In 1988, Echelon came out for DOS – it looked like the future!
I thought, “Wow! This is in actual 3D!”
And from my kid perspective living in the 80s, it was true. It had wireframe graphics and ultra-smooth scrolling. When I piloted the ship, it felt like I was completely in control.
We may snicker now at the EGA graphics but you got to understand that an NES couldn’t do this. Echelon really showed off what PCs at the time were capable of doing. It was revelatory.
Returning to it now, it’s amazing how far we’ve come in the past 36 years. However, playing this game is still fun – if only to stare at those wireframes!
Chris Trottier
Unknown parent • • •@goatsarah @justinto I realize that Amiga was fairly popular in Europe, but where I live (Canada), it simply never took off. For this reason, my closest reference point is NES and C64.
Well, there was Apple ][ and Mac, but Apple ][ was mostly in schools and Mac was stuck with black and white graphics.
Had I been aware of Amiga and Atari ST, I probably would have really liked the games on those platforms.
Alexandra Lanes
Unknown parent • •Chris Trottier
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •@ajlanes @justinto @goatsarah Yeah, so this will sound surprising coming from me, a PC gamer. For most of the 80s, DOS gaming sucked. This probably doesn’t surprise you but believe me, when you lived in the moment, it was rough.
I didn’t get DOS games because I liked them. I got them because I didn’t have an NES. Don’t get me wrong, when it specifically came to adventure gaming and RPGs, DOS was very good – I loved King’s Quest and Ultima – but if you wanted to play something like Contra or Super Mario Bros., DOS was brutal.
My mom was against an NES because she didn’t want video games to monopolize the living room. So I convinced her to buy a C64 that someone was selling at a garage sale – I told her it would help me with homework. Really, I just wanted a better gaming machine than our 286.
emmatonkin
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •@ajlanes @goatsarah @justinto
I think the Archimedes was a Thing People Maybe Had In School, whereas ST and Amiga were things people would more likely have at home. PC, on the other hand, would generally only show up if someone had one for work stuff, at which point possibly family might get to use it on the weekends.
My father bought and installed some kind of 8086 board thingy in his Atari ST (PC-Speed?) which made for an interesting frankenexperience. Iirc it ran pretty hot.
Chris Trottier
Unknown parent • • •Chris Trottier
Unknown parent • • •@goatsarah @justinto @emmatonkin @ajlanes I just think it’s wild that the Amiga and ST were made by American companies, but were not popular in North America.
And in a weird way, Arc is still with us through ARM.
It’s the British platform that somehow survived.
Chris Trottier
Unknown parent • • •emmatonkin
Unknown parent • • •Hm. Probably wasn't a very Radio 4 area, so maybe that's why I didn't see Archimedes in the wild, but I don't think there was a lot of software for them tbh despite their potential as a platform - people seemed pretty unsure what they were for in school, even. So I'd have thought they wouldn't be widely appealing beyond particular professional and educational use cases for that reason.
emmatonkin
Unknown parent • • •Tbh I only learned that Elite was a thing fairly recently (thanks to Steam's People Who Like Stace Games Also Like function). We were more into straight up arcade types of games - Llamatron, Lemmings, Lotus...
emmatonkin
Unknown parent • • •Alexandra Lanes
Unknown parent • •