Your Gold Box game. What was it and why?

[Murgos]

Absolutely Ultima III.  I had played a lot of games previous to that for the 2600 but Ultima III really blew my mind as to what could be possible in a computer game.  I played PoR gold box on an Apple II, it was a lot of fun (I distinctly remember fireballing hordes of gnolls in there somewhere) but no Ultima.

[WayAbvPar]

The first Ultima I played alone (I played II and III at a buddy's house), was Ultima IV. That may still be my favorite game ever. I had pages and pages of notes, and I loved every painstaking minute of it.

[Dren]

Absolutely Ultima III.  I had played a lot of games previous to that for the 2600 but Ultima III really blew my mind as to what could be possible in a computer game.  I played PoR gold box on an Apple II, it was a lot of fun (I distinctly remember fireballing hordes of gnolls in there somewhere) but no Ultima.

Fireball in that game was the shitznit.  Watching all of those kobolds turn into X's and hearing those death cries over and over was pure joy.  The other was when my warriors would get 3 strikes per turn and would just mow them down when they were surrounded.  I can still see that image to this day.

[MaceVanHoffen]

Edit:  Oohh!!!  Does anyone remember Darkseed!?!?  It was a horror adventure game based on H. R. Giger artwork.  There was a Darkseed 2 as well, both were friggin amazing games for their time.

Wow, I didn't think anyone else had ever heard of the Darkseed games.  I loved 'em.  Not really any replay to them though, as once you've figured out all the horror-endous puzzles that's it.  I wish someone would do an updated Darkseed game.  I think that license would do very well as a Zelda-style modern adventure game, albeit with Lovecraftian imagery instead of cutesy fairies and that damn Navi.

My first goldbox game that I can recall was an SSI battleship/naval combat game for my Commodore 64.  The title escapes me at the moment.  And yeah, I was into all the DnD stuff .... I miss the Pool of Radiance days.

EDIT: Oh and of course, all the Ultima games.  I even still have all my original boxes, from Ultima I on.  Once my UO addiction kicked in, I stopped keeping up with the single-player games.  So, I don't know if there even were any Ultima games past 1995 or so.

[schild]

Darkseed. God love abandonware.

[MaceVanHoffen]

Darkseed. God love abandonware.

Woot, thanks.  Time for a trip down memory lane ...

[Furiously]

I just recalled the hours I spent trying to "SINK THE BISMARK!" on my TRS-80 also.

[OcellotJenkins]

Darkseed. God love abandonware.

Thanks man! 

Yes, I would be all over an updated version of this game. 

[Daydreamer]

Dark Queen of Krynn.  Because my friend had it too, and because meteor swarm was FUN.

[ClydeJr]

Racing Destruction Set was the first game I got for my C-64. I spent so many hours designing race tracks for that damn game. I used to get these big sheets of graph paper and had a system where I could draw out the shape and elevation of each track piece. I severely dorked out on that game. Nothing more fun than racing on a track with moon gravity and dropping a land mine right in front of a friend. They'd would be airborne for over 10 seconds.

First D&D Gold Box was the original Pool of Radiance. Stayed up way late way too many nights playing that game. I ran into some bug when firing a spell/arrow diagonally across the screen. The spell graphic would fire at the target but then sorta miss. It wasn't like I missed the tohit roll. The spell graphic would barely miss where it was supposed to go, travel to the far side of the screen,  and wrap around making a new path just slightly to the side of the original. It would keep wrapping around, slowly moving across the screen until finally it comes back to the target from the other side and then hits or misses. It would take like 10 minutes for the damn thing to finish wrapping around. Still played the hell out of the game.

[Jain Zar]

Ive always loved videogames, but it wasn't till Ultima 1 that I became a hardcore gamer.  The rerelease from the late 80s.
Ultima is still my first gaming love, though I spent about as much time with Microprose combat sims and the AD&D Gold Box series
as I did with Ultimas.

No console RPG series has ever come near Ultima for my rabid love, though I have a serious crush on all the Phantasy Star games, even the third one.

[Johny Cee]

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was my first game, though I too dearly loved the gold box games when they came out. 

I'm feeling very sorry for myselft that I never got to play any of the sequals to Champions of Krynn....  I remember DREADING the 2 hitpoint snakes with poison in the noob dungeon.  They used to mow down more of my characters than the fricking dragons at the end of the game.

My first multiplayer game was Marathon.  We had a leaked beta of the game that only had one multiplayer level ("Mars Needs Women!") and no single player levels.  4 on 4,  using the campus lines to conference call to everyone on our team.  We played HOURS of Marathon,  on the one level.  Damn was that game ahead of its time.

[angry.bob]

Hell was the last adventure game I think I ever played.

Holy fuck, was that ever a terrible game.

[schild]

My first multiplayer game was Marathon.  We had a leaked beta of the game that only had one multiplayer level ("Mars Needs Women!") and no single player levels.  4 on 4,  using the campus lines to conference call to everyone on our team.  We played HOURS of Marathon,  on the one level.  Damn was that game ahead of its time.

Ah yes, the first and last Mac game ever. Oh, wait there was Mist and Journeyman Project also. The latter of which I always thought was superior and could have been direct inspiration for many of the games we hold dear today, including (albeit a stretch) Deus Ex. God I loved Journeyman Project, it made my Mac LCII so much more badass than the IIGS we had when I was 5.

[stray]

Please, Bob. PLEASE. Tell me something, one thing, that you DO like.

Please?

[stray]

I could have sworn that Fallout came out after Marathon (at least I purchased them in that order).

[EDIT] Oh yeah, there was Myth too. I generally hate RTS's, but that was one of the exceptions.

[schild]

Played both Myth and Fallout on my PC.

[Rodent]

Hrmm, too many games to mention. The one that comes to mind would have to be Iron Seed, the game noone but me seems to remember.

[stray]

I just meant that they were Mac only at release. Like Myst. Until the PC world realized that that whole "No good games on the Mac" thing was all bullshit.  

[schild]

Hrmm, too many games to mention. The one that comes to mind would have to be Iron Seed, the game noone but me seems to remember.

Someone else remembers.

Caution: I don't trust the place I just linked to. The flashy banners scare me. Seems ok though. BUT NO PROMISES.

[Rodent]

Hrmm, too many games to mention. The one that comes to mind would have to be Iron Seed, the game noone but me seems to remember.

Someone else remembers.

Caution: I don't trust the place I just linked to. The flashy banners scare me. Seems ok though. BUT NO PROMISES.

Neato, gotta give that baby a try after work.

[stray]

Heh, I downloaded almost every game on that site a few months back.

I remember Iron Seed "the box".  I never got around to buying it though.

[Trippy]

I've been gaming for so long on personal computers I've forgotten about more games than most of you have played :-D

Similar to Soln one of my first computer games I ever played (not including arcade games) was Adventure on a DEC TOPS-20 system though the turn-based Star Trek game was probably my favorite on that system. I grew up playing games on the first generation of "non-hobby" personal computers (the PCs you didn't have to solder the parts together for) with a couple of friends owning Commodore PETs, one friend owning a TRS-80, and a bunch of us with Apple ][s and ][+s.

Of that era, Wizardry I was the game that really got me into CRPG playing (Samurai + Murasama Blade for teh win!). I played Ultima I at around the same time but for various reasons I didn't like it nearly as much as Wizardry. It wasn't until Ultima III that I really got into the Ultima series. It's amazing (or amazingly sad depending on your perspective) how little combat in CRPGs has changed from the conventions developed in Wizardry.

I also played Wizard's Crown which Fargull talked about in his post and enjoyed that game as well. One of the greatest innovations in that game was having humanoid creatures that you killed drop everything they were wearing and wielding. To this day it's still one of the very few CRPGs to do that (the Gold Box games did that as well) and it still bugs me everytime I can't loot the weapon that the monster was trying to bash my head or slice my head off with. Grrr... Another cool thing about the game was you could have 8 people in your party (breaking the party of 6 convention that Wizardry had set) and that coupled with the fact that spears had a range of 2 squares meant you could setup some brutal defensive formations.

There weren't really any notable RPGs on the Mac in its early days (though Ultima II did get ported to it and I played it all the way through again) and my original IBM PC only had a monochrome video card so I didn't do much CRPG playing in college except for Rogue and all the Rogue-clones (Larn was my favorite of that era) on the various mainframes and minis at school. I also had A/UX running on my Mac II so I ported a bunch of those games over so I could play without having to dial in to a school's computers.

After college I bought my first IBM PC-compatible (the original IBM PC was purchased by my parents) and got back into CRPGs. I skipped over Pool of Radiance (that came out before I got my PC) so Curse of the Azure Bonds was my first Gold Box game which I enjoyed though Champions of Krynn was my favorite of that series. The world of Krynn with its interesting history, unique classes and races was more different from the generic Greyhawk D&D setting than the Forgotten Realms campaign setting was which made it more interesting for me.

I never played Dungeon Master since none of my friends had an Amiga or Atari ST so Eye of the Beholder was one of the more memorable CRPGs I've played of that era. Of course the graphics were incredible for a PC RPG at the time (woohoo full VGA graphics!) but what really made the game memorable for me were the sound effects. All the monsters had "footstep" sounds and they would move around in real-time so you could hear them creep up on you before you often could see them. For some reason the soft padding footsteps of the feline monsters would freak me out all the time.

The last really memorable PC RPG of that period (late 80s/early 90s) for me was Ultima Underworld -- a mind blowing game with a full 3D graphics engine far ahead of its competitors at the time (it took John Carmack and id *five* years after the release of UU to come out with their own fully 3D game).

The next game was some fight game with a Conan-like character that could do a really cool decapitation move.

Was that Bilestoad? That was a top-down fighting game where you could hack off body parts. It was kind of tough to control cause your legs and arms were on separate controls.

[stray]

I would have never guessed that you were that old school, Trippy.

Hmm...Must be the avatar.

[Tebonas]

My first PC game was actually a gold box game. Pool of Radiance - on the PC emulator on my Atari ST, in all its 4 color glory (the emulator module only emulated CGA).

I then got a PC instead of the Atari because it had more roleplaying games and CGA just doesn't cut it.

Hmm, prior to that my memory gets fuzzy.

First Amiga game was Fairy Tale Adventures, first Atari ST game was Sundog, first Atari 800XL game was Football Manager, the first Atari VC-20 game was River Raid (the only game EVER my mother played with the rest of us, go figure that. My mom blowing up bridges and shit), the first Sinclair Spectrum Game was Manic Miner. Prior to that it was only basic games like Hunt the Wumpus or Tron.

My memory about such things is not so fuzzy after all, I'm scared about my obessions! I think I still can remember every first game I bought after moving to a new location (I know I'm settled in after one all-night session at my new computer table, that was so even as a kid).

[Zetleft]

Darkseed. God love abandonware.

Thanks man! 

Yes, I would be all over an updated version of this game. 

Holy crap thanks for that website.  Found a bunch of games I hadn't played in years, Alone in the Dark (damn you uwe bol), The Immortal (just a small fun game), Eric the Unready, Beneath a Steel Sky (damn where are the well written games now). 

Think I got started with the pretty much all the sierra titles, Police Quest 1, Leisure Suit Larry, Kings Quest, Black Cauldron.  But the original (I think) Might & Magic is what really hooked me as a gamer, much graphing paper was sacrificed to mapping that game out.  First sim game that I really loved was Gunship, now that was a great chopper game. 

[raydeen]

First adventure game I ever played was Raiders of the Lost Ark on the 2600. Took me 5 months to beat it and no, I didn't use the cheat sheets. Then Adventure also on the 2600. Also on the 2600 was a great 3D Pac-Man clone called Tunnel Runner. That game was absolutely amazing for it's time. Go dig up an emulator and that rom and see for yourself. Then came  Star Raiders and Miner 2049er on the Atari 400. Then many years of nothing. Then Blaster Master on the NES. Then Populous and Phantasy Star II and III  on the Genesis. Then Ys 1-3 and Valis 2 and 3 on the TG-16 CD. Then Populous 2, Sorcerian, Thexder, the Kyrandia series, the Eye of the Beholder series, and finally the games that so far are the best I've ever played, the Elder Scrolls series, most notably, Daggerfall. If I have to give up all my MMOG's tomorrow, I'll be happy knowing Daggerfall will always keep me coming back into the best virtual world I've ever been in, bugs and all. I would give my left nut though for a TES MMOG.

Gold Box Games? First one I ever played was Curse of the Azure Bonds. But I'd have to say my favorites in the TSR line were the Dark Sun and Ravenloft games.

[Sky]

I got into gaming very early, both for games and myself. When I was a kid, my grandfather ran a regional road construction firm, and he'd often take me with him to the office. When he was in meetings, he'd plop me down with the sysadmin, who showed me how to navigate the file system and the basic commands (and how to use man pages ;)). So my first game was ADVENT, or Adventure, aka Collosal Cave, which eventually became the hobbled Zork series (no xyzzy or plugh? heresy!). I was only five years old the first time I played it (1975), so it was a bit advanced for me, but I kept plugging away during those meetings, getting an hour every week or so to play, so I'd have to plan my moves afk because my playtime was so limited. It was like a secret magic world only a few of us knew about. I finally beat the game, probably years later, and decided to get clever. I printed it out...the entire thing had been spooling and I dumped it ALL to the workgroup printer...I got in so much trouble for that, but I did get the printout, so I guess it was worth it.

I got into programming on the TRS80 at school and then the C64 at home, but I'll always remember the mainframe adventures I started on. Though I had played a lot of games prior, I think my first favorite 'pc' game was Ultima 4 on the C64, I loved the game world, the npc scheduling. I used to run a BBS back then, and it was half dedicated to Ultima 4 hints, actually made money with it, heh (the other half was a local skateboarding resource, good locations and whatnot). Raid Over Bungling Bay was another favorite on the C64. The game that re-hooked me after my stint in professional music  was Dune2, an RTS, ironically (since I don't like RTS). Playing Dune2 at my ex-girl's dad's house (competing for top score since it wasn't multiplayer) led to me buying my first pc since the C64, a 486/33 which I co-processored to a 100 (zoom!). Then Ultima 7/7.5 became my obsession, which eventually led to UO, and then LtM, forty-three implosions later, here I am.

It's kinda funny to me how many folks are 'into' computers now that they are becoming ubiquitous, the local computer shops are all run by kids who used to mock me for being a geek, a couple jocks and a stoner (the only 'good' shop is run by a guy I know from my old C64 pirating group, heh). So the world turns and now these guys look up to me. Crazy.

I feel old now :)

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny on Commodore 64 owned all.

I bought this one for $80! We only had one pc shop in the area, my supervisor and I still gripe about how expensive he was. And my band HATED this game, I played it while we were on the road, heh. I never realized how loud my disk drives (dual, bitches, dual!) were, but they made me very well aware of it, often. But then, they were playing fucking super mario, which is probably my first known console bias.

I played PoR gold box on an Apple II, it was a lot of fun (I distinctly remember fireballing hordes of gnolls in there somewhere)

I didn't tap into the gold boxes until I was on my 486/33, but my trick was always web/stinking cloud. Take that, Umber Hulks!

So, I don't know if there even were any Ultima games past 1995 or so.

I forget when 8 came out, but I really liked it. So many folks panned it, which is too bad. Definitely needed the patch for the targeted jumping, but otherwise I thought it was pretty damned visceral. Ultima 9 was crap in a box imo.

Racing Destruction Set was the first game I got for my C-64. I spent so many hours designing race tracks for that damn game. I used to get these big sheets of graph paper and had a system where I could draw out the shape and elevation of each track piece. I severely dorked out on that game. Nothing more fun than racing on a track with moon gravity and dropping a land mine right in front of a friend. They'd would be airborne for over 10 seconds.

Oh hell, yeah. Forgot about that one! My best friend and skate bud also had a C64 and we were always trading stuff. RDS was an incredible game. We also used to sit around sneaking his older brother's beers when we'd play 4-way multiplayer golf (hot seat style)...I forget which golf game it was, though. "Was that a tree?"

Similar to Soln one of my first computer games I ever played (not including arcade games) was Adventure on a DEC TOPS-20 system though the turn-based Star Trek game was probably my favorite on that system.

I'm writing this post as I read the thread, so I'm in this group as well. Quoted this for the Star Trek game! This thread is a fun memory trip, character-based graphics ftw!

The last really memorable PC RPG of that period (late 80s/early 90s) for me was Ultima Underworld -- a mind blowing game with a full 3D graphics engine far ahead of its competitors at the time (it took John Carmack and id *five* years after the release of UU to come out with their own fully 3D game).

UU was an incredible game! Wasn't it 2 1/2-d, though? I thought the npcs were sprite-based, though it's been so long I forget. Either way, it was so much more advanced than "find red key...endure mind-numbing generic hordes", it's not funny.

[Trippy]

UU was an incredible game! Wasn't it 2 1/2-d, though? I thought the npcs were sprite-based, though it's been so long I forget. Either way, it was so much more advanced than "find red key...endure mind-numbing generic hordes", it's not funny.

Yes the monsters were sprites but the world was full 3D -- e.g. there were bridges you could fly under and stuff. Doom and Duke Nukem 3D which both came after UU were 2.5D since you couldn't have a piece of geometry "floating" above another piece (i.e. for any given x,y pair there could only be one z value) though Duke sort of faked it with its sprite-based bridges.

Edit: stuff

[Yegolev]

Darkseed. God love abandonware.

Played some of this last night.  The sheer number of references to other games gets my nostalgia going.

[Signe]

I have forgotten more games than Trippy forgot.  And I'm still forgetting them.  Today I'll forget Heretic Kingdoms.  I'm almost up to date.

[HaemishM]

Geez, the Trash-80. My first computer, which was also sort of a console game since it had a cartridge port. Before that, the only game machine we'd had had been some shitty black & white multi-game Pong console with 2 knob controllers and like 6 or 7 games. On the TRS-80, I treid to program things in basic to save to a fucking cassette tape. Ugh, I still remember typing out like 7 or 8 pages of code to get to play some D&D type adventure game, might have been called Dungeon. My first PC type computer was a weird XT hybrid. It would load DOS, but it would also load Applie II programs as well, with some STAR floppy emulation shit or something. That kind of machine would be a heresy now. But I got to play some fun Apple II type RPG's. I still remember playing the shit out of Karateka (or some such) on that PC until I finally beat it. It was the shiznit.

The original Earl Weaver baseball is still one of my favorite baseball games. And yes, I was THAT GUY who programmed in all the stats for all the teams to make a season, and this was before it even had a season feature. Meaning I had to keep track of schedules and shit, and play all the games. I had no job and was in college, so I had nothing better to do.

[Xilren's Twin]

Gold box games?  Played em all but they weren't the first by quite a bit...Temple of Asphaii indeed..

Similar to Soln one of my first computer games I ever played (not including arcade games) was Adventure on a DEC TOPS-20 system though the turn-based Star Trek game was probably my favorite on that system. I grew up playing games on the first generation of "non-hobby" personal computers (the PCs you didn't have to solder the parts together for) with a couple of friends owning Commodore PETs, one friend owning a TRS-80, and a bunch of us with Apple ][s and ][+s.

Of that era, Wizardry I was the game that really got me into CRPG playing (Samurai + Murasama Blade for teh win!). I played Ultima I at around the same time but for various reasons I didn't like it nearly as much as Wizardry. It wasn't until Ultima III that I really got into the Ultima series. It's amazing (or amazingly sad depending on your perspective) how little combat in CRPGs has changed from the conventions developed in Wizardry.

I also played Wizard's Crown which Fargull talked about in his post and enjoyed that game as well. One of the greatest innovations in that game was having humanoid creatures that you killed drop everything they were wearing and wielding. To this day it's still one of the very few CRPGs to do that (the Gold Box games did that as well) and it still bugs me everytime I can't loot the weapon that the monster was trying to bash my head or slice my head off with. Grrr... Another cool thing about the game was you could have 8 people in your party (breaking the party of 6 convention that Wizardry had set) and that coupled with the fact that spears had a range of 2 squares meant you could setup some brutal defensive formations.

Wow that's scarily similar to my own gaming genesis.  Wizardry I was the first computer game that hooked me on the apple iie after the old TRS-80 adventrue games.  Hell I still remember the cheat to get a level 249 Bishop in that game.  Ultima 1&2 were ok, but you only controlled the avatar, no party.  For that reason I liked Ultima III  and beyond more. 

Hell, i still have a lot of my old apple II games and their boxes, including Wizard's Crown.  The tactical combat in that game was great, but it also had a quick combat option for those fights you knew you would mop up.  Saw the beginnings of Diablo style loot in that game too (lots of word modifiers to stuff i.e. Great Frost Spear of Doom).  I think I DL'd that somewhere; may need to fire it up again.

Archon and Karateka(sp) were lots of fun too and I can't remember how many hours I spend playing with the Adventure Construction Set.  Made some Norse themed game that I had more fun creating than anyone else ever did playing.

Great, now Im old too.

Xilren

[Raguel]

Wow I love the internet.  :-D

Here's a picture of my first game:


http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareID=935

[Merusk]

Combat ruled.

The first adventure game I played was Out of This World It was on my freshman college buddy's PC, and I still haven't finished it.  I found a Flash version I keep on the laptop, but my reflexes suck so much I still haven't gotten past the first animal that tries to eat you. Mis-timing that jump onto the vines = dead, every time. Still, it's fun even if I can't work through it. I miss good, challenging games like that rather than time-fillers for the Strat. Guide generation.