I had the good fortune of being raised by a cool dad who let me watch him play games on his old Windows PCs. First, the old floppy disks which contained a variety of fun and interesting games, though the only one I remember in detail was the Oregon Trail. I remember being so invested in whether or not our family would survive the trip to Oregon. Sometimes we did. Most times, not so much.
When the first CDs started coming out, we traded in the floppies for some of those. That was when the world of PC gaming opened up for me. Lords of the Realm, Lords of Magic, MechCommander 1 and 2, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Might and Magic, Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, Diablo 1 and 2. All of them were much cooler looking than Oregon Trail, and very different. But the one thing that never changed was the dynamic of my dad playing games, and little me standing next to him, watching him play, sharing in the challenges, the victories, and the defeats. He would occasionally look to me and ask “How would you do this part?” I would give him my best answer, which at first was usually the wrong one, but as I kept watching the game, and he kept asking for my advice, my answers got better. Eventually, I was genuinely helping him out.
When my parents decided I was old enough to play myself, basically when they believed I wouldn’t just break the computer, I got to play these games. I still play most of them to this day. The ones that I don’t are the ones that I can’t, due to them not getting a remastered or “enhanced edition”, and therefore not being playable on modern PCs. I still get that urge, you know? No matter what all the new games of today are like, I still come back to the old ones. They’re just a bit more special than today’s modern graphics and cheesy romances.
