I just opened a 2003 bottle of Pinot Noir and thought to myself, “What were some of the early games that were simple and a lot of fun?”  After thinking it for a while, I remembered some of the early DOS games that I really enjoyed.

These early DOS games were, how shall I put it…two-dimensional.  The games were often based on a grid and you could move anywhere within this matrix.  Some of my favorites were the early Tic-Tac-Toe games and of course Star Trek.  To play Star Trek you would fly you ship with in an 8x8 grid galaxy and battle enemy ships with in those grids to “conquer” the galaxy.  The player would navigate to a grid square and use long range or short range sensors to detect enemies and attack.

While these games were challenging at times, they were usually fairly easy to comprehend.   One could easily envision the grid in his head and plan his next move.

Enter Hunt the Wumpus.  Wumpus was one of the first games to break free of the “grid” and expand to the third dimension.  The first map created for Wumpus was a Dodecahedron.  Imagine a soccer ball made out of only twelve panels instead of the traditional thirty-two.  Each panel has a point of intersection; the player would move through this maze with simple text commands just like Zork.

There were other early games that broke the grid mold.  Take Towers of Hanoi, for example.  This simple child’s game, easily translated to the computer, proved to be very difficult.  I mean how hard is it to move five discs from one rod to a third rod by simply moving one disk at a time?  If you play the game you will find that it is a lot more challenging than one would think.

I was also thinking about the very first game I ever played on a computer.  The year was 1976, and I was in high school.  Yes, 1976 on a DEC mini hard terminal; the name of the program was simply called Lander.  (A hard terminal is a workstation of sorts that would output onto 24” wide green bar paper, sort of like a type writer).  In this game you had to input fuel burn rates so that you did not crash on the surface of the moon.  Again, it sounds simple, right?  Wrong.  You had a limited amount of fuel and had to land within a speed window.

Then there were some of the early attempts at A.I.  Anyone old enough to remember Elisa?  Back in the day, one of the true tests to see if A.I. really worked or not was to put a terminal in one room and either a person at another terminal or the computer in another room.  The first person would then enter questions into the terminal and they would have to guess what was in the other room: a person or a computer.  Elisa was a basic program that ran on a computer in the “other” room.

Well, that’s enough reminiscing for this week.  If you want to see some of these early games in action, you can visit: AW Software.  They offer a download package that contains a few of the early DOS basic games along with an emulator.  To play Hunt the Wumpus online here.

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