Favorite Games List – Early PC

The Favorite Games List was a recurring feature originally published on Trevor Trove. This installment originally debuted on September 3, 2015

Some of my favorite video games articles are when people breakdown all of their favorite games. A gamer as long as I can remember, it always gets me thinking about my favorite games and how I’d never really quantified/categorized them in that manner. In high school, we were tasked to write about a collection of ours and I wrote about (and was mildly ridiculed for) my video game collection. But even that was more focused on what my collection of video games said about me as a person. For example, I argued that video games were, in part, responsible for my intelligence and problem solving skills as I grew up playing more on strategy games or role-playing games than first-person shooters. It has been nice to see these thoughts validated in the years since through numerous studies about the positive effects video games have on a variety of faculties.

Anyway, I’ve decided to tackle this on a system by system basis (and I didn’t realize how many I’ve actually had/played until I started compiling this list). For this first installment I’m focusing on PC gaming. It was hard to classify the two and a half decades of PC gaming into one chunk so I’ve divided it up into three. This post will cover the Early Years (featuring the old school Floppy Disks), while the Middle Years (CD/DVD-ROMs) and the Modern Years (Steam) will be featured in future posts.

Kicking things off with my earliest memories, in the days before even dial-up internet connections. Back when I had to remember things like “dir” to pull up the DOS directory of what files were on the computer. The days when floppy disks were actually floppy and not the hard disk younger generations only know as the Save icon.  These were my favorite games of…

Early PC

Math/Reader Rabbit – Definitely painting myself with the nerd brush here when the first games I’m listing were educational games. But it’s a testament to my parents, who recognized early on this potential of video games. Learning reading and math with the help of an animated rabbit beat flash cards, no question.

Wheel of Fortune – I couldn’t tell you how many games I played trying to win one of the five end-game prizes (you selected the prize from cards labeled W H E E L). When I finally won that imaginary car, I ran screaming around the house!

Monopoly – There was no arguing over who got to be the car in the DOS version of this game; everyone was basically just different colored dots on the board. On the plus side, playing the computer game version of this meant two things: 1. people (*cough*me*cough*) couldn’t flip the board when they (I) got mad and 2. the computer was the Banker so nobody (me again) cheated and embezzled money.

Oregon Trail – An all-time classic. My family never actually owned it but I looked forward to every computer class in elementary school where I’d try and get me and my friends all the way to Oregon without anyone dying of dysentery (“whatever that was” six-year-old me would say…wait…what exactly is dysentery?).

So those are my most memorable DOS-era computer games. Stay tuned for more games and more systems and let me know what your favorites were in the comments.