Weekend Question: What was the best game on your school computers?

[PCG Jody]

I ask the PCG staff a regular Weekend Question and post the answers on the site. If you'd like to throw in an answer here, I'll squeeze the best into the finished article!

This week the question is: What was the best game on your school computers?

Sorry for asking you to remember the distant past once again for a weekend question, but the future is terrifying so let's all retreat to Lemmings or Zoombinis or The Oregon Trail or whatever the one good game on your school computers was. And if you had a Halo or Doom or something to play in class, feel free to stunt on the rest of us who had to play typing games.

 

[Pifanjr]

Some people put Halo on a shared network drive, so we could play it during computer class. The teacher didn't actually mind as long as you had finished your tasks.

 

[Zloth]

Hack, predecessor to NetHack. Or maybe it had already turned into NetHack? Whatever the case, it was great stuff for a PDP-10! (Yeah, we were into "cloud gaming" in the 80's.)

 

[OsaX Nymloth]

Personally: Quake ]|[ Arena, that I managed to install on some of them and play with others - high school.

But throughout middle and high school the undisputed king of "games" in IT classrooms was one: Deluxe Ski Jump. It was everywhere and everybody was playing it, all the time. There was no escape, everybody wanted to setup a new record and fly far far away. Poor teachers had trouble making some of the kids do anything else but playing it.

 

[Johnway]

In our infant school with our BBC micro we had a few games that we played (they were on the pc by default to facilitate "learning"). The first one was Podd. You typed in an action the tomato thing will try and perform it. Of course being young we couldn't come up with much and just typed in the commands that was on the laminated sheet. (un)fortunately, someone wrote down the explosion command and being children we kept typing it in and doing it too often annoyed the teacher as it was very loud.

Later on in junior school we had lemmings. Unfortunately, i never got a chance to play it because i had it on my Amiga at home and when several of us told the teacher we had the game at home, she took it as a sign that we would prefer to do school work instead of taking our turn to play lemmings...

In Secondary school, play time was over. No more fun and the pc's at the time were crap (to open lotus approach we had to open multiple programs and close them to build enough mem to get it working or something). But we did have Encarta and if you used Encarta, you know that there was Mindmaze. But that didn't keep me entertained for long. So i spent my lunch break doing my homework when possible so i could spend more time at home playing proper games. later on we brought 1.44 Disk floppies and played Genesis/emulator games.

 

[SWard]

I was a lonely, creative and whimsical child who watched LA Story and believed in magic. I opened a word document and there he was.

'Clippy', a magical paper clip who wanted to help me with what I was doing. I would spend ages typing things to clippy and watching his cute animations in the hope that one day his response would not be canned and that we would become friends....

What started as a game, became an obsession and many a homework session was lost to trying to get clippy to break his reserve, say something funny or just 'sing do-wa-diddy' with me. To this day, when I open WORD, I hope Clippy comes back. If he does... I hope he remembers me....

 

[Frindis]

I vaguely remember playing Hugo at high school and some math games that really sucked🤷‍♂️

@OsaX Nymloth Deluxe Ski Jump was a really fun game to play. I miss those times when I would play it with my neighborhood friends...and loose

@Johnway If I ask not mistaken, I got the first Encarta before hooking up to the Internet and it basically showed me the world for the first time. I used to fine comb through all the video/audio clips and be impressed by a lot of the stuff I would find. One thing is for sure, those video clips were LOW RES!

 

[Krud]

Since I went to school in the Stone Age, our classrooms didn't have computers. However, the local university had a "gifted students" weekend class thing that let kids learn on their computer lab's super computers, and one of them had Colossal Cave, and I LOVED it. The only other place I found computer games was at the museum, which is where I discovered Oregon Trail, and also a weird game where you tell the computer how many alcoholic beverages you drank at a party, and then you try to drive home in the dark while the steering wheel reacts as it would for a similarly intoxicated person. (I always crashed, but I was a kid and didn't know how to drive. Pretty sure it's what led me to buying steering wheels for my computer, though.)

OH wait, one year there was a computer game at a school I briefly went to (I'd forgotten because it was a bleak semester in 7th grade). They had a game I think was called The Mask of The Red Sun for the Apple II, and I'm pretty sure was the first computer game with color graphics I'd ever played.

But the best game was in college, when someone downloaded Wolfenstein 3D in the lab. That changed everything, man...MEIN LEBEN!

 

[Krud]

To this day, when I open WORD, I hope Clippy comes back. If he does... I hope he remembers me....

I am genuinely glad someone had positive memories of Clippy! =D

I similarly anthropomorphized him, but in the opposite direction. I'm pretty sure I'd hurl my monitor across the room if he ever materialized in Word again. =P

 

[Pifanjr]

I just remembered that somewhere in elementary school there was an educational thing where they let us play Sim City in a trailer they set up outside the school.

 

[Pt.assado]

Managed to get the Admin password from the teacher...AoE 1 was the game!

 

[nakedian]

I ask the PCG staff a regular Weekend Question and post the answers on the site. If you'd like to throw in an answer here, I'll squeeze the best into the finished article!

This week the question is: What was the best game on your school computers?

Sorry for asking you to remember the distant past once again for a weekend question, but the future is terrifying so let's all retreat to Lemmings or Zoombinis or The Oregon Trail or whatever the one good game on your school computers was. And if you had a Halo or Doom or something to play in class, feel free to stunt on the rest of us who had to play typing games.

This will date me but just about the ONLY game on our schools mainframe in Berkeley was Star Trek 1971. This was a text based Star Trek game and we actually played on printers. I cringe at the amount of paper we burned through. There was also a text based Blackjack that was meh.

 

[drunkpunk]

In 3rd grade, i remember we had some apple computers with a few games. Oregon Trail was of course one of them. Where in The World is Carmen Sandiego was another one I really loved. Number Muncher was another one that played all the time, despite hating math and being pretty terrible at it. There were a couple of others but those were the big three that we always chose to play.

 

[CyberV2077]

Of course that it was FancyPants

 

[Volley]

SkiFree. Part of the Best of Windows Entertainment package from Microsoft.

There was a time when everyone was playing it after getting assignments done, some 25 computers lol. After a while we got Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, and DooM on there, was surprised the school let us play it.

 

[Noctesilvis]

We had Unreal tournament stored on the school's shared drive. Any time there was a need to have students use computers En Masse there was suddenly no more trouble in class from mischief makers. Once the teachers caught on they tried shutting it down but it was too networked.

Before those days it had to be math blaster though.

 

[TryHardFace]

NetTrek - my middle school in the early '90s had black-and-white screen Mac Plus computers networked, and while I stayed after school waiting on my teacher mom, a couple friends and I played this Star Trek inspired exploration/Asteroids-style combat game. I vaguely remember some kind of mining and upgrade system too? Basically it was top-down Elite Dangerous and dope as hell

 

[Dan]

I generally used to play MUDs, as telnet ports were never blocked on the school network.

 

[khevolution]

its taken me ages to remember the name of this game, but i do have fond memories of playing elastomainia when the teacher wasnt looking

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZb_e1BpRIM

 

[McStabStab]

Storybook Weaver - loved the freedom to create and animate your own characters and environments and then have them engage in murders or lewd acts. I was kind of a twisted child.

 

[pocketshaver]

chuck yeager combat was good,

Mac Syndicate, nothing like computer class and killing people with an endless pocket full of semi autos... No one ever thought 4 rounds of buckshot to blow a car up was smart..

leather goddesses of phobos