The Golden Age of Gaming: Old DOS Games

Old Games Are Hard To Beat

Modern video games are amazing. With their hyper-realistic graphics, slick, multi-player gameplay and surround sound that puts you right in the middle of the action, you might think that gamers have never had it so good. Buta long time ago, before the PlayStation, before touchscreens, before the Internet, even before the computer mouse, there was a golden age of gaming and it ran on a text-based operating system called MS-DOS. These Old DOS Games were slow, fiddly to set up, their music was bleepy, their graphics were blocky and if your mum called you downstairs for tea at a crucial moment, you couldn't save your level.

But no matter how impressive a game looks and sounds, what matters in the end, is how much fun it is to play. And these minimalist games made up for up for their clunkiness with their clever and absorbing gameplay. Many modern games don't ask much more from players than fast reflexes and great hand-eye coordination. Beating their retro equivalents demanded problem-solving skills, spatial awareness and a quick wit too. Some of the best modern games started out as DOS games: Sim City, Pacman, Prince of Persia, Tetris, Doom and Duke Nukem. Although they might look more impressive these days, the gameplay of their originals has never been beaten.

Thousands of Old DOS Games were released between 1981 and 1997, in a variety that's mind-boggling when compared to the shoot-em-up-saturated market of today. There were RPGs like The Elder Scrolls, adventure games like Leisure Suit Larry, fighting games like Mortal Kombat, racing games like The Need for Speed, and strategy games, sports games, board games, puzzle games, educational games and of course, hundreds of first person shooter games.

The Golden Age of Gaming Lives On

These days we can fire up Grand Theft Auto with a couple of clicks, but if you wanted to play a game on your PCback in the day, you couldn't just click on an icon. You had to type a series of arcane codes into a command line to find the right files. If you've got a bunch of old DOS games on disk up in the attic and you want to show the kids what they've been missing, the golden age of gaming lives on in DOSBox. This software gives you a shell in which you can run the games and recreates the authentic experience by forcing you to use those tricky command line prompts. There are lots of Old DOS Games that you can download legally to play on DOSbox, and plenty more "abandonware" games that aren't legal, but the developers don't seem to mind their games being revived by nostalgic fans.

If you're less technically-minded and you want to relive the magic of your 80s games 2018, do that with just a couple of clicks. The Internet Archive has collected more than 4000 MS-DOS games,and you can play them online!You'll find old favourites like Donkey Kong, Link, Maniac Mansion, Qbert, Arkanoid, Tomb Raider, Lemmings and so many more that you might temporarily forget all about the sleek black box of the PlayStation gathering dust next to the TV.