Growing up gaming: The first five PC games I ever bought

I've already written about the five space combat sims that defined my youth—but as the comments in that article aptly demonstrated, there’s far more to PC gaming than just space combat sims. In this nostalgia piece, I'm both widening and narrowing the net—this time, I'm setting aside genre and game type and instead looking at the first five PC games I ever brought home from the local Babbage’s.

Of course, I didn’t buy these games, because at the time I was like eight or ten years old. My dad bought them, often after me begging him to drive us to Babbage’s to pick something out—a car ride filled with wide-eyed anticipation on the way up and frantic manual-reading on the way back. One of the reasons I think I have so many warm memories of playing games as a kid is because of my dad—most often I played them with him. Or rather I "played" them with him—that is, he actually did the majority of the playing and I hung around and on him making kid-suggestions on what to do next and asking a lot of questions.

It’s also important to note that while these were the first games we bought, they weren’t the first games I ever played. We had a big wood-paneled Atari VCS (later known as the Atari 2600) with an enormous cardboard box of games that my uncle had given us, and by the time I was five or six, I was already an old hand at games like River Raid and Berzerk. But as a card-carrying member of the "PC master race," the first PC games I (or at least my family) bought from the store hold a special place in the game shelf of my heart.

The very first one: Oo-Topos

Produced by Penguin Software—a small publisher later forced to rename itself to "Polarware" after repeated legal threats from Penguin Books—Oo-Topos was one of the company’s "Comprehend Interactive Novel" series of games. As with many titles of its era, Oo-Topos was a graphical adventure game with a simple text parser that let you type in commands like "go east," "take laser," and "open door." This allowed for some comparatively rich interactivity compared to a more modern point-and-click adventure, while at the same time also being simpler to program and implement—the mouse didn’t become a commonly used input device for most IBM-compatible PC owners until Windows 3.0 and 3.1 became popular, so the keyboard was the primary interface method most IBM-PC owners were familiar with.

Oo-Topos cast the player as the pilot of a cargo ship that had been waylaid by intergalactic pirates. But not just any cargo ship—your ship was carrying a cargo intended to save the Earth from an accidentally released cloud of toxic waste. You must escape the space pirates, find your ship and its cargo, and blast off to resume your mission as soon as possible, or the Earth and all its inhabitants perish.

Like many games of its day, part of Oo-Topos’ story was told by the manual and the items that came with the game (these pack-in items were commonly called "feelies" because they were often physical representations of things in the game and even sometimes functioned as copy protection). The game’s manual was themed as a flight manual for your ship, for example, and contained information you actually needed to refer to in order to take off (assuming you escaped from the pirates first). To a young space-obsessed kid, that cryptic book with its made-up acronyms and initialisms provided a lot of extra reading and enjoyment.

Having recently played through it from start to finish, Oo-topos still holds quite a bit of challenge, especially to a modern gamer accustomed to tutorials, hand-holding, and pointing and clicking. The parser interface by its very nature cloaks rather than reveals possible actions in any given room; the player must carefully and explicitly inspect their surroundings and deduce the right course of action. Though the game does have graphics for every room, they’re not always clear or demonstrative—though considering the CGA lens through which PC players had to experience the game, the designers did a great job with what resources they had available.

Rolling twenties with The Temple of Apshai Trilogy

My only experience with AD&D (or just D&D) when I was very little was the Saturday morning cartoon of the same name. I had some concept that it was a game that older kids played and that there were swords and magic (along with the titular dungeons and dragons). So wheedling my parents into getting The Temple of Apshai Trilogy seemed a great way in my young mind to play the same kind of game that the older kids were playing—but in a format I was comfortable with.

It proved to be a bit over my young head. The game compilation, made of three titles and published by Epyx, used a sort-of-but-not-quite-D20 engine called "Dunjonquest" to guide the player through the fantasy RPG world. One limitation—or perhaps a bonus—of the system is that before embarking on one of the three main quests, players could either randomly generate a character or enter their own stats. To play fairly, you’d either want to let the random number generator pick your stats out, or you’d manually enter in a previously played character’s stats.

Or…you could do what any self-respecting eight-year old would do, and enter in a character with all 18s and enough gold to afford the best weapons and armor in the game. Because 8-year olds have no self-control.

The Dunjonquest system in Temple presented a relatively minimal interface, though it was graphical—you could maneuver your character around from a top-down perspective, attack enemies with your sword or bow, and search for traps or secret doors. Players had to rely on the large printed manual for descriptions of their environment, though—each room was numbered, and players had to look the room number up in the manual in order to read a description of where they were and what they saw. Often, clues about secret exits or other potential discoveries were there, making the game a lot less playable today via emulation unless you also have a copy of the manual.

It seems like rather a thin experience, but I spent hours wandering through the three Temple adventures as a ludicrously overpowered adventurer. I certainly missed the main point of the game, but it was undeniably fun to wander around and bash monsters.

Transylvania and showtunes

Transylvania was the next game we picked up—I remember it clearly because it sat on the shelf right next to its sequel, The Crimson Crown. My dad suggested we buy the first one first, which was wise of him, as it gave me something to look forward to: if I beat this game, we could go back to the store and get another one!

The title was another Polarware/Penguin Software interactive novel, functioning similarly to Oo-Topos. It used the same parser-based interface and it had the same level of graphics; the difference, as might be inferred from the title, was that Transylvania was about vampires instead of space pirates.

The player takes on the role of an adventurer in the land of—surprise—Transylvania. An evil vampire has kidnapped the princess Sabrina, and you only have a short amount of time to rescue her before dawn comes and the vampire kills her. As is typical of the genre, the game involves a lot of item collecting and some annoyingly complex puzzles—including one that ends up involving statues and aliens and putting on your robe and wizard hat.

The game also actually required you to use the real-world "feelies" it came packaged with in order to acquire a critical item. In order to summon the Wizard Zin and get his help, the player had to go to the wizard’s house and then sing "Some Enchanted Evening." Without the wizard’s calling card from the game’s packaging, this would have been absolutely impossible to figure out.

Transylvania proved too difficult for me to complete on my own, and there wasn’t anything even remotely like GameFAQs.com in the mid-'80s to consult for a walkthrough. Though the game provided hours of diversions, I didn’t actually complete it until some time in the past few years, when I sat down with a walkthrough and powered through some of the more obtuse puzzles.

(For the record, I did end up getting The Crimson Crown shortly after Transylvania, and it was a much more enjoyable game—in fact, you had two companions that you could command and whose help was required to solve puzzles—and this was at least fifteen years before Daikatana and its mandatory and frustrating buddy system!)

The best game ever: Starflight

My world changed when my dad brought home Starflight. I wrote about the genre-defining game a few years ago, but it’s worth restating that Starflight is one of the greatest games ever created, for any platform. It packed a procedurally generated galaxy of hundreds of stars and planets onto two 360KB floppy disks, but more than that, it had an intriguing story—and unlike so many modern games, it didn’t lay its cards on the table all at once.

Set in the year 4620, Starflight has the player taking on the role of a captain about to embark on an exploration mission. Your civilization has recently discovered—more properly rediscovered—faster than light travel, and your job is to hop into one of the first FTL exploration ships your world has built and see what’s out there. You must gather resources with which to upgrade your ship and train your crew, and as you do this, you’ll encounter aliens you can communicate with—some friendly, some not.

The story begins to reveal itself as the player travels further and further afield. A wave of stellar flares is sweeping across this sector of the galaxy—and they don’t appear to be random. Something is using them to wipe out all intelligent life—possibly the same something responsible for the demise of the empire to which humanity and several of the local friendly aliens belonged ages ago. It becomes your job to find out what’s behind the wave of flares and to stop them before your home world is engulfed.

Starflight’s slow burn and dialog-driven plot are masterfully done, with the game unrolling like a beautiful scroll the further down one digs. The game’s resource gathering and crew management directly influenced scores of other games—most notably the equally classic Star Control II (reborn as the open-sourced title The Ur-Quan Masters) and even modern titles like the Mass Effect series.

No game before, and no game sinse, has evoked the sheer feeling of slack-jawed astonishment and wonder that Starflight pulled out of my young little brain. The game makes you feel like a mouse crawling through the vast wreckage of a long-dead glorious past, sniffing through piles of dust and catching glimpses of the ghosts that once ruled the stars. And the reveal at the end-game of who’s behind the wave of stellar flares—well, it doesn’t take a whole lot to blow a little kid’s mind, but my mind was definitely blown.

Out of every game I’ve ever played, Starflight remains my favorite.

Space Quest I and the beginning of a love affair

For all of Starflight’s riveting awe and immensity, though, the game that’s probably had the most profound and permanent effect on me as a gamer is the original Space Quest, which we bought right after its release in 1986. Space Quest was my first exposure to Sierra gaming. Other '80s-era PC gamers know that for a few years, you could pretty much divide games into two distinct categories: Sierra games and everything else.

Space Quest was amazing, even when playing it on our absurdly bad CGA-equipped IBM PC (I’ve taken the time to configure DOSBox for CGA, so you can get an idea of what it was like to play the game on an IBM PC without EGA graphics). You play "Roger Wilco" (though in both Space Quests I and II you can rename your character at the game’s start), and you’re a space janitor. "That’s right," confirm’s the game’s opening card, "a janitor. And not a very good one."

An on-the-job nap in the broom closet turns out to be the smartest thing you’ve ever done, as you awaken and find everyone else on the ship has been murdered by the Sariens, a marauding intergalactic band of evil-doers. You must find the plans for the Star McGuffin, escape the ship, stop the Sariens, and save the universe.

Space Quest was the second of gaming pioneer Sierra On-Line’s "Quest" series of games. It was preceded by King’s Quest and later joined by the more adult-themed Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry series, then by Hero’s Quest/Quest for Glory, which was arguably the last of the "Quest" games (arguably because Sierra made many more extremely important and influential adventure games, not all with the word "Quest" in the title). After publishing the world’s first graphical adventure game in 1980, the company grew to dominate the PC gaming and publishing landscape. There was a prolonged period of time from about 1985 through about 1995 where Sierra games consistently topped sales charts whenever they were released and the company was universally acclaimed for producing excellent games with complex, satisfying stories. (It all came tumbling and crashing down in the late '90s thanks to a complex series of unfortunate events—but that’s the subject of another article.)

Back to Space Quest, though: the game mixed equal parts puzzle solving and humor together in a combination that I found absolutely entrancing. Though the game at times suffered from the early stages of "adventure game puzzle madness" (where players are required to solve puzzles by making almost ludicrous deductive leaps with inventory items—something which competitor LucasArts was notorious for in its games), making it to the end of the game proved possible through a concerted family effort by my dad, my brother, and me—and I was hooked.

Sierra’s games became a staple on my shelf, as they did for most other PC gamers in the '80s and '90s. In fact, everything I remember about my eleventh birthday in 1989 is wrapped up in the anticipation of receiving Space Quest III—waiting for my dad to get home from work with the game, eagerly thanking him for it with a frenzied hug, and then rushing to the computer with my buddy Steve and playing the game all night long.

Gaming is an ephemeral thing—it’s generally something you do for pleasure during downtime—but the scaffolding of our lives and memories are often built out of the things we do while waiting for other things to happen. These five games all contributed hugely to my joy while I was small, and I’m glad I was able to grow up with them.