We’ve already been over how you can save money by playing games 1-3 years after their release, but what if you want to go really far back? If consoles are your target, there is always eBay, Half.com, and local yard sales or flea markets (let’s take a moment of silence here for Funcoland). However, the task becomes much more difficult when it’s PC games your after. With every major hardware evolution and operating system iteration, the task of getting a PC game to run properly becomes increasingly daunting. Luckily, there is help.
OK, maybe not THAT old.
Old Games: Good Old Games (www.gog.com)
The majority of titles available at GoodOldGames.com were released between 1995 and 2005, and range in price from $6.99 to $9.99. There’s two major reasons to support a site like this: it’s very hard to find physical copies of some of these games, and even if you do, how much time are you going to spend trying to get it running properly? Good Old Games packages all of their titles so that they will play just as they always did. We tested this out on a new Windows 7 laptop, and everything went smoothly.
Skeptics of downloadable purchases have nothing to worry about here. These games can be re-downloaded at any time, and come with absolutely no DRM. That’s right, they’re sold completely on an honor system, so you’ll never have issues backing these games up and installing them on as many PCs as you own. What’s more, the games come packed with some goodies such as pdf manuals, wallpapers, avatars, artwork, soundtracks, and maps.
Recommended titles:
- Fallout 1 & 2
- Baldur’s Gate 2
- Planescape: Torment
- Unreal Tournament
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six
- MDK 2
- The Oddworld series
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Commandos
- Kings Quest series
- Space Quest series
Really Old Games: DOS Games (www.dosgames.com):
These games are definitely pre-1995, putting the in a different department than Good Old Games. Also, they’re all abandonware, meaning they are completely free to download and distribute because the original license holders have discontinued the product with no intent to reproduce it. In total, there are over 500 titles available at dosgames.com, and while they do not come with any support, the site also provides utilities such as a sound blaster emulator, a DOS mouse driver, a slow-down utility for clock-speed dependent games, and most importantly: DOS Box, the open source DOS and X86 emulator.
Recommended Titles:
- Commander Keen series
- Duke Nukem side-scrollers
- Doom
- Descent
- Grand Theft Auto 1
- Hexen
- Lemmings
- Nethack
- Wolfenstein 3D
As one who cut his gaming teeth on a Tandy TRS-80 and a Commodore PET (with no HDD, no 5.25″ Floppies, just plug-in data recorders at my school,) I appreciate a lot of these old games; but they aren’t what I think of when I think of “old-school.”
Many of the early games for Commodore or Tandy TRS-80 were barely graphical, using ASCII symbols, and weren’t much more than a logic puzzle. Leisure-suit Larry, Eliza, and Labyrinth come to mind.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!