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A Study of Operating System Games

August 2nd, 2010 by Benj Edwards

The Great Operating System Games on Technologizer

Many computer operating systems throughout history have shipped with at least one free game — Solitaire and Minesweeper are some of the most famous examples. Knowing this, I thought I’d take a stroll through history and examine other OS pack-in games.

I ended up with an amusing collection of over twenty games from 1971 to the present. The resulting gallery is up now on Technologizer. I hope you enjoy it.



This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under Computer Games, Computer History, News & Current Events, Retrogaming, Vintage Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

8 Responses to “A Study of Operating System Games”

  1. K4DSP Says:
    August 2nd, 2010 at 11:41 am

    Nice job, Benj. You made Slashdot too!

  2. Christian Says:
    August 2nd, 2010 at 1:29 pm

    Excellent article! Oh the memories 🙂

  3. Lost Chauncy Says:
    August 2nd, 2010 at 9:50 pm

    Fun and Fascinating. To me (in answer to your question) it indicates two things: (1) That Windows tries very hard to do whatever the other guys is doing – first – bigger and better and (2) that consumers are still drawn to ‘more is better.’

  4. Kris Browne Says:
    August 3rd, 2010 at 3:28 am

    I’m surprised nobody mentioned the stable of games which are standard parts of emacs…. snake, tetris, doctor, dunnet, and more.

  5. Benj Edwards Says:
    August 3rd, 2010 at 10:00 am

    Thanks for the feedback guys. I’m glad you liked it.

    The emacs games would have been cool to include, Kris. Sorry I couldn’t put everything in my article. If I had included every OS pack-in game in history, the slideshow would have been hundreds of slides long. 🙂

  6. mnky9800n Says:
    August 7th, 2010 at 1:35 pm

    I had a port of the Trek game for DOS as a kid. It was called EGA Trek. I would always name my captain Picard and my dad would always name his captain Kirk. Some how Kirk always had the high score. I was only five. Incidentally, if anyone is interested in playing a Trek game you can download it for free here:

    http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=GameMuseum.Detail&id=73

  7. BDD Says:
    August 10th, 2010 at 9:53 am

    Gorillas was a lot of fun to tweak. We made the bananas fly faster, cause bigger explosions, and at one point even made the bananas larger. Then we changed the graphics to poorly-drawn versions of Spiderman and Green Goblin (a la the Atari 2600 game) lobbing bombs at each other. I’m sure there were other things we did, but nevertheless a fun game with code available for tweaking…

  8. Daniel Says:
    August 15th, 2010 at 7:38 pm

    Hey Benj. Great list!

    As soon as I saw DONKEY.BAS, I recognized it! Man, what memories.

    Fun stuff.

    And, oh, a coworker of mine is a cousin of yours or something. Dunno if Drew mentioned that yet, but I’d love to meet up with you sometime.

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