As we collectively say good-bye to the year 2012 I want to take this moment to look back, way back, to around 1992 or so.
It was a simpler time of DOS based machines, black screens, and mouseless navigation. The keyboards were chunkier and clunkier, and the floppy disks were actually floppy. I remember being in Kindergarten and having 'lab time', where all of us tiny children walked down the hallways and into the computer lab. The lights were dim, the room was warm, and the computers hummed lightly with anticipation of game time.
At school the game was always Word Muncher, a simple interactive title where a little green man with a giant mouth and legs walked around a grid and ate words or numbers that correlated to the key word or number. For example!
Aww yiss, Word Muncher. Source.
Those were good times, and I like to believe that is where I started my long and storied life as a computer lover.
When I was in second grade my mom bought our first family computer, and I was floored. I thought it was the best thing in the world, and I was so proud to have a computer at the house. MY house. After school I got to run home and play with it. And you know what I played?
Motha 'effin' Mario Teaches Typing. Source.
Mario Teaches Typing is the party responsible for the typist that I am today. In my prime I could do 77 wpm with virtually no errors. It's a fact that I am perhaps too proud of.
We didn't have internet until I was in fifth or sixth grade, and then it was AOL dial up and a nightmare. All years leading up to that were DOS based gaming bliss. Really just Mario Teaches Typing on Windows 95. My mom still has the box and all install items for it, too. The box is enormous and made of the heftiest cardboard that ever existed. It contains two options depending on your needs: five inch floppies, and three and a half inch floppies. Just hysterical.
What are your best DOS based memories?
-MJ
8 comments:
The 7th Guest, one of the first CD based games for MS-DOS. Also, Myst, similarly one of the first CD based games for MS-DOS.
I've never played any Myst games!
HAH! Just today I was just reminiscing fondly of the days of playing Munchers back in the day! I was watching a YouTube video and googling stuff and reading things in Wikipedia ...I wonder if we both saw the same thing on social media somewhere today.
Anyway, I loved playing Super Munchers; and, in the sixth grade, I got first place among the students in my class in the Odds & Ends category of the game and received a giant-sized Hershey's chocolate bar. =)
Perhaps you can help me, MJ. I don't know if you've ever played this game, but there was some kind of old adventure game during the days of Munchers that had these graphics that looked better than Munchers, and the story/gameplay was text-based just like any other computer adventure of that time. It was a completely different game from the grid-like Munchers game, but I vividly remember there being the purple Troggle monster (bad guy you avoid touching in the game) from the Munchers games as a stuffed animal in the background in one of the screens' graphics - it was at a carnival-ish area of this ..."whatever island" the game was set on. It's driving me nuts 'cause I can't seem to find out the name of this game!
And Mario Teaches Typing was just fantastically awesome.
DOS Games. Master of Magic took up way too many hours of time. But Wing Commander may have even taken more. Not playing, but trying to perfectly tweak my autoexec and config files for it...
Nibbles!
Bradley - sadly I'm not familiar with the game you're talking about! I've had this idea rolling around in my head for a while and I just happened to finally write about it. What a fun coincidence!
Ooh, I love Crystal Caves, Raptor, Jill of the Jungle, Keen. I was a total DOS gamer as a kid.
Thanks for the comments everyone! I'll have to write these down and maybe get my hands on some of your favorite DOS games in the future :D
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