Mega Man X
Played it for like 6 hours straight when I first got it. Took me over a year to beat Sigma.
Mega Man Legends
Also took me a while to finish, especially because it took a few months between getting the PS1 and buying memory cards
I did spend a lot of time with RPG Maker 2000 too, I did probably some 3 different games, never finished or published any of them.
Runescape and Diablo 2. Soul Caliber was also a favorite with my friend group a little bit later.
Doom 1/2. Wolfenstein 3d, Duke Nukem 3d
I spent a lot of time playing Sonic Mega Collection on gamecube. At least before maybe 6th or 7th grade when I got Borderlands 1 on xbox360.
Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, GoldenEye 64, Super Smash Bros, Deus Ex, Toejam and Earl, Tetris for Gameboy, Carmageddon, Quake, Unreal, Betrayal in Antara, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, Super Mario Bros 3, Sonic
I don't want to brag, but I once made it to level 12 in Tetris for gameboy, in a T.J Maxx in the 90s. I only lost because my mom said she was done shopping. But I had the perfect lighting spot and didn't want to move. So I said "Just go back to shopping. You love shopping."
And my mom took that personally.
My best ever tetris run may have gone on even further. I'll never know where I'd have gotten. In the end, my run was ended by my mom dragging me out of the store by my ear.
Still though. Level 12.
Ultima IV, Elite, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Kikstart II, RC Pro Am, Racing Destruction Set, Zaxxon
But the first was ….
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APF_TV_Fun_series
Played this for hours.
Yeah I’m old.
Okay, so I think this impacted by the platforms I owned, which was:
- Commodore 64
- Game Boy
- SEGA Master System
- SEGA Genesis
- A bunch of DOS/Windows PCs
- iMac
If I were to consider my favourite games across all these systems, they would be:
- Lode Runner
- Great Giana Sisters
- OutRun
- Super Mario Land
- Tetris
- Sonic 2
- Road Rash
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
- NHL 94
- Earthworm Jim
- MDK
- SimCity
- Civilization
- Heretic
- Marathon
- Escape Velocity
- GeneForge
- Tomb Raider
- Earth 2140
Road Rash! How fun. I had forgotten about that game until right now. (Carmen & Earthworm Jim are also classic).
In no particular order: Age of empires, HoMMs, Disciples, StarCraft, WarCraft, Dark Reign, Battlezone, Red Alert, Dune, Lula, 3D maze screensaver, strip poker, Duke Nukem, a virused version of that desktop mayhem thing that let you smash it in all kinds of way and many others that will be mentioned in other comments.
Games that give you a lifetime of fun.
[email protected] one of these is sus 😳
Seriously, Dune ii I get, but Dune?
Why not? It's a fun adventure with a little strategy. I like it.
I honestly never played Dune, just Dune 2 which was awesome.
Ultima underworld, that was the shit.
I grew up with some of the first games. Loved Sierra's library. Played some of the more eclectic games like Battle Beast and Howie's Great Word Adventure. As far as programs went, I didn't get much into it until later. But, I do remember using the Microsoft Works Creative Writing Program. That was fun to do designs on.
My absolute first PC game I ever remember was Math Blaster lol I loved it
Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2 (shout-out to OpenRCT!), Island of Dr Brain, Oregon Trail 3rd edition, Math Blaster, and a bunch of little educational games that nobody else has ever heard of from Ohio Distinctive Software.
As an edutainment nerd, I would be happy to hear the names of these little educational games
a bunch of little educational games that nobody else has ever heard of from Ohio Distinctive Software.
If you remember at least the names, you should consider contributing to the MobyGames database
Looks like all they have rn on record is like 3 games lmao
Old mac user: Lode Runner, KidPix, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, Allied General
My family used to put in hundreds of hours into Civilization 2 and once we were a little older we played Red Alert spending even more time building maps for ourselves to play. We could never figure out how to set up a LAN growing up, but it was a lot of fun all the same.
Off the top of my head: Savage Empire, LHX Attack Chopper, Operation Wolf, Lemmings, some German football manager game (I forgot the name, just Zuruck and Weiter are etched into my brain), Supaplex, ...
Bundesliga Manager?
That's what ChatGPT kept suggesting but no, doesn't look like it at all. The graphics I remember hardly contained any greens. I can remember black backgrounds with harsh pink/purple borders and texts.
Having gone through some of the football manager games of that period, it seems the one I had back in the day was rudimentary, even compared to its contemporaries. I now suppose it was some hobby project that was distributed in small circles, and somehow got into the hands of my Dad, who passed it along. That was the seed for my years-long addiction to Championship Manager :D
some German football manager game
Anstoss?
Anstoss
I don't think so, that looks way too modern. I'm trying to find out the name but it's hard with so little info :)
Okay, wish you good luck on your search.
Outside the super common ones like Mario, Zelda, Quake, etc...I'll list some pretty early ones.
River Raid
Comixzone
Flashback
Castles
A good chunk of my early pc games were demo disks from magazines
Total annihilation was my jam. Especially when I started finding mods and new units online.
Commander Keen! We had 1, 4, 6 and Dreams. Probably all of them Shareware. Those games made me want to get a pogo stick.
Might and Magic 4+5: World of Xeen waa what I considered our first "real" game. I didn't really understand it at the time. It's turn based but I played it like it's real time. I still play it every other year.
Well, Deluxe Music and Deluxe Paint when it comes to programs; and oh so many Rainbow Arts games: Giana Sisters, Turrican 1 - 3, X-Out, Mad TV. But also the classic Civilization and Sim City.
Sim City.
Many many hours sunk into Sim City 2k lmao...I should get back into it
SC2k surely was a simpler time :D
Anim8or
Thanks for this. Just recently I was trying to remember what this program was called. I remember doing the egg plant tutorial.
Monkey Island, Master of Orion 2, Commander Keen, Heroes of might and magic, Diablo, Warcraft.
I loved Speedy Eggbert and played Oregon Trail. Also played Math Muncher.
Eventually started playing StarCraft, Warcraft, Red Alert, Quake, Doom, UT, Half Life. Then didn't bother with educational stuff on my PC until I tried Blender and tutorials had you trying out generating models with Python
I completely forgot about Speedy Eggbert LMAO core memory unlocked
The biggest ones for me were the Marathon series, and a lot of old shareware RPGs (Realmz, Exile).
The 3rd title in the Marathon series came packaged with all of the tools they used to make the game, with which you could very easily make new maps and wild mods adding or changing weapons, enemies, mechanics, etc... I spent an absolutely unreasonable amount of time fucking around with that.
The maps were very rudimentary 3D (think Doom style), and they weren't really 3D spaces so much as just corridors and rooms connected to each other. You could have a corridor that turned 90 degrees 3 times with no elevation change, and passed "through" itself, without actually having the two intersecting corridors connect in any way, which let you make some really wild maps with some pretty unique features that would be challenging to pull off in modern games. (There was even a multiplayer map called 5D Space that really showcased this interaction.)
Crystal Quest
mleb mleb oooOOoo
Boulderdash 2, Kickstart 2, Jumpman jr, Hawkeye and Flimbo's quest. And probably tons of others I've forgotten about unfortunately.
Mortal Kombat 1 on a black and white laptop, playing 2 player matches with both players using the same keyboard
😆 that's sounds horrible
Zoombinies and Ski
Heroes of Might and Magic III (but also 4 to a lesser extent and 5 briefly) were mainstays as hot-seat multiplayer when hanging around at somebody's house. Always a good time.
The other real defining game of my childhood was Diablo 2. We played that on and off for probably over a decade growing up, every couple of years people would get the itch again and everybody would tag along. Was a real cultural touchstone in school.
Backyard baseball, my first encyclopedia, some lemonade stand simulator, pokemon yellow, dragon warrior monsters, eclipse mmo maker.
Had none, didn't own a device capable of gaming until I was 14/15 and even then didn't start playing games till I was 17/18.
I'm 21 ( soon 22 ) now.
Programs are software. Technically, games are also software, but they evolved into their own genre.