Forgotten Childhood Games

Hey everyone! I was wondering if there are any games that you played as a kid, but when you bring them up nowadays no one knows what the heck you're talking about? For me the prime examples are a game by Westwood called Nox, and Septerra Core. I remember both having playable demos that came with PC gamer, which I would play over and over again...

I eventually owned the full versions of both games, and both are now available on Gog.com. Does anyone else have games like this? Where for some reason those titles have been forgotten by everyone except yourself?

Rocky Rodent on the SNES. It's a platformer where you collect hairsprays to turn your hair into various deadly weapons. Almost never hear anyone talk about it, but I enjoyed it a lot as a kid.

Hot Wheels Turbo Racing was pretty fucking great.

Not so much a childhood thing, but Bad Blood - an early Chris Roberts game in 1990 for the PC. It was like a primitive Fallout. It must have had an impression: My user icon has always featured one of the game's characters. I remember banging my head against it for ages but never managing to finish it. It is available for free on the Internet Archive now, but make sure you find the vibro-blade!

@cure_optimism: I had Rocky Rodent as a kid. Never was able to get very far in it, but I do remember it.

Hot Wheels World Race is a big one. That's an awesome racing game, and it's just as fun today. But good luck finding anyone who knows it.

Ah I remember Septerra Core. A Western made JRPG style game exclusive to the PC. Kinda weird but interesting game.

As a kid I played a ton of freeware games and demos because my parents wouldn't let me buy many PC games. I can't even remember the name of 90% of them anymore but one that comes to mind is Space Bastards: Sudden Justice which was a 2D side-scrolling puzzle game where you basically just pushed blocks around. I actually was able to find a full version of it much later and played it not too long ago and boy, imagine taking the worst of the humor from Duke Nukem 3D and multiplying it. Also this game came out in 99 so there was even less of an excuse to how lame it was.
Another obscure PC game I played a lot was Asghan The Dragon Slayer. Third-Person Action/Adventure in a Fantasy setting with Tomb Raider like controls. Kinda like a Drakan but less open world I guess. (also no flying on a dragon)
I played a lot of Dink Smallwood, which is actually not a terrible game. People still make custom addons for that game which is kind of crazy.

My sister and I played a bunch of Hodj 'n' Podj which was a 2 player head-to-head board game sort of thing. It had different clue booklets for the two players so you would each be going after different 'hidden' objectives essentially which was probably a large part of my fascination with it. This game is also probably responsible for my continued fascination with video game board games.

Don Pan The Magical Puffer Fish for the Tandy

Color Computer 3. It was every bit as strange as it sounds. A side scrolling shooter where you control a flying puffer fish. At the end you turn into a king...I think.

I think I might be the only human who remembers Lost Kingdoms or its sequel. I guess that’s fair, given that they were weird GameCube exclusive card-battling RPGs that I’d be willing to bet aren’t as good as my youthful memories would suggest. Finding out years later that From Software developed them suddenly put a lot of things into greater context, though it honestly makes me want to check them out again at some point.

Run Saber. No one ever talks about it. It makes me sad.

I'm sure it's remembered by some around these parts but I could mention Bombuzal, AKA Kablooey for the SNES, to exactly zero people in real life and expect results.

@arbitrarywater: Im still keeping an eye out for both of those games, since release hahaha. If I ever encounter either the first one or the sequel for 20 bucks, I'm picking it up :p Im very curious about them.

Most of the ones I can think of were forgotten for good reasons. Absolutely no one needs to play the Les Manley games or Conquests of Camelot, but the former sticks out as being kind of a fun Leisure Suit Larry knockoff, and the latter had some damn good music for the day and age. There are a ton of adventure games like that - Laura Bow and the Dagger of Amon Ra, Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon... Stuff I wouldn't mind seeing spiritual successors to, but I completely understand why they're relics of the past.

There was a game demo I played on PC in the 90s that was a 2D sidescrolling zombie game where you could play as a guy soldier or a girl soldier and they were both geared up like SWAT rather than military and it was fantastic but for the life of me I can't remember anything else about it. It had kind of a cartoony look, and the environment was like some jungle or something; definitely not like a city or anything like that.

Others I'd include but have heard people mention (GB crew included) are the Jurassic Park RTS, Expendable (Windows XP pack-in I think), and Hover!, which was another pack-in if I'm not mistaken. Also Blake Stone and BioMenace and Sango Fighter and Tonic Trouble, holy shit. But yeah, those are less forgotten that that goddamn zombie game.

I didn't have a lot of games for the SNES, but I did have Pugsley's Savenger Hunt and Taz-mania.

Pugsley's was the first game I ever bought with my own money... well, after I bought and returned Yoshi's Safari because I didn't have a Super Scope. It was an okay, side scroller based on the Adam's Family cartoon. I don't think I had even seen the cartoon at that point. I bought it based on the box art. I had money, I went to Toys R Us, I wanted to buy a game, but I didn't know what.

Taz was a gift from my cousins. Basically Desert Bus with the cartoon character. Maybe my all time least favorite game because it was one of the few SNES games I had and I played it more that I would have liked to. As a dumb kid I think I assumed at the end of this long road I might find the actual game.

....at least I had Mario World

I played a lot of the Jane's Combat Simulations series as a kid, but have yet to meet anyone else who played those. I don't think they were an extremely niche series or anything.

I played a heck of a lot of an isometric puzzle game called Contraption Zack https://www.giantbomb.com/contraption-zack/3030-239/

I think the fact that it’s GB wiki entry is blank, says no one played or remembers it except me.

Incoming.

Played that so often not knowing what i was actually suppose to be doing. I just loved booting it up and shooting UFO scum.

I absolutely LOVED Septerra Core and constantly wish more people remembered it. The characters and world were so great and the battle system was a good take on the ATB system. Playing it these days reminds me of how maze like and overly-long most of the dungeons were however.

The entire Apogee Software back catalog, basically.

I became the PC kid in the midst of the Nintendo vs. Sega console wars, and never owned a SNES.

For people too young or who didn't own a PC in the early/mid 90s, Apogee is probably known best as the company that popularized the shareware model along with iD. They were the company behind the original Duke Nukem before they spun off 3D Realms to be their 3D wing. They basically made a long series of platformers, shmups and even a kart racer - most of their catalog was DOS versions of what was popular on consoles at the time.

Most of these games were lost to the abyss of 'abandonware' but have since been released as the Apogee Throwback Pack on Steam, following the remake of Rise of the Triad.

Having grown up with those shareware compilations of stupidly obscure DOS and Windows games, half of my gaming nostalgia fits this thread, haha. Hey, who here loves classics like 1993tris? Tubes? Xerix? Bad Toys 3D?

I love it when a game I always assumed was forgotten turns out to be surprisingly well-known, too. The Hugo games, Sango Fighter, Witchaven, Bad Mojo... warms me heart, it does.

A lot of people have played and enjoyed Monster Rancher, but I've yet to meet anyone other than myself who enjoyed Monster Rancher Battle Card 2.

That may be because it was never that good of a game, and attempting to convert a monster training sim into a card game was ill-conceived: but hey, I liked it.

This might sound weird but one game I loved as a kid was The Game of Life for PS1.

General Chaos. Megadrive.

For me it's Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, which was one the two MS-DOS games I knew how to launch on my Dad's computer (the other being the original Civilization). Maybe among this crowd it's better remembered due to its historical importance, but whenever I mention 'Dune II' aloud to people they always, always, always think I'm saying 'Doom II' and after I explain what I'm talking about they're just confused.

I played them. They took the word simulation very seriously. Those manuals, man. I was a 12-year-old kid trying to grasp advanced aeronautics. It generally went about as well as Drew exploding the A-10 engine on the tarmac.

I played a lot of dos games as a kid. I don't think a lot of people remember this but Duke Nukem 1 and 2 were sidescrollers before the franchise became known for the first person shooter game.

Here are a few games off the top of my head: Boppin, Bio Menace, God of Thunder, Moraff's World, Jill of the Jungle, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Captain Comic, Commander Keen, and Wacky Wheels.

Much like Dan Rykert freaking out when seeing the "real people" in the Mortal Combat games, I remember playing "Silent Steel" on my Uncle's IBM 486...something back in 1995, and being completely blown away by the FMV experience. (Holy crap, the submarine crew is talking directly to ME! It's like I'm REALLY the Commander! I totally have NO idea what I'm doing and it's great!)

NES was the best console back in the day. Super Mario Bros 3 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Manhattan Project, and Guerilla War are some games I used to finish multiple times. Great times. FF7 on my friends' PS1 made a huge impression on me.

I got to hang out with my best friend a few weeks ago unexpectedly (we live about 2400 miles apart) and we spent a ridiculously unreasonable amount of time geeking out over time spent in high school playing the gawdawful Reelect JFK. We tried to explain it to his girlfriend who's a few years younger than us and I swear she spent most of it looking at us like we each had two heads.

Like @shagge I played a lot of shareware games that few seem to be aware of today. I spent a lot of time playing SinkSub, Winroids and Comet Busters in Windows 3.1, and the horror adventure game Last Half of Darkness for DOS.

Three non-shareware titles that seem surspringly forgotten today are Fire Power (the 1988 predecessor to the 3DO classic Return Fire), the cyberpunk geopolitical simulation Shadow President, which I guess kinda was part DEFCON: Everybody Dies and part Europa Universalis, and finally Dungeons & Dragons: Stronghold, a 3D RPG/god game/strategy game hybrid from 1993 in which you build a fantasy town and defend it from D&D monsters.

Nobody ever talks about Vectorman. Vectorman is great.

The first game I remember playing is Wizard on C64. (Our family was a few years behind the latest games. I am old but not that old...)

Gex HD collection!!! Not really though. I did like Gex 2: Enter The Gecko as a kid even though it was meh looking back at it. The camera controls were so awful

Odium.

Turn-based tactical turn-based game where you take command of a MASSIVELY underequipped squad of soldiers fighting Carpenter/Lovecraftian aliens. The difficulty curve was a light vertically upward.

7th Legion

RTS game with a great concept! You play as the descendants of those abandoned on spent-up Earth, or the descendants of the people who did the abandoning. Very much a Command and Conquer knock-off, but had weird "cards" you could play on the field for different effects. The AI ALSO had those cards, so once again: VERY hard game.

So many Amiga shareware and low budget games that once I left my hometown for University realised were seemingly the reserve of me and my friends only. Even Flood by Bullfrog, which we played hours and hours of, seems to be unknown to too many people. As a very small person I played all my games on a Tatung Einstein - that seems to be a computer everyone's forgotten.

For me, it's probably a bunch of Atari 2600 games that I probably can't even remember the names of, but I'll give it a try. I liked that weird early era of games where they were experimenting in all sorts of ways. There was Star Raiders, which made use of a keypad controller. And then there was Solaris, which was similar gameplay-wise.

I actually really liked Towering Inferno, which was the first game I ever played about firefighting!

One of the few games I ever played with my mom as a kid was Atlantis. You basically had to use anti-aircraft guns to shoot enemy ships as they tried to destroy your city, and in 2-player mode one person controlled the left gun and the other controlled the right gun. 2-player mode was harder in a lot of ways because those guns could only shoot diagonally, but in single player there was a center gun that could shoot straight up. To this day, my mom will bring up how much fun she had playing that game when my brother and I were kids. Years later, she tried Super Mario Bros., died to the first goomba, and that was the end of her gaming.

And then there's the hide 'n seek game, infamously called Sneak 'n Peek. My friends and I had fun with that one, but some of the hiding spots were incredibly stupid. Whee, I'm hiding in a wall! Behind this very skinny lamp! etc.

I got most of my Atari 2600 games after the big crash, either through parents' friends or relatives who just gave them away to us. I think I still played my Atari 2600 and 7800 even after getting an NES. Not nearly as much, of course, but I was still able to find those games fun.

That was the first RTS I'd ever played. Back then I just referred to it as "SimCity, but with fighting" rather than real time strategy. Later I'd play the follow-up, which was Command & Conquer. I had a hard time adjusting to Warcraft II after playing those games. I didn't really like the extra resource management.

I actually talked about Dune II recently with one of my roommate's kids. He's 13 and just recently started getting into StarCraft, so I told him about Dune II. He was fascinated, especially since he's read the first Dune book. I doubt the game holds up very well these days. That was when you had to command units individually.

Lego motherfucking Rock Raiders

I was one of those weirdos who actually preferred the first Dune over Dune II on PC. It was like a cross between an adventure game and turn based strategy. So you had to go to various places as Paul, talk to the Fremen and become Muad'Dib. But you also had to send units around the map, equip them with weapons and so on to take over the Harkonnen bases.

There was a game I played on my friend's PS1 back in the day, but I've never been able to find out what it was called. It was like a 3D arena combat game with 2 or 3 small wizard characters shooting spells at each other while running around. The closest thing I've been able to find to it is a game called The Unholy War, but I don't think that's it.

Cyberia and Cyberia 2.

They were 90s point-and-click FMV shooter games that were part of that wave right when CD-ROM drives were getting big (maybe Sewer Shark is the most famous example). I never owned Cyberia 1 but I played it at my friend's house, then got Cyberia 2 for PC.

The game was essentially you clicking to shoot things over pre-rendered FMV. When you "installed" the game, all you did was create a menu entry. The only thing it saved on your hard drive was the save games!

They both had near-future plots with nanomachines and a generic cyberpunk protagonist who never took his sunglasses off. The voice acting was cheap, the plot was plenty sophomoric, and the limitations of its vision and technology were clear even at the time it was made, but I still remember it fondly. I sold it a few years later, but I frequently find myself wishing I could go back and play it. You could probably emulate the whole thing in a browser window!

@frodobaggins: How General Choas hasn’t been brought back as a $10-$20 game is beyond me.

That game was fun, strategic, charming, and chaotic. It had a great gameplay loop and some serious style.

So, I bet it’ll be tough to come up with a game no one on this forum remembers, unless it’s a regional thing...

My best guesses would be:

- Ninja Crusaders (NES)

- Todd’s Adventures in Slime World (Genesis)

Other games I might have mentioned like Bonanza Brothers (Genesis) and Two Crude Dudes (Genesis) have been played or mentioned on Giant Bomb.

I guess I feel compelled to yell out a couple others that come to mind, though they aren’t rare:

- Legendary Wings (NES)

- POW (Arcade)

- The Road Warrior (SNES)

Two random NES games-

Tombs & Treasure was a weird RPG/point and click hybrid that no one remembers.

And Xenophobe was a weird port of a old arcade game that was a split screen shooting game with a duck man.

Hell yeah, General Chaos was absolutely fantastic. I can still picture some of the animations vividly to this day.

As for my own answer, I would have to say Adventures of Lolo on the NES.

Gadget Twins for the Sega Genesis. Had co-op, fun music, and surprisingly interesting gameplay where you map gadgets to your up, down, left, and right directions. Made you semi-plan out levels based on drops.

Kula World on PS1 (retitled as Roll Away I believe in the US) was I game I remember fondly as a kid. It was pretty difficult for me at the time and I never really got too far with, even replaying recently as an adult it's a pretty mentally stimulating puzzle game and the only times I really hear about it in gaming circles is in "top ten hidden gems on PS1" lists.

Huh, I had no idea this game out on Genesis. I played it on the Atari Lynx. My friends and I actually managed to get 5-6 of them between all of us and play a few multiplayer games. That was a lot of fun. In hindsight, it wasn't necessarily a great game, but there's something to be said about watching a friend fall down a pit followed by you throwing a room-clearing bomb down there next to them.

I have never heard anyone except me talk about Lands of Lore. I specifically only played 3, but it's not like I hear anyone talk about the other games in the series either. That's a weird ass game, switching disks every time you go to a different zone is a nightmare lol.