So the family got its first 8088-based PC in 1984. It had the CPU unit with dual 5-1/4″ floppy drives and no hard drive, keyboard, CGA monitor, and dot matrix printer. Quite the luxury for the timeframe. Aside from typing up the occasional book report, I wanted to play games! But those were sparse and the ones I had access to were played heavily.
For some reason, all PCs at the time were equipped with GW-BASIC. I had in my possession a whole floppy disk full of games for this primitive language. I think there was more than one Pac-Man clone, but I can only remember one right now that must have been the least obnoxious of the bunch. Looking back on it, the game must have run in an 80×25 cell text mode. I just remember it was very difficult.
Another game that I distinctly recall is Outpost. In this game, you are stationed in a lonely outpost trying to hold down the fort against numerous ruthless advancing enemies. You have limited supplies but reinforcements randomly made it through. An overhead radar map was refreshed for every turn which updated the enemies’ positions (as well as your resupply unit’s position). If the resupply unit crossed paths with an enemy, well, you would have to spread your current stash a bit thinner. I believe there were various weapons that worked at different ranges and had different levels of effectiveness towards different enemies, whom I believe were identified by their toughness levels (1-5) on the overhead map.
But the GW-BASIC game that I remember the most dealt with being on an island full of monsters. It was Escape From Monster Island, or perhaps just Monster Island. I remember the basic thrust: It was a text adventure where you moved from location to location and fought monsters of varying difficulty for numerous treasures. Some of the treasures were just unusual and for some reason, the only one that I can clearly remember is “XYZ monster is guarding a WANTON NAKED WOMAN”. The name of the treasure was always capitalized.
Does anyone out there have any recollection of these games? Google sure doesn’t.
Jeremy Wse says:
I don’t remember the examples you give here, but I remember years ago I had a Tandy 1000 HX, and we bought some GW-BASIC games (they were compiled) at Radio Shack. They were adventure games: HAUNTED, MOUNTAIN, CRIME, ICE, ISLAND, etc. We were never actually able to finish the games after our disk became corrupt. I’ve been trying to locate the company that made them, or look them up through Radio Shack, or find the titles on the Internet, but have never found a tidbit of information. The disk was from a company called Software-To-Go (Software On The Go?), out of Texas. The disk was called GA-220, and there was another arcade game disk called GA-110 which came with Hardhat Mack, Moon Bugs, Asteroids, etc.
I would be willing to pay a lot of money to track those games down so I could actually play them again (and beat them!).
I understand your search, and I can’t believe we can’t track these things down with today’s search engines.