For a moment in late December, and just for a moment, I was transported back in time more than 15 years to a period in my life when desktop computer towers had Turbo buttons, clocked out at around 44 MHz and even the nails-on-chalkboard ping of a consumer-grade 14.4 modem was still a twinkle in some telcom engineer’s eye. It was, truly, a frightening time with much uncertainty.
But this momentary time travel, contained wholly in my mind’s eye, was not so much a sadomasochistic jaunt into non-digital caveman times as it was one into a time period that also happened to be steeped in rich video game/PC gaming nostalgia. You see, while the technology we used was enveloped in an now-unimaginable Dark Age, the game genres we played upon it were some of the most imaginative the world had ever seen. Within minutes of loading a new game, we gamers were transported to fantastical new worlds complete with pirates or space quests, and the mechanical wheezing of a struggling 250 MB hard drive was relegated to being a minor annoyance in the background.
One of the earliest and best examples of this phenomenon was the point-and-click adventure game.Â
Blake was snooping around the Infendo offices the other day asking the writers about original IP due out for the Wii this year, and I was honestly less than helpful. I think I grunted something about how Disaster: Day of Crisis might be out this year and then went back to playing Super Mario Bros. 2, which I had dusted off in a fit of nostalgia over the weekend.
