The Great Operating System Games 145
harrymcc writes "For decades, the simple little games that come with operating systems have been some of the most-used software on the planet. Legendary geeks such as Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Andy Herzfeld have tried their hands at writing them. And yet they get no respect — or, actually, attention of any kind. Technologizer's Benj Edwards aimed to rectify that with a look at forty years' worth of bundled OS games, from 1971 Unix text-based ones to Woz's Little Brick Out to such Windows mainstays as Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Reversi." Article is an annoyingly long slide show (would it kill people to put a reasonable amount of content on pages?) but there's some fun stuff in there.
Heh (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone remember Hover! [wikipedia.org], a game that came on the Windows 95 disk? Good times, good times.
SkiFree (Score:2, Interesting)
There were so many fun little things tied into this game. Cool tricks for points. Setting trees on fire. Knocking over people. And of course, the surprise monster ending!
Snipes! (Score:2, Interesting)
I burnt *many* hours playing Snipes [wikipedia.org] on our school's Novell network.
NetHack! (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably not installed by default on most OSes, but it should be! First thing I install on a new machine myself.
I (as student) once argued with our university IT staff that this was essential software for any self-respecting computer science lab, and they agreed and installed it on all machines. :)
What I'd like to see - boot games (Score:4, Interesting)
Simple games presented to us while the OS is booting. Kinda like in Tekken (1), where you could play a quick game of Galaga while proper game data are loaded from the CD.
Something that simple (again, Galaga-like; or, for example, clearing one screen of Frozen Bubble-like game; using as basic GFX/toolkit/etc. as possible) shouldn't burden currently available machines too much. You can either play along for dozen or so seconds it currently takes to, basically, stare at a loading screen...or ignore it, no harm done (hm, or OTOH have an option to continue, clearing few more screens ;p ). Could be fun on mobile phones, too, many recent ones have not exactly instant booting... (and I can certainly imagine Google giving such option in Android; they had Pacman in mainsite logo already)
Re:Startrek (Score:5, Interesting)
Some friends and I (and lots of other 6th through 12th grade students) played that on terminals connected to our school's computer in 1980. I think the computer was a PDP-8/some letter, but I don't remember which letter. It was kept in the administrative building, while the student terminal room, which had a noisy teletype-style terminal, a newer and quieter terminal whose display was dot matrix printing, and three or four monocrome CRT terminals, was in a building with classrooms and the school library.
Trek was so popular at one point that I remember all the terminals surrounded by kids, and even the teletype-ish terminal pounding out the quadrant and sector maps. My friends and I figured out a few different ways of aiming photon torpedoes perfectly. One obvious one was a calculator with trig functions (and inverse trig functions), but at least we understood the trigonometry well enough to figure out how to use the calculator to help us kill Klingons. But I also remember three of us with protractors, rulers, and graph paper, getting the angle without using a calculator. The cool thing was when other kids saw us picking off the Klingons easily (and us celebrating each perfect shot), watched us for a while to understand how we did it, and then went off and did it themselves on other terminals. Some didn't care much about math like my friends and I did, but they cared enough about destroying Klingon ships represented by the letter K that they were willing to learn the math to do it.
Re:Too busy watching Weezer's "Buddy Holly" video (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd guess it was just a demo video to show off the multimedia bits of the OS. It's a catchy but inoffensive bit of pop, and the music video is based around an interesting gimmick, so why not use that for a demo? It's not like they were pushed for space on the '95 disc anyway, a full install of the OS itself is only around 100MB IIRC (it's been ages since I've installed it).
On a related note, I've got a Gateway 2000 system CD somewhere (well, you never know, you might want to install WfW 3.11 on something) that has a load of their TV ads on the disc as well. I think it's reasonably common for early CD-ROM releases have random stuff to fill the massive 650MB of space that CD-ROMs gave them.
GORILLA.BAS (Score:3, Interesting)
How about those games that came with QBASIC?
You know. GORILLA.BAS
I used to visit my friends to play that game... my computer only had GWBASIC.
Re:Pinball - MS licensed a bad build (Score:3, Interesting)
The game you're talking about was licensed from a 3rd party, and Microsoft got a bad build of it. Maxis, the software's author, released the same game as one board of several available in a package called "Full Tilt! Pinball" in 1996.
I experienced it first through the "Full Tilt!" product, and was sorely disappointed by the version included in Windows. My biggest gripe was the plunger - in the Windows build the power of the ball release wasn't proportional to the distance the plunger appeared to be pulled back. Yes, that's a petty complaint, but little details like that stand out when you've played the finished product then get handed a copy of the beta release. There are other problems, too; I think Maxis made improvements to the physics engine after licensing it to Microsoft.
If you like the version you got free from Bill Gates, then do yourself a favor and find a copy [lmgtfy.com] of the full release. Three boards instead of just one, with fewer bugs. You'll be glad you did.