Dinosaur Safari. This was my very first computer game, and it came out in 1994. The goal is to take the best pictures of all of the dinosaurs, from common and innocuous to rare and mostly instant-death. We ran it on my dad’s two-inch thick laptop, which could go for about an hour on its battery in the car, at which point it would be too hot to keep in your lap. This is exactly the version I had, which originally ran on a Windows I don’t remember the name of, and I have no idea why anyone would make it available for XP. I encourage all of you who are able to download it, which took about six minutes on my machine, and give it a whirl or just click on the link and look at the screencaps. It has no music, the graphics are exactly as shown, and it has the weirdest voiceover I’ve ever heard. That Ichthyosaursus swimming around down there used to scare the crap out of me, but look at the poor thing now. But someone has written an article about it and detailed the odd processes one must go through to get the poor little game to run on a contemporary operating system. Thank you, but WHY?
I think it just goes to show that, as technology evolves, so do our expectations of it. I was six and loved this game, my dad was thirty-six and loved it too. We still reference it with much fondness. Now I’m making fun of it. Having fought dinosaurs in the gorgeously-rendered Final Fantasy XII, seeing them move in real time with fancy things like a shadow and music and sound effects and individually moving body parts, this old game seems like something a six-year-old should be making, not playing. It makes me wonder where we go from “gorgeously-rendered” with all the fancy new trappings.
It also makes me wonder at the huge amount of mostly-useless stuff archived on the internet. Who would bother making this available twelve years after it was a good game? And why? I suppose it supports the concept of this (for me) newly-discovered “abandonia.com.” Abandoned games for the people who like them, and advertising for people with that target audience. I guess that’s me then…
Excuse me as I go try to make this tiny speck of nineties run on my machine.
Welcome to the Cladagram Room.
Fantastic.
I found “Shufflepuck Cafe”, a favorite of mine from kindergarten. The teacher’s son liked to play it, but she would hide it somewhere on the hard drive so we couldn’t get to it; leading to my discovery of the power of “apple+f”.
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/872/Shufflepuck+Cafe.html
“this old game seems like something a six-year-old should be making,”
Incidentally, my daughters have started to make their own “games” using MIT’s Scratch program- http://scratch.mit.edu/ user:cutepanda Not quite up to Dinosaur Safari standards, but they’ll get there 🙂
I really love this example of how the media has completely transformed over the last 10-15 years. My parents would buy me computer games, when I was about 8, and would play along with me, looking entertained themselves. If you think about it, computer games were new to them since they come from a generation that had local tv and the radio. Today I am still trying to teach them how to play games, surf the web, download music…After awhile, I think they feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with all of the new technology out there!