Which DOS games do you remember playing in the 90s?

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igor_kavinski

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Here's my list:

Jill of the Jungle
Commander Keen
Dangerous Dave
Broderbund Software's Stunts
Duke Nukem 2D
Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny
Lotus car racing game (it had cool music)
Highway Hunter (also cool music)
Many, many Sierra Interactive games
X-Wing
Tie Fighter
Day of the Tentacle
Monkey Island
F22 Raptor
Doom

And a lot more but the above is all I can remember.
 
I don't recall ever playing any DOS games. By the time I got a PC towards the end of 1999, the only game I played was mostly just Unreal Tournament.
 
I forgot to include Prince of Persia 1 and 2. Though I didn't really play them as much as most other games because they were too hard and "clunky" where it was easy to get killed if you didn't time the jumps right and the sword fighting also wasn't very fluid. I don't think I was able to finish both and probably watched the ending from save games.

www.gog.com

Star Trek™: Judgment Rites

Star Trek™: Judgment Rites includes the Star Trek™: Judgment Rites Collector's Editio
www.gog.com www.gog.com

That is one of the BEST adventure games I have played because the puzzles actually make sense and I didn't need to use a walkthrough. There was one puzzle involving figuring out the code for a keypad and it was in Base 7 I think so I took pencil and paper and figured it out by doing Base 10 to Base 7 conversion.
 
igor_kavinski said:
Here's my list:

Jill of the Jungle
Commander Keen
Dangerous Dave
Broderbund Software's Stunts
Duke Nukem 2D
Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny
Lotus car racing game (it had cool music)
Highway Hunter (also cool music)
Many, many Sierra Interactive games
X-Wing
Tie Fighter
Day of the Tentacle
Monkey Island
F22 Raptor
Doom

And a lot more but the above is all I can remember.
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Throw in some flight sim games and leisure suite Larry and we have a very similar list!
 
One interesting thing I remember from that era was that going from 386DX-40 to 486DX2-66 to Pentium 120 (or was it 133? I forgot) would make the DOS games run so much better and faster that often, I had to press the turbo button to slow down the game to keep from getting overwhelmed by the enemies. I think the Pentium was the last one that had a turbo button? Coz my Pentium II or Celeron 700 MHz couldn't be slowed down and there wasn't any need to anyway because by that time, games programming had gotten more "deterministic" and independent of the CPU clock.

I have these hazy flashbacks of using the turbo button to slow down Aladdin during the flying carpet level. And that reminds me, I loved playing Lion King too. And yes, both these games were DOS mode games but they were also ported to Windows later. At least Lion King was.
 
I vaguely remember back to DOS gaming times. Only a few specific titles come to mind that haven't already been listed (cross-verified with Google)

TES Arena
Advanced Civilization (based on the Avalon Hill board game and shamelessly ripped off by Sid Meier's Civilization)
Ascendancy
Hammer of the Gods
Pirates! Gold
Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon
Nethack (an original Rogue-like)
Warlords
Lords of the Realm
Master of Magic
Master of Orion
Might and Magic series
The Bard's Tale series
[edit to add ...] Wing Commander: Privateer
Mechwarrior
Earthseige [... end edits]

... and probably more, not including all of the Apogee shovelware and the occasional bargain bin pinball games.

And for that matter, I do play some DOS games via DOSBox that are still available through GOG.
 
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Man MOO and MOO2 I put far too many hours into. I'd love to play moo2 even now.
 
486 DX 33mhz is what I remember playing games on (i was 7 when my dad bought it)

Alone in the Dark
Commander Keen
Crystal Caves
Simcity 2000
Jetfighter 2
Indianapolis 500 The Simulation
Amtex Gone Fishing
World Class Leaderboard (golf)
Sharky's 3D Pool

I'm sure there is more i'm forgetting, miss those days, things were so simple back then.

I do vividly remember begging my dad for a ram upgrade back then.

SC2000 would not run on 4MB of ram, needed 8MB, so I believe it was 25$ per megabyte back then ~1992, but I was totally set with 8MB of ram with that system.
 
Skillz said:
Not sure I'd call running DOS games "simple" lol
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Yeah, you did need a little primer on navigating DOS with some essential commands and locating the EXE and COM files to start the game. Games that needed expanded memory were the worst, as then you needed to fiddle with config.sys. Thankfully, I only encountered maybe two such games and they weren't anything special. Later, DOS Extenders, around the time DOOM was released, allowed games to easily circumvent the 640K conventional memory limit and games started looking more sophisticated.

One of my favorite activities in those times was poking around in the game folder to look for executable files other than the main game EXE. Sometimes, I would find a trainer that allowed me to get unlimited health and ammo.
 
Tyler-98-W68 said:
486 DX 33mhz is what I remember playing games on (i was 7 when my dad bought it)

Alone in the Dark
Commander Keen
Crystal Caves
Simcity 2000
Jetfighter 2
Indianapolis 500 The Simulation
Amtex Gone Fishing
World Class Leaderboard (golf)
Sharky's 3D Pool

I'm sure there is more i'm forgetting, miss those days, things were so simple back then.

I do vividly remember begging my dad for a ram upgrade back then.

SC2000 would not run on 4MB of ram, needed 8MB, so I believe it was 25$ per megabyte back then ~1992, but I was totally set with 8MB of ram with that system.
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I guarantee it was far more expensive back then. I remember getting 4 1 meagbyte Simms and it was 250 bucks after tax.
 
Grimlakin said:
I guarantee it was far more expensive back then. I remember getting 4 1 meagbyte Simms and it was 250 bucks after tax.
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That's cheap compared to the current RAM prices. (I mean, obviously not if we compare actual storage size to dollars, but physical DIMMs and their use per se)
 
Oh, we are just spoiled. I'm lucky enough to have started from 4 megabytes of RAM as a ten year old kid.

Can't IMAGINE what life would've been like for people with lesser RAM than that!

One thing I find funny is that we make so many plans of what we will do with things we don't have once we get them. And we get them and then we do absolutely NOTHING.

When I didn't have a lot of RAM, I would imagine creating a large RAMdrive and running games directly from it. I have 128GB in my Epyc server and I haven't done that yet. I don't know if I ever will. Being human is a silly, annoying exercise in contrariness.
 
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