Studies show that the average gamer is 35 years old and has played games for 13 years. Some 14% of gamers are aged between 35 and 44 years old, which is the category this writer falls into. As a child that grew up in the 1980s and someone that has now gamed for 40 years, I have witnessed the video game industry's rapid development firsthand. Although I am a fan of modern-day titles, there are three retro games, which all ran on MS-DOS, that shaped my gaming life. These are that trio.
My first foray into video games came in the early 1980s when my parents bought an Atari 2600. It came with Pitfall!, which I vividly remember spending countless hours on, trying to navigate my way over obstacles on the horizontal scrolling platformer. Over the following years, I became the proud owner of a ZX Spectrum 128K and a Sega Master System, but it wasn't until my father brought home an i386-powered PC that I knew video games would be part of my life forever. It is on that trusty i386, then an i486, then a Pentium, that ignited my passion for gaming thanks to three MS-DOS titles that are still epic today.
Prince of Persia (1989)
Broderbund developed and published Prince of Persia for the Apple II in 1989, and little did they know that the game would become a multi-platform global success. Prince of Persia ported to DOS in September 1990, which is around the time I first laid eyes on it. It's incredible to think Prince of Persia was played by millions of people globally some six years before online betting became a thing, according to the dates in the Everygame sportsbook review. Had that industry been alive and kicking when Prince of Persia made its debut, there is no doubt it would have been the favorite to win the Game of the Year award.
The game's animations were ground-breaking for the time. Jordan Mechner, the game's designer, used rotoscoping for those animations, using footage of his brother performing acrobatic stunts to give Prince of Persia realistic movement. If you haven't already, you should try the original Prince of Persia because it is truly an epic game.
Doom (1993)
The year 1993 was incredible for video games because that was when id Software released Doom into the world. One of the first true first-person shooters, Doom was an instant success, with experts stating that by 1995, the game was installed on my PCs than Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system!
Doom was a game that defined a genre. It was one of the first games to use 3D graphics, which still holds up today, and was one of the first online multiplayer games as the now defunct DWANGO service allowed up to four players to battle it out.
The game spawned several sequels and remasters, but the 1993 original is still the best of the bunch.
Command and Conquer: Red Alert (1996)
In November 1996, Westwood Studios released Command and Conquer: Red Alert onto the PC, and it was a fantastic game. Red Alert was my first foray into the real-time strategy genre, but it would not be the last. As a 15-year-old, I spent almost all of my spare time mining ores and precious gems in the hope I could build an allied army large and robust enough to overcome the threat from the Soviet Union.
I'd never played a real-time strategy title before, and I remember being taken aback by the flexibility Red Alert granted me to approach the game as I wished. Unfortunately, while the Red Alert was a superb game, as was the original I played some years later, the sequels leave much to be desired.
