Old is gold – How 90’s PC gaming changed my life!
Last night I was thinking about my first interaction with a computer. “Ramu chetta, can I use the computer for sometime?”. Ramu is my cousin. He was the luckiest kid on the block. Got a computer with Intel pentium. The word Intel was somehow really cool back then. The PC was extremely top end. 32MB RAM, 1GB HDD, 13” monitor, a mouse and a keyboard? What? I went crazy. I couldn’t sleep all night after my first 10 minutes with the PC. When I made the first ever folder with my name on it, I stared at it for hours. Right click to refresh was satisfying somehow. The PC apparently told me to shut it down when it was time.
He always told me this was the computer telling me that it had to shut down. Years later I helped him buy the “right” phone.
We used to play countless hours of games or watch Chinese movies. I miss those stay overs during the weekend where we would not sleep for nights together. Shutting down the PC was a sad affair. When the internal fan cuts out, reality sinks in. It was time to study again.
Games
If I cherish my childhood, it’s only because I spent a good deal of it playing PC games. I got my first PC when I was in 5th standard. This was a big deal. I got a Pentium 3 machine with hyper threading. I had 64MB RAM. The best of the best back then. A 15” monitor. A better looking cabinet than my cousin. I had to go weeks behind my dad convincing him to get me one. And I did it. It cost my a dad a fortune getting me the PC. Little did I know how difficult it was to run a family. Oh boy I do now! With all the recurring bills and payments I sometimes wonder how our parents did it. No phones. No emails. Just hard work. That’s for another time. Back to this.
I vividly remember the day I got my first PC. I couldn’t sleep. I would switch on the lights at 2am and would stare at it for sometime. I knew this would be an eternal connection. Nothing else mattered. I used to get a steady supply of games from Ramu chettan (chettan is “brother” in Malayalam).
The first game that I was hooked on to was – Future Cop L.A.P.D.
It was a thrilling game. Challenging. Didn’t know how to play at first. But after completing it, I was convinced that USA is an amazing place to be a cop.
After several years I found out that this machine also had a hover mode. Sigh!
Re-volt
Full version games were extremely difficult to obtain. The World Wide Web was non existent. The only connection was Sathyam dial up which required me to go buy a CD and that would last for just 58 minutes. It took 3 minutes to load Google.com. We got hands on with a game called Re-volt. That was probably the first racing game I played. The graphics were insane back then.
The concept of driving remote controlled cars through real life setting was something interesting. This was the first game I used cheat codes on. It was as simple as ending the inf file containing the respective car and modifying the values.
This game struggled running on Ramu chetta’s PC. I somehow felt like the lucky one.
Captain Claw
We always think it’s the graphics that matter in a game! Captain Claw changed my whole perspective about that. The whole sounds and musical interaction, a proper story line etc was unheard of in a game.
I would still play this. I would still use cheat codes on it. I still remember the actual cheat codes. MPJORDAN (jumps higher), MPKFA (full life), MPCASPER (invisible mode). Okay now you get an idea how much I played this title. I wish kids these days could play games like this. It was empowering in someway.
Midtown Madness
A game made by Microsoft? What? I need not go in depth on what this game is. Everyone who owned a PC has probably played this. Blitz race. Cruise. The different weather modes. First drive in snow. Chicago to someone who was born in Kerala was a dreamland. I somehow felt like I lived in Chicago for a year. I knew where the airport was and where the stadium was.
No game until then gave you the freedom to just roam around a city without consequences. This was the GTA of our times!
The Mummy
Weren’t we all obsessed with the Mummy series? When I got hands on the game I remember how hard it was to install the crack. The game kept on crashing and I had to wait a whole day to get it working. The levels were harder than any game I played before. It was genuinely interesting.
Each time I played a new game, it opened up a different experience. Real life wasn’t as interesting as the games were.
If time travel was a real thing I would do this again with my eyes closed. I’m someone who’s still struggling to find games that are as good as these ones and countless others I used to play in the 90’s. I was the first to subscribe to Apple Arcade but I failed to find anything that kept me half as engaged as these games did.
Some of the other titles:
1. Tomb Raider 1
2. Tank
3. Half Life
4. Dungeons and Dragons
5. Worms
6. Pocket Tanks
7. Serious Sam
Well I’ll update this as I keep remembering.
Thanks for reading
