Vinyl Goddess from Mars (1995): Shareware’s Last Great Platformer Gamble
By 1995, shareware platformers were running out of road — Windows 95 was months away, and the floppy-disk-and-BBS distribution model […]
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Mystic Towers (1994): A Free Wizard-Sim Apogee Almost Forgot
Baron Baldric would really rather be reading. Unfortunately, an aging wizard with a talent for clearing monster-infested towers doesn’t get
Word Rescue (1992): Apogee’s Free Vocabulary Platformer
By 1992, Apogee had built its name distributing run-and-gun shareware platformers. Then the company turned its formula toward classrooms with
Math Rescue (1992): The Free Apogee Platformer That Actually Teaches Arithmetic
Can a game built around solving math problems actually be fun rather than something you tolerate because a teacher assigned
Nitemare-3D (1994): The Hugo Series Goes First-Person
By 1994, nearly every small DOS studio was trying to make its own Wolfenstein clone. Gray Design Associates took a
Corridor 7: Alien Invasion (1994): Wolfenstein’s Engine Gets an Alien Makeover
By late 1994 the first-person shooter had already been reinvented once by Doom. Corridor 7 is what happens when a
Abuse (1995): The Mouse-Aimed Shooter That Was a Decade Ahead of Its Time
A Control Scheme From the Future, Stuck in 1995 Twin-stick shooters didn’t really exist as a concept in 1995, but
Lure of the Temptress (1992): Revolution Software’s First Game Was Already Ambitious
Most studios spend a few games finding their voice. Revolution Software announced theirs on the first try: Lure of the
Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995): A Free Point-and-Click Gem Worth Rediscovering
Joe King — yes, that’s really his name, and yes, the game knows exactly how silly that is — is
Beneath a Steel Sky (1994): Revolution’s Free Cyberpunk Classic
The Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons doesn’t have many video game credits. But the one that matters is a big one:
Hovertank 3-D (1991): Watching Carmack Invent Raycasting in Real Time
Months before id Software formally existed as its own studio, John Carmack was already proving out the raycasting technique that
Catacomb 3-D (1991): The Rough Draft for Wolfenstein 3D
Every genre has an origin point that gets overshadowed by whatever came right after it. For the first-person shooter, that