I played Over 1000 Games for Windows
Well, actually it was only 748, but that’s still a lot.
Back when I was a wee lad with a gimped home computer and a different definition of “fun”, I owned this CD that was stocked in bargain bins across Australia called Over 1000 Games for Windows. The promise of that seemed like such amazing value for $9.99, but in reality what you were getting was an impossible task — a mountain of busywork trying to sift through all these titles where there is no ranking system, no quality bar, only a short and often misleading blurb to indicate what you were in for.
A couple years ago I must have been bored and was nostalgic for this virtual experience of digging through a big heap of rubbish looking for something shiny. I found an image of the exact disc preserved on archive.org, spun up a Windows 98 VM and got to work. I wanted to see if those strange little games I vaguely remembered would still be fun. I thought I’d document the process on the website formerly known as Twitter, writing a little micro review for every title. How long could that possibly take?
More than a year later, I’d gotten through as much as I could handle. 748 titles. I wish I could say it was fun. Even be able to say I was having fun most of the time. But by about the midpoint the novelty had really worn off and this had become some kind of tedious ritual of self punishment. I had seen so many unfinished / broken Klik & Play games, ancient .exes with the gameplay and graphics of Notepad, and so so many clones and variations on Yahtzee. The best stuff on there was always just the shareware demo, never the full game. I had good intentions to write this blog post about my experience as soon as I was done with it, going over the best of the titles and the worst and if there was any real point to it all, but I was too battered and beat to bother with that. Do you want to know what the very best title was out of the 1000 games? Indy’s Desktop Adventures, a Zelda-like Indiana Jones action-adventure game for DOS by Lucas Arts. Too bad it was just the demo.
Just a sample of the more interesting games in the collection
So what made me bring this up and decide to write about it now? A week ago I received a very unexpected email. The sender had Googled themself (as one does), found one of those tweets where I talked about THEIR game they developed a lifetime ago and wanted to know how I came across it. They didn’t even recall sharing this game outside family. This really does beg the question how Nodtronics, now deceased publisher of 1000 Games, originally sourced these games, plus what the legal implications are of taking freeware / shareware software and selling it for profit while (allegedly) the developers see nothing. Anyway, I had to let this developer know that there was an era where their game was being sold all across Australia — it’s possible tens of thousands of people had played their game without them ever knowing. Strange to think about.
Turns out this developer had since lost any copies of their own game, so the least I could do was send them the version I played. I was glad to hear back that they got it up and running and it brought back a lot of memories. I suppose my earlier suffering ended up bringing about an unexpected and wholesome outcome, something that’s even better than the demo of Indy’s Desktop Adventures.
When I thought on it some more, the majority of the games on that CD are a snapshot of what the indie game scene looked like in the 90s. These were just made by enthusiasts at home with whatever very limited tools they had at their disposal back then. It’s changed the way I look at it now. I’m the privileged, modern variety of game developer where I have a selection of premade engines and tools and plugins for any situation, I barely need to understand how a computer works – everything about development now is so much easier because we stand on the shoulders of giants. I salute anyone from that time that worked hard to make something they cared about – and this was well before indie games were a cool and mainstream thing. I thank them for their service, and I thank that developer for giving me a reason to think that playing Over 1000 Games for Windows was almost a worthwhile endeavour.
