I noticed that pretty much all games I played in my life have been released after 1990. So now I’m asking those with earlier experience here:
Which games can you recommend from before that time?
But: they should still be fun in their own right and not just interesting to play in an historian sense of trying to understand how genres developed.
Games I played that are older than 1990:
- Tetris (classic for a reason)
- Pacman (interesting but simple)
- Prince of Persia (was too young to understand how to correctly play this game, I should maybe try to play it again)
- The Legend of Zelda (too old school and clunky for my liking)
can’t remember WHEN it came out, might have been 89 might have been 90 but Batman The Videogame for the NES (the first batman game)
absolutely fantastic game, amazing soundtrack, easily one of the best Batman games ever.
Sorry to nitpick but there were several Batman games before that. The first one that I know of was Batman (1986), an isometric exploration game on 8-bit micros. It’s a very good game for its time and the engine later evolved into Head Over Heels (1987) which uses a different theme.
Meant the first one on the NES.
Sunsoft was on a bit of a roll there. The same composer did the soundtrack for Journey to Silius AKA Raf World. They made simulated instrument sounds from the CPU’s sound channels in an different way from everybody else… listen to those games, Gimmick!, and Hebereke.
I recently watched this video comparing various Midi game soundtracks on different sound cards. Really interesting how different cards interpreted the sounds differently.
The game is great up until that bullshit last level. That clocktower level was brutal and then you have to fight two overtuned bosses in a row.
Had a SEGA, the batman videogame fucking ruled, probably still does. I can picture that game so vividly. Still remember celebrating with my brother when he beat it 🙂
So yeah, seconding your recommendation for sure.
1000% this game had amazing music. For a system that had only a couple of pulse waves, a sine wave, a white noise channel and a sampler channel using an algorithm that was already over 30 years old in 1983 some games really got an amazing amount of expression out of them. I’ve always felt that this game’s soundtrack was criminally underrated.