30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1993

On that same shareware collection that brought Wolfenstein 3D onto my family’s home computer, there was another, even more important game to me. Probably the most important game in my life. We’re talking, of course, about Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. Nah, I’m just messing with you. We’re talking about DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! As good as it was, there’s no surprise Blake Stone is completely forgotten in the wake of the game that came out just a week later and literally changed the world: id Software’s Doom. Doom forever changed the landscape of videogames. It codified an entire genre, appealed to people who’d never considered themselves gamers, ruined

30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1992

Get psyched! It’s time for some profound carnage. My family got its hands on a reasonably powerful PC sometime in 1994; I’m not entirely sure how, given how much my mother already hated the Atari, Nintendo, and SNES. Maybe she convinced herself that the family would use it mostly for educational games and word-processing, and there’s at least some merit to that theory. See, in the old days games were significantly harder to find and purchase for the PC than they were for dedicated videogame consoles. A lot of them used the shareware model, where the first portion of the game

Operation Eisenfaust: Legacy

I admit I don’t love Wolfenstein 3D the way I love Doom. There are a few Wolf3D mods that I’ve given a look, and none of them seemed like much more than map packs: a bunch of new levels, maybe a new weapon and enemy or two. And I just don’t feel Wolf3D is modular enough for a simple map pack to be something to get excited about. At least not the way I get excited over some Doom WADs, even those that add literally nothing but a few maps. Sorry to all Wolfheads reading this. But a year or so ago,

How ’bout That New Wolfenstein?

Who were the fictional heroes of your childhood? I had an odd assortment of characters I looked up to myself, from the cool and current to the way-before-my-time. From Captain Picard to Captain Hawkeye Pierce. From The New Jonny Quest to the 1977 cartoon version of Bilbo Baggins. Dexter of Dexter’s Lab. Luke Skywalker. Super Mario. Link (who I may have called Zelda, depending on how early in my childhood you talked to me). But also, weirdly, this guy…

Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me About Dangerous Dave?

Seriously… this game. Seriously. Where have you been all my life? I’ll admit I’m biased toward liking Dangerous Dave. I have a kind of pseudo-nostalgia for this early era of PC games, in all its 16-color, PC speaker glory. I say pseudo-nostalgia because I wasn’t even around for it when it was going down. It really wasn’t until Doom that I came onto the PC gaming scene, but there’s still this warm, fuzzy feeling that creeps up on me when I load up these older games.