Text-based games: ASCII, etc.

Galaxy is a relic from the early days of PC gaming, when the idea of exploring space could be conveyed with a handful of pixels and a lot of imagination. The gameplay is simple, re...

There’s a certain dark humor baked into Global Thermo War, a game that tackles nuclear conflict with a mix of strategy and unsettling realism. It’s not exactly cheerful...

Golden Oldies: Volume 1 - Computer Software Classics is less a single game and more a time capsule, offering a collection of early titles that remind you just how far gaming has co...

Grand Prix is one of those games that tries to bottle the thrill of Formula racing and pour it into a DOS machine that wheezes like an overworked engine. In Grand Prix, you get a s...

Guardians of Infinity: to Save Kennedy is the sort of time-travel adventure that casually suggests you might want to prevent one of the most infamous assassinations in history befo...

Gumboots Australia is a delightful educational romp that turns geography into a cheerful scavenger hunt. You travel across Australia answering questions, solving simple challenges,...

Guns 'R' Us feels like someone looked at the early ’90s and decided subtlety was overrated. This side-scrolling shooter piles on enemies, explosions, and weapon upgrades with...

GW-BASIC (short for Gee Whiz BASIC) is a dialect of the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. It's one of the early implementations of BASIC and was included ...

Released in 1984, Hack is one of those games that quietly shaped an entire genre while pretending not to care if you understood it or not. This early roguelike doesn’t bother...

Hacker 2: The Doomsday Papers doubles down on everything the original attempted, raising the stakes from “interesting breach of security” to “global catastrophe.&...

Hamburger Hell from 1986 is one of those titles that practically dares you to ask, “What were they thinking?” The premise is gloriously absurd, and the execution doesn&...

The 1996 Hamurabi remake takes one of the oldest strategy concepts in gaming and gives it a modest DOS-era facelift. At its core, it’s still about managing resources, feeding...

Hockey League Simulator takes the thrilling, bone-crunching sport of hockey and boldly asks: what if you never actually played it? Instead, you manage teams, tweak stats, and stare...

Hollywood Hijinx feels like stepping into a puzzle-filled mansion where logic occasionally takes a coffee break. Released in 1986, this text adventure blends humor with brain-teasi...

Holy Grail is one of those early games that feels like a mysterious artifact itself—intriguing, slightly confusing, and very much a product of its time. Released in 1984, it send...

Incursion is a modern love letter to classic tactical RPGs, clearly inspired by tabletop rulesets and games like early Fallout. It throws you into a turn-based world where position...

Indenture is a small, relatively obscure DOS adventure that thrives on mood rather than complexity. Set in a bleak, oppressive world, it uses minimalistic visuals and text-driven s...

Indiana Jones: Revenge of the Ancients from 1987 is one of those curious side stories that feels like it emerged from a parallel cinematic universe. Presented as a text-heavy adven...

In Infidel, you play a not-so-noble adventurer whose moral compass is spinning like a broken ceiling fan. As a treasure-hungry explorer poking around an ancient Egyptian tomb, you ...

If you’ve ever wondered what the world of finance might look like as a video game—minus the existential dread—Inside Trader has you covered. This quirky DOS title...

James Clavell's Shogun, a text adventure game developed by Infocom and released in 1989. Infocom was known for its interactive fiction games, and "James Clavell's Shogun" was one o...