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Comment by lolive | Hacker News Reader

This article summarizes most of my gaming experience in the late 80s. (ok, add also Sierra On Line to the list to be fully accurate).

This is marvellous to remember those times!!!!

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There were also Crystal Quest, a labyrith game in a pyramid and a helicopter where you had to fly in russian-named cities.

Oh my god, that article opened a pandora box in my memories.

Armor Alley was a great LAN game too. Nettrek[1] was another popular LAN game. And Spectre was a wireframe tank game.

[1] not the same thing as Netrek.

The helicopter game was Apache something.

Crystal Quest was awesome. My mom loved that game too.

I don’t recall a pyramid game.

Apache Strike

Yes!! Apache Strike!

It was probably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarab_of_Ra

I was going to link screenshots, and then I realized, holy jesus, I can just link the actual running game to you on the web archive: https://archive.org/details/ScarabOfRaMacintosh

Anyone else remember Sierra games on a monochrome Mac?

Oh, the dithering!!

At that time I was really bad at English (==learning a foreign language at school is inefficient anyway). Then King's Quest 3 arrived on my father's Mac SE. What a blast! With my tiny french/english dictionary, I worked superhard to understand the texts, and input commands correctly. And with the help of Minitel forums (the french Usenet, accessible from any Minitel that every french family had at home at that time), I eventually finished the game. My English level skyrocketed. And it was the beginning of my love story with Sierra games.

Totally agree.

King's Quest III was amazing; when I went off to college I upgraded to a Quadra 840AV which allowed me to play the first three games (as well as the Space Quest & Monkey Island series) in color.

It was like the Wizard of Oz shifting into color for the first time… just amazing.

Switched to a PC for a similar experience :) When King's Quest 5 was released, you needed a 386 and a vga card. Shit, that was much beyond what I would ever have access to. (and then came the Moore's Law).

Space Quest was pure, utter magic to me. I couldn’t believe it.

Which one did you start with? (I started with the number 3)

The Pirates of Pestulon? I like it, though perhaps it was the more "gimmicky" of the first three. They are my favorite Sierra adventures, in their unadulterated low-res, text-based, 16-color pixelated glory. Vohaul's Revenge is my favorite, perhaps because it was my first.

The VGA point-and-click remakes did a great disservice to these fantastic games.

I learned a lot of English with Space Quest!

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