It's funny to see the first three there and feel so much nostalgia.
Prince of Persia: Massive nostalgia for the sound of those first 5-6 notes of the intro music in bold OPL3 MIDI, out of my oversized computer speakers. Inviting my friend over one weekend to play it, only to cheer him on as he beat the entire game. "...maybe you jump through the mirror...?!"
Doom: HS Physics teacher bribe. "In my hands I'm holding a stack of floppy disks with the Alpha version of a game called Doom. If you work hard today..." Worked so hard. Massive jump-scare weekend with friends over.
Wolf3D: "There's a full copy on the drafting class computers, and you don't have to shell out of anything, they boot straight to a DOS prompt!" What??! Incredible. Made every computer class after that year seem so restrictive. You'd walk in expecting to see CAD being done, and instead you'd see Wolf3D, POV-Ray experimentation, computer programming, and "I don't care, as long as you get your work done, hee hee" was the only response from the teacher. Loved that guy.
I remember being blown away by how intense and visceral the experience was, it probably helped I played it on my uncle's top tier 486 with a great sound system. Whenever I look at screen shots these I'm kind of shocked how pixelated the sprites were, I guess it wasn't a concern at the time.
CRT monitors made things look so much more vivid than on LCD. So when you look at old games today and think «Did it really look this bad and pixelated?», the answer is actually «no».
Doom didn't cause me nightmares as a kid, but when Dead Space got released I bought it, played a bit, then stopped because I didn't enjoy the jump scares at all. And I was an adult. Well made without question, but not for me.
To this day I still think Prince of Persia is one of the best videogames ever made.
Don't get me wrong, Doom and Wolf3D were impressive tech breakthroughs and I played and enjoyed the hell out of them. But unlike them, Prince of Persia is still a genuinely good and enjoyable game, with impressive animations.
Some personal picks of the DOS era: Basstour (somehow great fishing sim), BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception (RPG way before its time), Budokan (AFAIK still the most varied such game produced), Civilization (the original - "6,000 years of history in 640K"), Colonization, Descent (first free 3D action), Hero Quest series, Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries (best early sim), Pyro II (hilarious, original and addictive), Sid Meier's Pirates! (still play this!), Railroad Tycoon, Stargoose, Stunts (unmatched), The Land (huge indy dev effort), Transport Tycoon Deluxe (unmatched), Warlords II (hotseat). Of course, Dune 2 for its legacy popularizing the RTS genre from an obscure Amiga start, and Warcraft 1 & 2 thereafter, but they're borderline unplayable now.
Great catch there. Ultimately too short but fantastic storytelling and for its day, a real sense of freedom. I remember playing this one a lot as a little kid, as well as seeing the BattleTech/Mechwarrior manuals in bookstores and having my mind blown. I enjoyed the modern PC title but it is far more tactics-oriented than RPG. I would love to see someone build a proper modern RPG in that universe.
This doesn't give me nostalgia as much as it reminds me of the huge headaches of PC gaming during the late 90's. IRQ's, sound card settings that didn't always work, boot discs, not to mention verifying ownership with a color wheel, special glasses, or find a word in the manual.
Almost every DOS game I played was cracked, so none of those annoyances for me!
The one game which wasn't, MicroProse F-19, thought it would deter me by asking me the names of various shapes of Cold War era aircraft. As if! It only served to teach me those few shapes I didn't already know.
Tokened shovelware, as in they shoveled as much onto a CDROM as they could. Sometimes, they'd accidentally include not just shareware but licensed software... oops.
I one time bought some 4 in 1 box set with Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, The Hunt for Red October, and two other games, I forget. For some reason, the games were stripped of all display drivers except glorious 4-color CGA graphics.
One game had a teal sky, and a hot pink ground, and there other had a pink sky, and teal ocean.
Thanks to that I was able to locate a game[0] I had been searching for for years by investigating likely candidates on a "1000+ Games!"[1] or somesuch CD.
[0] It was Space Exploration Mission Alpha[2]. A lunar lander clone where you play as aliens visiting all of the Sol system planets. I never did find the non-shareware Space Exploration Mission Bravo, so if anyone knows Jeffrey R. Marken please drop me a line, I'll gladly pay the $16.75.
That game (and x-com) helped me learn autoexe.bat and config.sys. I had to do all manner of memory, DMA, & IRQ fiddling to load a mouse and soundcard. Probably why I'm in tech today.
A trick I learned is that if you started it with wizards.exe instead of mom (don't remember if it was .com or .exe) it would skip the intro video which used about 60k more RAM than the rest of the game. Also, nwcdex (the novell CD-ROM driver) could load into either EMS or XMS while the microsoft version could not.
Funny thing is, they say the "lite" version, which doesn't contain the games, only the frontend & metadata, is 52 _GB_!?!?! Maybe they meant MB? (No, I just checked the actual torrent, it _is_ GB...)
https://archive.org/details/bob_and_his_amazing_journey_home