Favourite games of my early childhood
The top titles I personally played and loved between 1984 and the early '90s, and the impact they had on me.
List items
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1. Alley Cat
I first played this with my grandparents on their Amstrad PC-20. That system now sits on my desk next to my main gaming rig, and if I'm booting it up these days, there's a good chance it's for some Alley Cat. The simple yet varied gameplay makes for a timeless classic.
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2. Colossal Cave Adventure
Lame as it sounds, text adventures really broadened my vocabulary when I was learning to read... though "xyzzy" admittedly probably wasn't a particularly useful addition (nothing happens!). This was the first one I played, with one or both of my parents sitting next to me, offering suggestions and making maps.
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3. Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World
My first graphical RPG! I still have my boxed copy, though as a kid I was dumb and saved over the character disc with my own rubbish efforts. I loved how massive the world felt, the first-person perspective, and the ability to control a whole party - mindblowing stuff to me at the time.
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4. Digger
I was pretty into Windmill Software in general, but this one's my favourite. There's something oddly personable and endearing about the characters. Like Alley Cat, I'll still give this one an occasional spin on the Amstrad.
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5. Larn
I played Rogue too, but for some reason sunk more time into this one. I probably wouldn't go back to it after discovering NetHack, but it still has a place in my heart. I loved the abstraction of ASCII graphics, though these days I'm the kind of pussy who plays Dwarf Fortress with a tileset.
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6. Golden Axe
The game that really kicked off my love of beat-'em-ups, and still one of my absolute favourites in the genre. Who can forget Fiend's Path and the amazing feeling of battling on the back of a giant eagle? Gilius Thunderhead will always be my homeboy.
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7. California Games II
It was a tough call between this one and the first game, but I think here the events feel overall less static, and that kept things interesting. Also, y'know, I just liked dropping the snowboarding guy from the wrong height and watching him bounce down the mountain.
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8. Adventure International
Okay, so I'm kinda cheating, but it's impossible to choose just one - I owned a compilation of the 12 games from Adventureland to Golden Voyage. Scott Adams' text adventures were so well written, across such a broad variety of scenarios, and I still find many of the puzzles and descriptions memorable even though it's been almost twenty years since I last played. It could have just been that I was young, but man, they were tough! The only one I completed perfectly was Pyramid of Doom. One day I'd like to go back and beat them all.
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9. Stunts
I have zero interest in cars and racing, but this game was awesome enough that I played a ton anyway. The variety in the tracks, the opponents, the great replay feature... and it's the first game where I remember getting really into custom content creation; I spent hours in that map editor.
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10. Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars
The first platformer that made a major impression on me. It probably contributed to me becoming a bit of a linguistics geek, as I definitely got into memorising the Standard Galactic Alphabet. Also kickstarted an interest in Apogee, which led to Epic, and a massive passion for the height of the shareware era.
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