Good obscure Pre-1995 PC games?

[Callate]

Jones in the Fast Lane, a vaguely "Game of Life"-like computer board game by Sierra about managing your limited amount of time each week to progress to better jobs, education, etc. while still finding time and money to eat and relax.

Sid Meier's Covert Action. Basically a series of mini-games the player performed in the process of fulfilling procedurally-generated missions for their agency, but good fun for all that, and succeeded in maintaining a surprising illusion of depth (at least for a while, until the player started recognizing the patterns.)

Flames of Freedom (a.k.a. "Midwinter 2"), an early (and admittedly fairly ugly) polygon-based first-person game that tasked the player with "turning" various islands between your home nation and that of an enemy nation planning to invade in order to guarantee the good guys will win the battle. You could commandeer virtually any vehicle in the game- tanks, helicopters, planes- and turn them against your enemies, and you were tasked with various RPG-lite tasks involving assassination, meeting up with rebel leaders, etc. It also had a surprisingly robust portrait designer, used for both your agent and all the other characters in the game (the polygonal graphics were pretty ugly, but the 256-color graphics for the "story" segments weren't bad for the time.)

Sort of a weird predecessor of "Just Cause", in a way...

The Terminator. Based on the movie. Also an ugly combination of polygons and higher-rez graphics (mostly to keep computers of the day from bursting into flames), but something about stealing a M-60 from an army depot and mowing down civilians as a near-invincible cyborg just doesn't get old.

(Or maybe that's just me. Please don't call the authorities.)

 

[Jacob.pederson]

I get the feeling that there is a huge wealth of uncharted gaming territory for the PC pre-1995. I am not talking about the obvious games like Civ, Simcity, Elder Scrolls arena. Those all have recent entries in their series. I want the obscure games that were great, but due to not selling hundreds of thousands or not getting sequels, have been lost to the mists of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight_2:_Trade_Routes_of_the_Cloud_Nebula

1991 Starflight 2

A rougelike adventure RPG IN SPACE, in which the developers designed their own AI friendly computer language (forthought) to create it Looks great in DOSBOX, available on GOG for $6

 

[blackrave]

Star control 1-3
I've tried 2 and played 3
(I assume that there is StarCon1 and that it's worth trying)
3rd is really good
(occasionally obscure, but still good)

 

[Breywood]

Retrogaming. Awesome. I'll throw in my $0.02 worth since I do a lot of retrogaming.

Dune 2 (1992) Not the first, but certainly the most famous of the real time strategy games, possibly obscured by the mists of time.
Wasteland (1988) While Fallout was its own game, and a damn good one in its own right, it borrowed a lot from this game. Quirky, but mechanically excellent.
Gunship 2000 (1991): I had wasted plenty of time on this one.
TIE Fighter (1994): While you're starting in a tin can capable of taking 3 blaster shots at the most for the "Evil Empire", I thoroughly loved playing this one.
Master of Magic(1994): The game was tons of fun if you liked turn-based strategy.
Warlords II (1993): My favorite one of the series. You could even obtain an expansion pack that allowed you to do plenty of map and graphical editing.
Strahd's Possession (1994): A gothic horror Eye of the Beholder style game. A lot of good highlights and story, even if the dialogue is a bit stilted.
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (1993): Buggy, but worth playing through once.
Discworld (1995): Fiendish puzzle game with Terry Pratchett's famous universe. What more could you want?

I will apologize in advance if any of these are missing their "obscure" tag.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I originally played them on the Mac waaaaay back in the day, but I think at some point in the past few years free PC versions of The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three were put up on the creator's site. They're pretty clever little adventure/puzzle games (I particularly liked 3 in Three, but they each have their own style, both in terms of types of puzzles and presentation) that I'm guessing most people never got a chance to play. I think I saw somewhere that The Fool's Errand is even finally getting a sequel after all these years.

Star Control 2 (1992) <<< Mass Effect was "inspired" by this game.

For a certain type of people, the "Mass Effect" is the uncontrollable urge to burst laughing and/or screaming at how much mass effect was "inspired" by SC2. IMO SC2 is the better game in all respects but that's just me.

Heh. I remember when I first encountered scanning planets for minerals in Mass Effect 2 and thought that it seemed familiar from somewhere, only it'd been done better the first time around, a couple decades earlier. I think I still have a notebook somewhere with hand-made star charts and lists of what planets are in every system and what types of minerals they have and anything else of interest.

Star control 1-3
I've tried 2 and played 3
(I assume that there is StarCon1 and that it's worth trying)
3rd is really good
(occasionally obscure, but still good)

Lies. There are only two Star Control games. The first is ok, but it doesn't have any plot, just the ship combat mode. The second is one of the best games of all time. Sadly, they never made a sequel.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Anything on gog isn't obscure anymore.

That was the most hipster post anyone could make in this thread short of posting a photo of themselves wearing matching cutoffs with their girlfriend.

And yet it is still correct.

 

[blackrave]

Star control 1-3
I've tried 2 and played 3
(I assume that there is StarCon1 and that it's worth trying)
3rd is really good
(occasionally obscure, but still good)

Lies. There are only two Star Control games. The first is ok, but it doesn't have any plot, just the ship combat mode. The second is one of the best games of all time. Sadly, they never made a sequel.

Star Control 3 was released in 1996, and it was direct sequel to Star Control 2
(you're playing same ship captain I believe, at least other aliens react on you as if they know you)
They planned StarCon4, but it was scrapped

P.S. Unless StarCon3 is treated by StarCon fans, like C&C4 by C&C fans, then yes, StarCon3 was never released, keep lying to yourself

 

[Jacob.pederson]

Given what an enormous market electronic gaming is now, the PCs games in the 80s and early 90s are by definition somewhat obscure because there were just so few people who played them relative to the millions and millions who play them now.

The first game I got for my PCjr in 1985 was The Ancient Art of War, which was a cool little semi-real time strategy game, and it was followed by The Ancient Art of War at Sea. Some other favorites that followed in the mid to late 80s were Starflight and Wasteland. Wasteland in particular has enjoyed a lot more attention based on its spiritual successor, Fallout.

It is funny to hear the Ultima games referenced in such a manner, being the lineage that finally gave us the still extant Ultima Online, but as Icehearted noted, EA did pretty much run them into the ground in the process of dismantling Origin. It's really like they added insult to injury by naming their hated digital distribution platform after the previously beloved studio that gave us Ultima, Wing Commander and others.

Bless you I'd completely forgotten about Ancient Art of War, I had it on the Tandy 1000SX. Those little archers mowing each other down were EPIC.

 

[xDarc]

I had fun playing the Police Quest games from Sierra.

 

[Avaholic03]

I find a lot of the PC games in the late 80s and throughout the 90s were more innovative than the games today.

By necessity, I assure you. There were far fewer gaming tropes to work off of back then, and also more system limitations to work around. That forced developers to be innovative to simply make an average game. But given a choice, I guarantee developers back then would have taken the easy road-more-traveled if it was there for them to take. So let's not get blinded by nostalgia and pretend like gaming was so much better back then. I'm really sick of that argument.

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

Pre-1995? But 1995 is when shit started to get good!

Anyway, I'm not sure how "obscure" this is but pre-1995 I was mostly enjoying Frontier: Elite II IIRC.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

P.S. Unless StarCon3 is treated by StarCon fans, like C&C4 by C&C fans, then yes, StarCon3 was never released, keep lying to yourself

Now you're catching on. It's not a terrible game on its own, but it is kind of a mediocre game. When compared to StarCon2 though, it's a joke. The quality of the writing, which was one of the strong points in 2, took a significant step backward, and the story was a mess. The pseudo-3D combat was unplayable and had to be disabled just so you could aim properly, and the ships weren't as varied and interesting and well-balanced as before either. I did like what they did with the some of the puppets for the alien races, and a couple of the new ones were fun. The audio quality may also have been better in 3, but 2 had more memorable music.

Really what the problem was was that the first two were made by Toys for Bob (who recently have made the Skylanders games and are too busy now to make a true sequel, even though they've said repeatedly that they were interested in doing it), and then the publisher got someone else to make the third one without their involvement at all. It completely ignored a lot of things previously established by the series as a result, both gameplay and lore, and kind of pissed off existing fans. It wasn't a bad game so much as it was just an average game being sold as a sequel to what was at the time (and sometimes still more recently) considered one of the best PC games ever made. It's ended up in a weird place where people who played it on its own seem to like it, but people who played the previous games first and Toys for Bob themselves have disowned it and consider it non-canon. Heh.

 

[blackrave]

Now you're catching on. It's not a terrible game on its own, but it is kind of a mediocre game. When compared to StarCon2 though, it's a joke. The quality of the writing, which was one of the strong points in 2, took a significant step backward, and the story was a mess. The pseudo-3D combat was unplayable and had to be disabled just so you could aim properly, and the ships weren't as varied and interesting and well-balanced as before either. I did like what they did with the some of the puppets for the alien races, and a couple of the new ones were fun. The audio quality may also have been better in 3, but 2 had more memorable music.

Really what the problem was was that the first two were made by Toys for Bob (who recently have made the Skylanders games and are too busy now to make a true sequel, even though they've said repeatedly that they were interested in doing it), and then the publisher got someone else to make the third one without their involvement at all. It completely ignored a lot of things previously established by the series as a result, both gameplay and lore, and kind of pissed off existing fans. It wasn't a bad game so much as it was just an average game being sold as a sequel to what was at the time (and sometimes still more recently) considered one of the best PC games ever made. It's ended up in a weird place where people who played it on its own seem to like it, but people who played the previous games first and Toys for Bob themselves have disowned it and consider it non-canon. Heh.

I have nothing against such approach
SC3 had good gameplay mechanic and story was fairly funny
Now I need to play SC2 (NOT StarCraft!!!)

 

[Jfswift]

I always liked those SSI dungeon and dragon games. I'll add more later as I think up titles.

 

[Vkmies]

Tyrian (1995)
Vinyl Goddess from Mars (1995)
Star Control 2 (1992) <<< Mass Effect was "inspired" by this game.
Jazz Jackrabbit (1994)
Populous (1989)


Obscure but beyond 1995:
Abe's Odyssey
Dungeon Keeper
Populous 3: The beggining
MDK
Grim Fandango

Populous, Abe's Odyssey, Dungeon Keeper and Grim Fandango are by no means obscure. Some of them didn't sell well in their time, but all of them are widely considered classics and have certainly not been lost to the mysts of time.

Its hard to tell WHAT is obscure. People KNOW about System Shock 2 (for example) but NO OF THEM played it.

People may "know" that those existed but never really cared about the impact those games MADE in the first place and how those outshine the attemps of "innovation" that the industry today keeps doing. Like how people think that Fallout 3 made innovation for allowing the feature of "talking the final boss to death" but way back in 2000, the games like Planescape: Torment and Fallout 1 - 2 already made those bold moves.

I disagree in some ways. I agree that the word obscure it's pretty obscure itself and hard to define, but I think the retro-gaming community is evergrowing and I think at least trying the classics is slowly becoming the standard for gamers all around. Especially emulators and XBLA, Wii VC, Steam and GoG are helping modern gamers get into and try out these classics. Pretty sure Planescape: Torment is pretty widely played throughout the gaming community, at least in the parts where people know about it's existence. Same with most "classic" games, especially if there is a new sequal or a reboot coming.
Pretty sure the original X-Com, Deus Ex, Hitman and Fallouts started selling again, when the recent reboots started selling by the millions.

OT: The only truly obscure stuff I can come up with on the spot is "I have no mouth and I must scream" which is a wonderfully morbid post-apocalyptic point n' click.

Not that widely known by the common gamer, but has a big and devoted fanbase; I highly recommend the Heroes of Might and Magic series. The first one is pre -95 if I remember correctly. If you can go past 95 like a champ, 2 and 3 are absolutely fantastic TBS-games. Not that obscure, but still criminally underrated.

 

[Vkmies]

Pre-1995? But 1995 is when shit started to get good!

Anyway, I'm not sure how "obscure" this is but pre-1995 I was mostly enjoying Frontier: Elite II IIRC.

Good choice. Also; the original Elite, if you want to get real old school. I guess Amiga/Commodore times were before -95 PC's? The original Elite is a classic. Super great stuff.

 

[mjcabooseblu]

Well, it's not exactly obscure, but there's Myst. It gets a lot of shit from people that didn't have the attention span to pay attention to the story, puzzles, and visuals all at once, but it's honestly quite good. A little moon logic sometimes, but ultimately satisfying.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I have nothing against such approach
SC3 had good gameplay mechanic and story was fairly funny
Now I need to play SC2 (NOT StarCraft!!!)

Yeah, it was alright. I never finished it, but a couple of my friends did and thought it was ok but just not quite the same. If you want to give StarCon2 another shot, check out The Ur-Quan Masters [http://sc2.sourceforge.net/], which is a port of it that runs on pretty much any modern computer/OS and is completely free. It definitely feels like it's 20 years old, probably because it is 20 years old this year, but as long as you don't mind taking notes yourself on where to go and what's going on (no quest logs/journals back then) it's still pretty playable.