In the last year I’ve added a few interesting games to my collection. They’ve come from various sources, but they’ve all been ‘rebuys’ of games I used to own back in my youth.
Even though I can’t actually run any of this software, the nostalgia value for me is high. I’ll cover them in reverse historical order…
The above two were purchased at a local comic show about a year ago, and I paid a mere $2 each for them. The seller had even more, including the second Xeen game and some early Heroes of Might and Magic titles, but none in as good condition as the above.
I bought Might and Magic 3 back in 1991 when it was first released, and it was amongst the first boxed PC games I ever bought. I recall loving it at the time and (probably) testing Bernards patience by how much time I spent using his computer! I’d been a fan of the series beforehand, and had played the first two in pirated form, and was pleased to own the latest iteration. I continued playing the series well into the Heroes offshoots, and once arriving in the US had a great time replying MM2 on an Apple and then the Genesis, as well as the NES and SNES versions. A great and important RPG series.
The SSI ‘gold box’ series of AD&D computer games were amongst the more important and influential RPG games of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tabletop RPG fans had been dreaming of computer versions of their favorite game for years and SSI delivered in spades. Starting with Pool Of Radiance in 1988 there were many games (and spinoffs) in the series and I played them all! I recall particularly enjoying the Krynn titles, including the two above, the Amiga versions of which were given to me with an Amiga 500 by a colleague.
In fact the gold box was one game series that spanned the shift to the USA, since I even purchased Unlimited Adventures for Macintosh after moving here and wrote – and somehow put online in those very early days – my own ‘module’ called Dead Swamp Destiny (for which I even designed the enemy sprites!). Ah I wish I could load that up and post screenshots to this blog today 🙂
The gold box series is now long dead, but the basic game design lives on in countless tactical games still going strong today (such as the Fire Emblem series). But I’ll always remember the series as one of my favorite of all time.
And speaking of favorites, the above is the 1987 USC64/128 release of the original Wizardry (which first came out in 1981). I bought this copy earlier this year for $40.
As you can see it’s complete and in amazing condition. Does the disc work? I’ll likely never know, but I couldn’t resist this piece of history. Wizardry isn’t just an important game to my personal gaming history, it’s one of the most important games ever released, and has gone on to directly influence the design of many other juggernaut game series including Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
I’ve got a collection of many Wizardry titles for seven or eight systems and many spinoff games (the series and its variants is still going strong in Japan) and the ‘dungeon crawl’ is to this day one of my favorite game styles. Over my decades many a long hour has been lost in the labyrinthine mazes of the Wizardry series, and I hope many are still yet to be lost in my future…
