I started playing computer games back in the early 90s, and I still have some of those classics around the house. Every now and then, I like to boot up one of those and take a trip down memory lane, which is why I still keep a couple 15-year-old PCs around, since they are the only things that can still run these games (See, kids, at one point you actually had to exit Windows and boot into something called MS-DOS and type lines of code to run a game).

I’ve been on one of those kicks lately. We are currently clicking our way through Star Trek: A Final Unity, about as good a Star Trek game as I’ve seen. I also dug out Star Trek: Judgment Rites. It comes on 14 3.5-inch floppy disks, which just seems hilarious in retrospect. I remember when I had to delete a bunch of files off a really old computer just so I could install this game, and then spending the next hour checking back intermittently to switch disks. I also rediscovered my copy of Earl Weaver Baseball II, which comes on two floppy disks. I spent many an hour in my teenage years leading the Negro League All-Stars to victory over their pasty counterparts with one 600-foot homer after another by Josh Gibson.

I have to admit, part of me admires the programming skills it took to write fun and (for that time) visually appealing games that fit in as little as 3 MB of space. As Courtney pointed out, it takes more space than that to download a new dress or a piece of furniture for your Sim. And these were games from which we have derived hours of enjoyment, even more than a decade later. I guess it goes to show that the really important things that make a game great don’t require oodles of disk space, killer graphic cards, or massive amounts of memory.

So what’s your favorite old-timey game?