Games I Played In My Elementary School's Computer Lab

The years were around 1991-96 or so, probably. The school had a whole mess of Apple IIe's and some old PCs (don't remember the model) so that's what most of this stuff was running on. The hardware was probably at least five years old at the point I was using it. Eventually some newer Macs were bought by the school district, and with them came new opportunities for gaming when we should have been learning. I don't know why a lot of these games were on the computers but I'm not complaining! Now, in 2011, I mostly play PC games. I am sure it's because messing with computers in these classes planted the seed of PC love in me, so when I finally got a real computer in 1998 I was hooked.
 
Anyways, jump into a fellow nerd's trip down memory lane via this list!

List items

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  1. Gold Rush!

  I played this game in good ol' monochrome, and my prevailing memory of it is of getting grabbed by the cops for walking on the grass. None of us knew how to play it, although I did make it to California once.

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  2. Gradius

  I've been a big fan of the Gradius series for a good long time now, so it was a surprise to me that I had played this as a kid back when I knew it as Nemesis.

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  3. Highway Hunter

  This is the game I remember the least clearly - but I do remember liking it a lot! I also remember it being really hard. I wonder how this ended up on a school computer.

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  4. Mario Teaches Typing

  I remember typing furiously in the underwater stage trying to get Mario to avoid drowning. Goddamn that was stessful. Probably more stressful than playing a real Mario game, at the time.

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  5. Number Munchers

  I probably way more of this than I should have. I was a dorky little kid too I guess.

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  6. The Oregon Trail

  Basically all the kids' strategies boiled down to "buy a zillion bullets and shoot everything and take as much meat as you can carry". Also, always ford the river. Somehow I finished this at least once.

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  7. SimCity

  Here's another game us grade-schoolers were too dumb for. Funny that years later I would purchase a copy of SimCity 4 Deluxe off Steam and become immediately overwhelmed by that, too.

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  8. SimCity 2000

  I can't really remember the differences between this and the original. I just remember some of the newer computers had this one and it looked all cool and fancy!

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  9. SkyRoads

  This game was a lot of fun, and I went a lot of years not knowing what it was called. I'm glad I found it again a few years ago. Surprisingly cool music too! It's abandon/freeware now, you should go look it up.

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  10. Spectre

  This would have been the Mac version probably. Also totally surprised I remembered its title! This game looked crazy amazing back when we first played it.

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  11. Wrath of the Gods

  It took me a while to find this game, since I didn't remember the title at all. I'm pretty sure this is it, though. A lot of wandering around not knowing what to do in this one.