You know what’s embarrassing? I still have a Gateway 2000 mouse pad on my desk at work. I am not trying to make some sort of vintage statement with it; I simply liked the mouse pad and it was the correct size for my mouse and I guess it was the right size to survive three moves while other mouse pads went missing. However, each time I look at those cows, I go back to 1994 when that beige tower arrived at our house and turned everything upside down.
My parents thought they were purchasing me educational materials. While technically they were correct, I learned many things from that 486DX2/66 with its enormous 8 MB of RAM. Just not the type of things my parents envisioned when they reluctantly agreed to pay half the price for it. Of course, I had Microsoft Encarta installed for display purposes, however the actual education occurred late at night when I learned that “one more turn” in Civilization could somehow extend until dawn.
It was that machine that introduced me to PC gaming properly, and many of those early gaming experiences have lasted longer than I ever thought possible. I’m talking about games that have accompanied me to five different computers, two marriages (okay, one marriage but it seems like two at times), career changes, and now middle age. These are not simply nostalgic relics collecting digital dust – I regularly start these up when my children are monopolizing the quality television for their PlayStation or when I want something I can depend upon after a particularly long day of spreadsheets.
Civilization is essentially digital crack cocaine masquerading as a history lesson, and it’s hard for me to think of another game that has given me that same feeling of excitement every time I start it. I first installed it from what felt like thirty seven floppy disks, and I’ve been chasing that “first city founded” rush ever since. The original Sid Meier classic had a perfect balance – complex enough to challenge you, yet easy enough that you didn’t need a user guide the size of a telephone book to advance your warrior unit.
I recall my very first complete victory like many people recall their wedding day. Winter break, junior year of high school, I started playing Thursday night as the Romans. Before I knew it, my mother was pounding on my door on Saturday morning asking if I was dead because I hadn’t left my bedroom. I attempted to explain to her that I had just directed a civilization from the Stone Age to outer space, but the expression she gave me indicated that this was not the type of achievement she would be bragging about to her book club.
Today I have the GOG version of it loaded due to the fact that attempting to get those old floppy disks to work on Windows 11 would likely take a computer science degree. Every so often after work I’ll boot it up thinking I will play for twenty minutes to relax. Three hours later, my wife finds me slumped over the computer screen, mumbling to myself about trade routes and whether I should construct a library or barracks in my most recent settlement. “That old game again?” she’ll ask, and I’ll attempt to describe the elegance of the technology tree system to her, but she gives me that look indicating she loves me regardless of my apparent mental issues.
The artificial intelligence personalities in the original were perfect in their simplicity. Montezuma was consistently a cheating liar, Gandhi was peaceful until he obtained nuclear arms (which was actually scary), and Napoleon was… well, Napoleon. Modern Civ games have more complicated diplomacy systems, but sometimes I miss the straightforwardness of knowing whether Lincoln was pleased or Caesar was angry. You knew where you stood.
However, Fallout was different to me. Eric brought it back to our dorm in ‘97 and interrupted what should have been an evening of productive procrastination on my English essay. “Dude, you gotta cheque this,” he said, already switching out whatever educational software I had pretended to be using. As soon as I walked out of Vault 13 and into that wasteland, I knew my GPA was doomed.
What I fell in love with wasn’t just the post-apocalyptic environment — plenty of games had done that before. What I fell in love with was the freedom. Want to negotiate your way past most encounters? Great. Would you prefer to resolve problems with a plasma rifle? Also acceptable. Even then, the turn based battle was ancient, however it provided this strategic depth that many modern real-time RPGs sacrifice for flashy visuals. And the humor was black as coal in a way that felt subversively funny.
I have lost track of how many different characters I have developed in Fallout over the years. My most recent character was a high-intelligence smooth talker who could convince super mutants to solve their own problems via clever use of dialogue options. Until I reached an enemy encounter that required violence to resolve, and my diplomatic genius was frantically looking through his inventory to determine what he could do instead of relying on harsh language.
Incredibly, after 25+ years, I still get surprised by the game. Only last month I found a dialogue choice with some random NPC in the Hub that led to a small side quest I had completely missed in multiple play-throughs. The feeling of “this is new” was as exciting as discovering a rare item in a modern game.
Back then, getting it to run on modern hardware was a nightmare involving compatibility patches and prayer. Thankfully, the digital distributors realised this and made preserving the game easier, although sometimes you still have to search through forums to locate the magical combination of settings that allows you to avoid crashing during the final sequence.
SimCity 2000 was my introduction to the “just five more minutes” trap that city builders are famous for. I was hesitant to try simulation games because I thought they were dull compared to blasting demons or exploring dungeons, but that distinctively blue box at Babbage’s store caught my attention and the demo station convinced me. At that instant, I understood why city planners became enthusiastic about zoning laws and power plant placement.
Will Wright created something truly unique with that isometric view – your cities existed as real entities in a way that the top-down SimCity could not compare. I spent hours creating perfectly designed residential districts, always ensuring that I placed the coal-fired power plants far away from the wealthy sims because it turns out I had an innate understanding of environmental inequalities at the tender age of 16.
When my first city achieved a population of 100,000, I actually printed out a screenshot on our extremely slow inkjet printer and placed it on my desk. My dad saw it and asked if it was for a school project. I told him yes because explaining to him that I was genuinely proud of a fictional city seemed strange even to me. Nonetheless, those tiny sims depended on me to meet their infrastructure needs, and I took that responsibility seriously.
SimCity educated me more about urban planning than any textbook could have. The relationships between residential, commercial and industrial zones, the importance of public transportation, why you needed parks and schools spread throughout your city – none of these were theoretical concepts to me anymore – they were real challenges that I had to overcome or face the consequences of low approval ratings.
The sound design was excellent too. That construction music is forever etched into my brain – sometimes I find myself humming it while building IKEA furniture, which my wife finds simultaneously amusing and concerning. The sounds of placing buildings, the adviser pop-up messages announcing budget crises or natural disasters – all of this helped create a sense of life in your city.
While DOOM is probably the game that I have purchased the most versions of across various platforms. Original shareware disk sets, the full registered version, the Ultimate DOOM collection, DOOM Classic for Xbox 360, the BFG Edition, and the recent re-issues – I have pretty much funded John Romero’s retirement at this point, and I wouldn’t change a single thing.
My initial experience was not even on my own computer. Tom’s older brother had installed it on their family computer, and we waited for his parents to leave for dinner before starting it up. Sitting around that monitor in their den, jumping whenever an imp made that unmistakable screeching sound – it was similar to watching a horror movie that I could control. The shareware episode was passed around our school like contraband, copied from floppy to floppy until everybody had experienced the thrill of ripping and tearing.
There are several reasons why DOOM remains forever playable – not just nostalgia. The game design is almost perfect – fast, easy to understand, with guns that feel just right and monsters whose behavior is clear. Many modern shooters attempt to create depth with customization options for firearms or the ability to use cover, but DOOM demonstrated that you could create incredible depth through sheer gameplay fundamentals.
The modding community has continued to sustain it in ways that id Software could not have possibly foreseen. Due to the release of the source code, DOOM now operates on everything — I mean everything. I have seen it operate on calculators, ATMs, and possibly on someone’s smart refrigerator by now. My present configuration uses GZDoom with high resolution texture packs, making it appear as though my teenage brain perceived back in ’93.
I currently maintain a file of approximately fifteen of my preferred WAD files — custom map collections created by the community over the years. If I require a quick gaming fix but I don’t have sufficient time to devote to something more in-depth, I can access any of these and receive that ideal burst of adrenaline fueled action. There are no crafting systems, no dialogue trees, no moral dilemmas – just you, a shotgun, and demons to shoot. It is digital comfort food.
Diablo completed my 90s PC gaming education when it came during college and I was supposed to be developing academically and personally. Instead, I spent my sophomore year clicking on skeleton after skeleton in randomly generated dungeons, seeking that perfect loot drop like some sort of digital prospecting for gold pixels.
Blizzard created something profoundly addictive with their loot system — not merely the items themselves, but also the sound design associated with obtaining them. The audio cue that occurs when something valuable drops can cause me to sit up straight even if I’m half asleep. My poor roommate Brad suffered through countless hours of mouse clickings at 3 AM until we engaged in a conversation regarding “considerate living practices”. I began utilizing headphones, and it made the experience more immersive and may have saved our friendship.
The multiplayer component of Diablo via Battle.net was my first true taste of internet gaming. Playing with others to explore dungeons was revolutionary, even if the community could be… odd. One time a young player asked in chat if I was “a hot girl gamer”, and I, a 19 year old male wearing stained sweatpants consuming microwave dinners, simply exited the game rather than shatter his illusions.
One of the things I enjoy about the original Diablo is the way those pixelated graphics force your imagination to fill in the gruesome details. Modern games show you everything in 4K detail, but there is something to say for the method whereby your brain fills in the blanks. It is akin to the difference between reading a horror novel versus watching a horror film — sometimes what you envision is scarier than what you observe.
Additionally, the atmosphere of the original was perfect as well. That haunting score, the ambient audio design, the way Tristram felt like a real location with real problems that only you could resolve by going deeper into increasingly perilous basement levels. The butcher’s “fresh meat” line still comes to mind at random intervals, typically while grocery shopping, and I believe it creates some bizarre psychological associations.
These games represent something that appears to be disappearing in modern gaming — they were entire experiences at launch. There were no day one patches, no DLC plans, no online requirements that might cease to exist when server support ceases. You bought the box, installed the disks, and received the complete experience the designers intended. Will today’s games remain operational in 25 years? Honestly, I have no idea — but I am positive that I will continue to be able to load up Civilization and lose yet another evening to the “one more turn” curse.
David runs a pub in Bristol and has transformed his back room into a functional shrine to arcade cabinets and early home systems. By night he writes about arcade culture, MAME emulation ethics, and why certain games simply feel different on original hardware versus emulation. He brings a perspective that matters: he owns these machines, maintains them, and plays them regularly, rather than just holding memories of them. His technical knowledge of arcade hardware is matched only by his ability to explain why authenticity genuinely matters to the experience.
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