RGB Classic Games Forum

My preservation efforts have led me to purchase over 100 boxed games over the years, most of them since 2005 (when the site started) at Goodwill and the Salvation Army Thrift Store for $3 or so -- naturally my family couldn't have afforded to buy over 100 games for $50 or more when they were new. So I won't count those for the purposes of this post.

I was going through some boxes of disks that have my original games: the games that were purchased for me during my childhood. I thought it might be fun and educational to share a list of games that we had in our youth.


5.25" floppy disks

DOS commercial software

Alge-Blaster Plus! (3 disks)
Clue Master Detective (2 disks)
Combination Lock
The Humans (3 disks)
The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary Version 1.0 (2 disks)
Time Treks (2 disks)
Wing Commander 2 Speech Accessory Pack (3 disks) -- came with SoundBlaster 16 Edutainment pack (SB16, 2x CD-ROM, software bundle, about $500)
Wing Commander II: Special Operations (2 disks) -- came with SoundBlaster 16 Edutainment pack
What's My Angle (3 disks)

Disks with plain, dot-matrix labels that may have been illegally distributed full version games -- bought at Woolworth

Alf's U.S. Geography
Black Monday

DOS shareware disks

Plain yellow label

3D-Chess (illegal copy of Psion Chess)
Arcade Volleyball
Cap World
Chopper Commando

Personal Companion Software -- sold at Woolworth

Chinese Checkers
RoboMaze 2: The Lobby

The $5 Computer Software Store ("Just type Wiz") -- they had a display at K-Mart

001 - Tutor.com (Computer and DOS Tutorial)
009 - Viruscan/Clean-up (believe it or not, McAfee VirusScan)
803 - Kingdom of Kroz II
881 - Monopoly

Windows 3.0 commercial software

Annabel's Dream of Ancient Egypt: A Gateway Story CD-ROM rel. 1.11 (accompanying floppy disk)

Windows 3.0 shareware disks

The $5 Computer Software Store ("Just type Wiz")

453 - Paint Shop Pro (Windows 3.0)
456 - Screen Peace (Windows 3.0)
476 - Windows Arcade Game Pak (Windows 3.0) -- Alien Force, Bang! Bang!, Worm War
478 - Football for Windows (Windows 3.0)

3.5" floppy disks

DOS commercial software

Alge-Blaster Plus! (2 disks)
Castle of Dr. Brain (2 disks)
Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon (2 disks)
The Humans (4 disks)
Indianapolis 500: The Simulation -- came with SoundBlaster 16 Edutainment pack
Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! (6 disks) -- my mother bought that one and, of course, did not let me play it
Lemmings -- came with SoundBlaster 16 Edutainment pack
Lemmings 2 (2 disks)
The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary v1.0 (3 disks)
SimAnt (2 disks) -- from Maxis Collections 1
SimCity Classic (2 disks) -- from Maxis Collections 1
SimCity 2000 (2 disks)
SimLife (2 disks) -- from Maxis Collections 1
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (8 disks)
Star Trek: Judgment Rites (11 disks)
Time Treks (4 disks)
What's My Angle (2 disks)
When Two Worlds War (only found 1 disk so far)

DOS shareware disks

Plain yellow label

3D-Chess (illegal copy of Psion Chess)
Arcade Volleyball
Cap World
Chopper Commando (currently MIA)

Plain white label

Ford Sim3/Morafs Entrap

Explore the World of Software Inc

EDU29 - All Around Canada Trivia
GAM049 - Commander Keen 6 Aliens Ate Baby
GAM051 - Wolfenstein 3D (third-party levels?)
GAM424B - Doom Episode 1 Wolf 3D Sequel
GAM453 - King Arthur's K.O.R.T.

Gold Medallion Software

Android Pinball (Android table from Epic Pinball)

PC Gamer magazine

Mega Man X (April 1996, Disk 2)

The $5 Computer Software Store ("Just type Wiz")

550 - Professor Weisman's ALGEBRAX
889 - Hexxagon

Windows 3.0 commercial software

Annabel's Dream of Ancient Egypt: A Gateway Story CD-ROM rel. 1.11 (accompanying floppy disk)

CD-ROMs

DOS commercial software

Bodyworks Voyager
Detroit (SierraOriginals series)
Pinball World
Under a Killing Moon (4 CD-ROMs)

CD-ROMs of full version software from SoundBlaster 16 Edutainment Pack

Creative Labs 1213330145 -- Pagan: Ultima VIII, Syndicate Plus, Strike Commander, Wing Commander II
Creative Labs 1213330146 -- Hong Kong Mahjong Pro, Seven Cities of Gold, Yeager's Air Combat, Shadowcaster, Populous II, Space Hulk, Ultima VII, The Savage Empire, Ultima Underworld, Wing Commander Academy
Missing one that had a submarine game

DOS shareware CD-ROMs

Aztech New Media Corp.

Aztech's Super Games (AZ-101) -- Doom, Duke Nuk'em I, Duke Nuk'em II, Blake Stone, Raptor, BioMenace, Oxyd, Wolfenstein 3D, Sango Fighter, Master Mind, AstroFire
(A copy of that CD-ROM is hosted on cd.textfiles.com)

Windows 3.x commercial software

Annabel's Dream of Ancient Egypt: A Gateway Story
Championship Chess
Grandmaster Chess Ultra
Klik & Play
The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain


I've probably missed a few games, so I'll add them when I find them. These are the games of my youth, which gives you a window into my experience with DOS games. This list doesn't include the many shareware games that I received from friends and acquaintances, such as copies of Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure and Wolfenstein 3D that I got from the computer store where we bought our used 286 and new 486 when I saw Cosmo running in attract mode on one of their computers; my copy of Mah Jongg -V-G-A- that I got from my French teacher in Grade 8, and some text adventures and ASCII games like "Castaway", "Samerica" (South America) and Kroz from my uncle. This is only a list of my legally purchased commercial games and shareware games (third parties legally sold shareware by charging for the disks, not the software).

You'll notice that a lot of the games are listed under both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks. It was common in those days to include disks for both formats.

As you can see, a lot of those games were educational, which is pretty much all my mom would buy. The few action/arcade games came with our SoundBlaster bundle which we picked up at Electronics Boutique in around 1994 to upgrade our 486. It was also eventually necessary to upgrade from 4 MB of RAM to 8 MB (30 pin!) and replace the 360 MB hard drive with an 850 MB, which used Dynamic Drive Overlay to overcome the 520 MB limit of the BIOS.

Exceptions to the educational and Sim games: I begged my mom to get me When Two Worlds War for my birthday. It was an awesome early RTS where you developed your planet and its technology and raised a fleet to attack a nearby planet. I also begged my mom to get me Under a Killing Moon when I saw a demo running at a computer store. I had never seen a game with full motion video before, and the demo was hilarious.

Of course, my search didn't turn up the one thing that I was especially looking for, which was a set of disks that contained a collection of games that was given to my mother when we first bought our used 286. They had about a dozen shareware games like Pharaoh's Tomb, Moraff's Blast/Super Blast, ambiguously licensed games like Dangerous Dave and "Pong 3D" (Bounce Zone from one of the Compute! magazines), some full version games like Hoyle Official Book of Games: Volume 1, Oh No! More Lemmings, and Wheel of Fortune.

Gee, that's a very cool collection. Unfortunately, I lost most of my original floppy disks after a house move. I'm still pretty mad at myself about that. Luckily I keep backups of mostly everything, so the games themselves weren't lost. All that's left is some Apogee games I purchased from their webstore since, those being Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Paganitzu and Blake Stone. I was disappointed to see they didn't come with a manual (with the exception of Blake Stone) or even a small box.

I do still own quite a few CD-ROM games from the DOS era. Among them are a couple 3DRealms/Apogee games (Duke Nukem 3D Shareware and Retail 1.3D, Realms of Chaos, Wolfenstein 3-D, Commander Keen Combo CD and something else I'm pretty sure I forgot) as well as a good number of Sierra titles (Phatasmagoria, Shivers 1+2, Space Quest series, Roberta Williams Anthology, Police Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry etc.). Man, I loved those. I've also got a lot of id titles (I collected boxed id games for a while), including pretty much every official Doom compilation ever made (id Anthology, Depths of Doom -this one looks neat-, Ultimate Doom Trilogy). I used to be a huge Doom nut and I still regard it as my all-time favorite game. There are many more DOS/Win95 CD games in my collection, but I don't know them all from the top of my head. I've got them all backed up on my external harddrive (500GB) as CD images, so that I don't need to use the originals.

I also used to be an Amiga nut, but I had to sell off my entire collection at one point when I needed the money. This still pains me. I can't recommend Amiga Forever 2008 enough, I use it all the time. It's great for nostalgia buffs like myself. I hear they're soon releasing C64 Forever too, I'll be on the lookout for that one.

My current collection is practically a software museum. I've filled an entire bookcase with DOS games in the last few years. I'll make a list of that stuff soon, but that's a different story. It's interesting to hear about what games people had during their childhood, and also interesting to see if they still have the disks. Thanks for sharing.