Shhh… don’t tell anyone but I still have my Gateway 2000 mouse pad at my workplace. I’m not sitting here at my desk trying to make some kind of retro gamer statement with it. I simply liked the mouse pad and it was the right dimensions to fit my mouse and well it must have been the right dimensions to withstand moving THREE times and every other mouse pad getting lost along the way. But every time I glance at those cows…I am instantly transported back to 1994 and the day that beige tower showed up at our home and flipped everything upside down.
My parents thought they were buying me educational software. They were right, sort of. I did learn a lot from that 486DX2/66 and its glorious 8 MB of RAM. Just not what my parents were thinking when they begrudgingly agreed to pay half of the sticker price. Sure I installed Microsoft Encarta to make it look legit, but the real lessons came late at night when I discovered you could play “just one more turn” of Civilization and suddenly it was sunrise.
That PC taught me what video games were supposed to feel like and many of those early games are with me today in ways I never imagined they’d stick around. I mean games that have followed me through five computers, two marriages (okay one marriage but it feels like two sometimes), job changes, and general entering of adulthood. These games aren’t just artifacts that I revisit every now and then when I’m feeling nostalgic – I actually fire them up when my kids are hogging the TV with their PlayStation or when I want something that I know I can count on after analyzing data all day.
Civilization is like candy for your brain disguised as learning about world leaders. Hard for me to think of another game that gets my heart racing each time I launch up the program. I installed it from what seemed like 37 floppies back then and have been searching for that high ever since. Civilization I had you hooked from the get-go. Challenging enough that it kept you interested but not so difficult that you needed the dictionary to play your barbarian.
I remember finishing my very first win as if it was yesterday. Winter break, sophomore year of high school and I boot up Thursday as the Romans. Next thing I know, it’s Saturday morning and my mom is banging on my door yelling if I was alright because I hadn’t been seen since Wednesday night. Needless to say, any explanation I could give her about conquering the known world wasn’t going to fly so I nodded along and pretended to care about „real life” again.
I have GOTED version of it open as we speak because I doubt my fragile Windows 11 would even recognise those floppy disks at this point. Every once in awhile after work I’ll pull it up and think I’ll play for half an hour to destress. Next thing you know it’s midnight and my wife is waking me up from my slump chaired position, cursing at the screen because I just didn’t have enough gold to finish that upgrade. „That old game again?” She’ll ask as I hop off the couch, and I’ll try to explain to her the beauty of managing a Civilization game but she gives me that look that says she loves me despite my psychotic gamer tendencies.
The computer personalities in Civ I were perfect. Montezuma would cheat every chance he got, Gandhi was nice until he got nukes ( scary sneaky nice), and let’s not even get started on Napoleon. Civ games these days have deeper diplomacy but sometimes I miss the simplicity of just knowing if Teddy was happy or if Caesar was pissed. You knew where you stood kid.
Fallout though changed my life. Eric pulled it off of the bus into our dorm room one day in ‘97 and basically stole away my evening of constructive procrastination I was planning on doing on my English paper. „Dude, you have to see this” he said already starting up my presumed homework session. The second I left Vault 13 and into that wasteland I knew my GPA was doomed.
It wasn’t the apocalypse world that drew me in — other games had crafted fantastic worlds like that. What hooked me was the ability to choose. Want to talk your way out of every situation? Sure thing. Prefer to obliterate every enemy with a laser gun? You can do that too! Even back then the turn based combat was ancient but it added this layer of strategy that a lot of realtime RPGs today sacrifice for „wow” factor. And the jokes were dark enough that it was humorously naughty.
I don’t know how many characters I’ve created over the years in Fallout. My latest character was so high intelligence that I could bribe super mutants into beating up other super mutants with the power of persuasion. Until I ran into a group of enemies that were unwilling to negotiate, and my slick tongue was clicking through his inventory to see what else he could use besides four letter words.
What blows my mind is how the game can even surprise me after all these years. Last month I stumbled across some dialogue option with an NPC in the Hub that spawned a tiny side quest I never knew about during previous play throughs. It was such a „new game” feeling that I got tingles reminiscent of finally beating a level in Fortnite.
Back in the day trying to get it to even launch on modern computers was a hassle. Keyboards were snapping, tempers were short, pets were offended we weren’t playing with them. Luckily some clever folks realised this and have made downloading older versions of old games a lot easier. Although you’ll still find yourself digging through forum threads to try and find that magical combination of options to stop it from crashing before you finish.
SimCity 2000 taught me the joys of „Oh shit I gotta go to work in five minutes” that so many other builders have followed suit with. I steered clear of any sort of simulation game for years because who wants to watch sliders move when you could be slaughtering demons or dragons? But that blue box at Babbages caught my eye one day and the demo kept me. It clicked. I got it. city planning was awesome.
Will Wright made Scorn something so special with that isometric angle – these cities you built were something you could visualize in the real world. Sure sure City play had given me plenty of hours but man did SimCity 2000 fill that craving. My Sunday Cities were impeccable – and every.Single.Time I placed those coal power plants on the opposite side of town as the mansions because let’s be honest I just knew whats up with pollution at the age of 16.
When my city finally hit 100,000 people I ended up printing out a screenshot of my handiwork ( our printers were slow so this was a process) and proudly displayed it on my desk. My father glanced over and asked if it was for a school project. I told him yes. Because why wouldn’t building a simulated city be for school? Anyways Dad walked off but man did I feel proud of that city. Those little people needed sewage and I was going to provide for them.
SimCity taught me more about life than my parents did. Supply and demand, workers vs specialists, the bus system vs having everyone drive their own car. Why you should spread out your parks and schools rather than clustering them – I could go on for days about my love for zoning but the point is SimCity wasn’t just a game to me. It taught me about life and how to be a responsible member of society.
Sound design was great too. That build build build song will forever be ingrained in my memories of the game. To this day I find myself humming it while building furniture (“HELLO IKEA”) and my wife thinks it’s the cutest and creepiest thing at the same time. Hearing those tiles snap into place, adviser notifications pop up telling you about your budget deficits or earthquakes – it all made your city feel alive.
DOOM is the only game that I have probably spent money on more versions of then any other. Install disks, full registered version, The Ultimate Doom pack, Doom Classic on Xbox 360, The BFG edition, the remastered version last year – I swear id Software is now funded for their retirements by me and I am okay with that.
I wish my first experience was on my computer, but Tom’s older brother ended up installing it on theirs and we would wait for his parents to leave for dinner and boot it up. Huddled around that screen in their basement playing, leaping out of our seats every time some troll made that blood curdling scream – it was similar to watching a horror movie where you know you can run around and fight the monsters. Everyone in school was trading the shareware episode of DOOM on floppy disks and within weeks everybody had ripped and torn for themselves.
DOOM will never go out of style for many reason. Nostalgia being one of them but gameplay-wise it is near flawless – fast paced, easy to learn, weapons that just felt right and enemies that behaved how you expected them to. These days developers try and make their shooters feel deep by adding attachments to guns or using cover but DOOM proved to me you could make a deep game with simply fantastic gameplay.
The mods that people have created since release has kept it going strong in ways id Software couldn’t have imagined. Opening the source code allowed DOOM to run on..well anything I think now. I’ve seen DOOM mods that run on calculators, ATMs, and I wouldn’t put it past someone to have it running on their smart fridge at this point. I’m currently playing it via GZDoom with a texture pack so it looks like how my weed infused brain thought it should look back in ’93.
I have a document of about 15 of my favorite WAD’s open — these are custom maps that other players have created through the years. If I’m craving a quick gaming session but don’t want to commit to something longer I can pop open one of these and get my perfect dose of twitchy runners shooter goodness. No gear systems, no emotes, no conversation trees – Just you and a shotgun against a horde of hellions.
Diablo was the final piece to my 90s.pc education when I got it in college and was supposedly „adulting” and becoming a better version of myself. What actually happened was I spent my whole sophomore year clicking on skeletal corpses ad nauseam in procedurally generated nightmares while searching for that sweet sweet doll drop.
Blizzard had mastered the art of trolling you with their loot system. Not just with the items but the SFX that played when you killed something. I swear if something great drops I literally jump upright in my chair regardless of how tired I may be. Poor Brad lost so many hours of sleep to my incessant clicking at 3 AM he eventually had a talk with me about „being a good roommate”. I started using headphones and haven’t looked back since.
Multiplayering Diablo through Battle.net was my first introduction to online gaming. Exploring those dungeons with my friends was next level, even if half the people you played with were complete idiots. Hey one kid even asked me in global chat if I was „a hot girl gamer”. Fantastic, now I’ll never know what my closest male friend at the time thought I looked like wearing Dirty Shirt and eating Easy Mac.
Pixel art was another thing I adored about the original Diablo. Yeah we have better graphics these days but sometimes it was cool seeing your imagination fill in the blanks. Kind of like the difference between reading a horror book vs watching a horror movie – sometimes your imagination can create a better scene than what you’re actually watching.
Oh and let’s not forget about how creepy that game truly was. Atmosphere was on point back then too. That creepy soundtrack, the ambiance, the way Tristram felt like an actual place that was struggling to survive and you were their only hope by delving farther underground into more dangerous crypt levels. I catch myself saying the butcher line about having „fresh meat” randomly throughout the day and my wife thinks I need help.
Games these days could learn a lot from titles like this. They were complete experiences when you bought them. No patches on day one, no DLC plans announced a week after release saying there’s more goodies coming your way. Hell there wasn’t even an online component that would one day stop functioning when they turned off the servers. You popped in the disks, went through the installer, and boom you had everything the game had to offer. Will we be able to open up tomorrow’s games in 25 years? Who knows but I guarantee I will be able to load up Civ and waste another Friday night on the „one more turn” phenomenon.
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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