Comments on: What is a DOS game?

By: Gary Osborne

Gary Osborne — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 14:15:03 +0000

Windows Games – I was asked a trivia question only yesterday – when was Windows 1.0 released? I answered I worked on it in 1985, which turned out to be the answer expected. No prize though :-(. This reminded me that at some point either during Windows 1, or Windows 286 we had a game called Taipei from Microsoft. This had started out I think as someone’s lunchtime project.
More background: in those days everyone used Microsoft Mail – pre Outlook, and it was internal only. no ‘@company.com’ stuff. At Apricot we used the same email format as Microsoft – this was given name and first letter of surname – hence billg for example. Steve Balmer, Bill’s 2IC was steveb.
So anyway we all played Taipei. Taipei is great as it requires luck and strategy, and having tried to play this with physical Mah Jong tiles it is much better on computer than in real life. To win you pair Mah Jong tiles until there were no tiles left.
If you did this then you had a fortune cookie printed on the screen. Randomly, and we call these Easter Eggs now, the fortune cookie that came out to our huge delight was “Day without steveb like day on sunny beach”. Taipei was released many years later to the public in the Entertainment pack. History here: https://www.giantbomb.com/taipei/3030-5034/ You can find the game on the web and also on mobile devices etc.

By: Shirley Marquez

Shirley Marquez — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 16:41:08 +0000

The other advantage of Windows games is that if they are written correctly, they can take advantage of whatever display you have. Even if it’s a type of display that did not yet exist at the time the game was written. If the developers included support of multiple windows you can also take advantage of additional displays by moving one or more of the windows there. That’s great for strategy games, where seeing more information at once can be important to playing the game well.

By: Gary Osborne

Gary Osborne — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 14:36:02 +0000

I remember many of these of course. The most compelling was h2g2g – The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy – from Infocom (No, I didn’t remember that, but I have no been reminded – see below). We played this at work until the bitter end and swapped clues and tips. It was entirely text based, you had to type in questions and gather up the clues. So, shock, here it is…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-game-30th-anniversary-edition

The graphic shows a keyboard – you can type in using your PC keyboard, it all works. Clue “who am i”, “What can i see” “Get out of bed” the rest is up to you. It works under my copy of Chrome. There’s a java version (see wikipedia). Enjoy.