Grettings GOG Community,

I would really like to hear stories about when and how you discovered/got introduced to DOS gaming. You may also discuss any fascinations you have with DOS.

Here is my story.

About two years ago, I discovered DOS games one late night and tried finding way of playing them. When I finally found DOSBox, that's where my fascination with the method of manually inputting every single command[not to mention the amount of trial and error I went through] just to play each game began. I downloaded nearly 3GB of Shareware that week alone blazing through each game even getting to play some games I remembered grade school computers having. After some time, I decided to start hunting for DOS games in their physical form and never did find any apart from Warcraft Humans & Orcs in a second hand store and a few others.

Side Story:
[spoiler]For anybody that has worked for Activision, it is well known that Activision occasionally puts out boxes with old stuff up for grabs in the break room. One day they sent out an email mentioning 'free software'. I knew that they meant games, but to my surprise the boxes mostly included PC games with a few PS2 games thrown here and there [that I grabbed because nobody showed any interest in them. Here I found a bunch of Windows 95-98 games I thought I would never breathe to see in their original casings and whatnot. I grabbed all the game manuals for games I really enjoyed. The DOS compatible games I found were a factory sealed Time Commando[the music is nice], both Quake Mission Packs on one disk, Novastorm, and I was stupid enough to trade a sealed Wolfenstein 3D for a game I don't even remember the name of.[/spoiler]

How did I discover DOS gaming? That's a funny question. When I was a teenager DOS was simply the cutting edge of gaming technology. There were no Windows (3.1) games to speak of and using the command line was perfectly natural. So I didn't really "discover" DOS, it was pretty much the only way to use a computer at the time.

Well, back when I was a kid, we had a DOS computer, and I used it. I had these little notes that had the commands to start games on 'em. I couldn't read back then, so I guess I just matched symbols or something. I used DOS for some games after I learned to read, too. I remember there was this monster of a command that was needed to unpack games from multiple disks. It always terrified me.

So nothing groundbreaking. It was the OS to use back then.

I discovered dos gaming via such amazing games as:

Alley Cat
Striker
Moon Patrol
Tapper
Jump Joe
Digger

That was a time when computer games were computer games and people who played games were nerds.

Back in 1990, a friend's family had a DOS PC, which ran Sim City and Civilization. The system was obviously superior to the Atari ST home computer which I had at the time. I bought my own PC about a year later.

It was during the 90's. I used to head to my neighbor's house and play some Commander Keen. I think it was #6? Good times. Pogo jumping around and such. I love that game.

Well, let's see... about 18 years ago my parents bought an Amstrad 386 computer, the first we had. First thing I remember is accessing a system called QBasic and playing two games called Gorillas and Nibbles. My uncle taught my brother and me the commands to launch some games he installed using floppy disks, like Wolfenstein 3D, Battlechess, Day of the Tentacle, Prehistorik man... most of them run slowly.

I also learnt a few things of DOS at school, the basic stuff to create, copy, delete... But then Pentiums and Windows invaded us, and that was it for DOS gaming until I discovered GOG.

Gorillas was the first computer game I played too (which is why I think Angry Birds is okay). Played it on my cousin's computer, probably 386 also. He gave me one of his older computers as well, Commodore I think, but I never played games on that.

First computer my family bought was 486-100 though, with DOS 6, Win3.1; that's when I started to play computer games on at home. Even with Windows I still played a lot of DOS games, especially Challenge of the Five Realms, also given to me by my cousin.

It's weird, before I used Dosbox, I thought the text interface would be intimidating, but it wasn't. Somehow after all these years I still remembered all of the relevant DOS commands, I was surprised.

My first DOS game was Dig Dug back in the 80s. Man, I was so hooked on it but I sucked playing it.

I started playing games in 1982 or 1983. On Apple II. I remember typing "catalog" and "run" in the command line back then, before the PC and DOS came along and destroyed Steve Job's.

I had an Amiga, awesome games, wnderful colours.

My uncle in Greece had just a PC, with a bicolor screen. In the basement, where the living room and the guest room were amenaged (it was better times, their house was big, and the basement was the fresh place where the family spent most time).

I would spend time on that computer, playing the soft floppy disk games he had. "Psi 5 trading company" (the "FTL" of those years, great game), "Sierra Championship boxing", "Burger Time", and above all, "Ultima 4". Hours and hours of "Ultima 4".

Back to Switzerland, I'd keep playing with my superior Amiga. But those ms-dos games stayed linked to a specific atmosphere, specific house, specific family environment, and related moments. I found "Ultima 4" for the Amiga, but it didn't feel right in colours. Still, I continued playing it a lot. And I never found "Psi 5", except on abandonware much later. This kept linked to a magical moment.

Many years later, I had to stay in Greece for a few months (an anthropology fieldwork), with the only laptop I could afford - an unused relic from a company where my swiss aunt worked, an old old computer, designed for win32, and that could just barely run win95. I wanted a few games on it, so I checked for oldies caspable to run on it. I've played the "Star Trek" adventure games on it, the magnificent "Covert Action", and "Wasteland", "Sam and Max", "Simon the Sorcerer", and I'd keep using it back in Switzerland, with "Full Throttle", etc. I ended up playing these on my more robust, modern desktop.

That too old laptop finally ceased to work, so I had to ditch it. Sadly. I grew attached to it, it had had a good life for a computer. It had shared my epic greek adventures (the real-life ones, I mean). I had also lived quite a life bofore me, passing from colorful owner to colorful owner (the one before me was a sex-crazed homosexual who wasn't very good at clearing caches, I had some hilarious surprises when stumbling upon the browser's history). It was like a veteran computer, like these objects that, in movies, pass from hand to hand, telling about a lot of lives and epochs. So.

MS-Dos. Greece, holiday, childhood. Fresh basement in summer heat waves. Times where my greek family was economicaly better off. Then lovely fieldwork times. Magnificent warm nights on the terrace, surrounded with the stray cats who had learnt to trust me a bit. And courageous little laptop who had lived through much more stuff than me.

That's basically it.

___
Edit : had forgotten about burger time.

back in '90s, i used to play some arcade games.
And obviously Mortal Kombat!

Some of the first games I played were on an Apple IIe- no HDD to speak of, they just ran directly off of the old 5.25" floppies. When my family got a 386sx around 1990 running DOS it was a giant leap forward. Playing the original Sim City, along with some platformers like Crystal Caves and Duke Nukem (the original) were my first serious introduction to gaming. The DOS setup we had had a very basic shell that could be used to launch some things, but any kind of installation and many standard operations still had to be done through the CLI (and we liked it!). When Win 3.1 came out that seemed like a pretty incredible shift (although I still did a lot of things through the DOS CLI), and from there it was into territory that will be familiar to most people with Win95 onwards.

In short, when I was introduced to DOS gaming it wasn't "DOS gaming", it was just gaming and DOS was how it was done at the time. And since none of the other old-timers have said it yet, you may now remove yourself from my lawn. ;) I hope you went back a little and played Keen 4&5, as IMO those were the pinnacle of the series.

Same as others here, when I started gaming DOS was all we had. Of course, it was about 1996 and I was 8, but the only computer we had was fairly old and therefore could only play games from the earlier 90s.
This! This was only of the few games we had (and it was only the shareware first episode). We also had the first episode of Last Half of Darkness, I bet no one remembers that.

On my first PC back in 1992. It was a 486/DX2 @ 50MHz. with 2MB RAM I think.
My favourite games back then were Wolfenstein 3D and Prince of Persia.