What games fascinated you before you even played them?

Games
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The conversation in the Frame Game thread between @wavey and @Left_Empty got me thinking about the impact of advertisements and screenshots and previews, especially back in my early days as a gamer, when I would stare longingly at magazines thinking about what some of these games I saw would be like to play.

Some of them I did go on to play later, but many I didn’t. Either way, the game in my mind (paired with way too much free time) was a powerful thing.

Most of this was from my Apple II days, and probably seen in the pages of Family Computing magazine. I remember seeing ads for LucasArts’ Eidolon and thinking This game has a dragon!
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(Remember, this was basically still Infocom days!)

What do those dials mean?? What can I do with this dragon when I find it?? And check out the game’s cover, too!

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And there was this ALL-TIMER advertisement:

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That grasshopper guy sent my mind reeling. Conversations with buggy aliens was definitely the most powerful ingredient, but I also just love how much text there is in this advertisement. I would read and reread it, trying to discern just what this experience could be like. (I finally got my hands on it way way later, and by that time it had been spoiled by the much more playable Star Control II.)

Another phenomenon for me was owning books with game cheats and walkthroughs, where I could literally read, in a sense, how the game worked even when I didn’t own the game. That happened with Sundog:
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In a book with “Go North. Eat meal. Get lamp.” type walkthroughs, the advice for playing Sundog was wholly different–more suggested strategies than a perfect ordered list of moves. It was like imagining an elephant from only minute descriptions of each square inch of its body.

Some of you must have played it. Is Sundog any good? I have no idea!

I also did this with tabletop games when I first got into them. Poring over the catalogs of late-80s RPG companies… it was so full of possibilities. I did this a lot with ICE and their Middle-Earth catalog, even though I had barely managed to make it through The Hobbit.

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What wonders would I learn in this Mirkwood module?? Who knows!!
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What games did you fantasize about without ever playing them? Did this happen in the internet age the same way it did in the print age? Do you have to be a cash-strapped kid in a world of $50 floppy disks to have this experience? Does it happen to anyone still today? And what games were literally better in your head, and should have been made instead of what actually got pressed to disk?

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The number of times 14-year-old me took down Magic Realm off the bookshelf in his bedroom, and just sorted components or looked at the character cards (the Black Knight!) are too many to count. The number of times I read and re-read that rulebook and stumbled through the introductory scenario? Also countless. In my mind’s eye, there was this eventual version of me playing the game with ALL the rules and both sides of the map tiles and every component and it was the most glorious and fun experience to ever be had anywhere. Sadly, never realized.

The same with SPI’s “Freedom in the Galaxy”, which was essentially “Star Wars Rebellion, the Game…but don’t sue us and we’ve changed all the names of everything in it please stay away George Lucas legal team”. The rules for Freedom in the Galaxy were complex, but manageable. Finding anyone willing to play? That was the issue.

And then there was Wings by Yaquinto games. Look at that big, beautiful, glorious game box! That amazing cover photo. The rules were very intricate, but made sense. I even taught it and ran a few games at the local games store as a teenaged kid. But again, finding players to play was always an issue, so I’d look at the game box. I’d imagine the FUN to be had if I could only find players who were as transported by that box lid picture as me. The dogfights we’d have! Ah, well.

screenshot-www.ebay.com-2023.03.10-09_45_25

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For a while in the late 70s/early 80s I would get the Avalon Hill magazine 3 or 4 times a year. At the time I didn’t have the money to buy new wargames but my brother and I would attempt to reverse engineer some of them from articles. We recreated Kingmaker well enough that we got friends to play. When I got to college and finally played real Kingmaker it didn’t seem that much better. We also recreated a rail game whose name I don’t remember (not one of the crayon ones) that never came close to being balanced.

In the back of The General, the AH magazine, were ads. Tribes of Crane, a human moderated play by mail game, fascinated me. I never did play an of the commercial pbm games but the idea of one that was human moderated always felt like it could have been special.

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Rebelstar Raiders. This admittedly now unquestionably bad artwork was catnip to my 7 year old mind when I saw it in a magazine. Eventually found the sequel in a local shop for £1.99 and it went on to absorb days of my life.

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Pong (yes, I’m old).

I grew up in the UK in the 70s. I spent enough time sitting in a pub with my parents, a bottle of coke with a straw and a bag crisps that would lead to a report child services nowadays.

I used to walk past pong machines which fascinated me but my father had no interest in so I had look on from afar.

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This was gonna be my pick. This ad pretty much drove me to get a DOS-based PC.

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I think the first game that I read about in a magazine that I never would have known about, but then anxiously awaited to be released was the original X-Com. Before that, it was just a weekly trip to EB or similar to see what was available. Then consoles came out and reduced the PC game footprint to a fraction of what it was. Still miss those weekly trips.

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The DnD games on the Intellivision. I had an Atari and even an Apple II but the call of actual DnD on a cartridge just taunted me for years. Even after I’d played Wizardy and Ultima there was just something about those two DnD games. Probably for the best I never played them as I don’t think they would have been that great to actually play.

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As discussed on the Civ/Firaxis thread, the original Civilisation. It tantalised me for a year before it became available on my only computer platform at the time, the Atari ST.

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I remember the first time I felt completely entranced by a video game: it was Pac Man. I went into some pizza parlor and went over to check out the video games. I was familiar with stuff like Space Invaders and Pong, relatively simple, monochrome images that I thought were amusing but little more. But seeing Pac Man was like that moment in Wizard of Oz when things went from black and white to color - suddenly I was seeing so many colors, hearing music, heck there were even little interstitials, almost mini-cinematics, between levels! I was completely entranced, the hook was set, as it were.

Starflight is a really good call, I was into that game before it was released. I had to wait a bit, if I remember correctly, for a C64 release but of course it was worth it. But then there was the sequel, which had this amazing box art:

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Still one of the best I’ve ever seen. And notice it’s an IBM copy, yeah that one never got released on C64 so it was many years later when I picked it up on GOG that I finally played it. Following this theme, I was completely absorbed with Mass Effect from the moment it was announced. When I first saw this early trailer I knew I had to play this game.

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I have stories about both Wasteland and Might & Magic.

I took summer programming classes at the local community college when I was in middle school. After one class, I saw my instructor (a college student) booting up the first Might & Magic on one of the Apple IIs we worked on.

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I’m not even sure it was in color, it might have been monochrome. I stared over his shoulder as he showed it to another college student.

Now, I was kind of his “star pupil” in that class. The first day, I knew all the basics of BASIC that the class was going to use to create their own adventure games. So instead of having me do that, he started teaching me assembly language graphics programming. Frankly, I hated it, and spent every session I was making games with the others. But it was all worth it when, the last day of class, he handed me a pirated copy of Might & Magic - Book One: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum.

Wasteland was the first game I ever saw with a content warning sticker on it. I HAD to have it. And luckily neither my parents nor the staff at B. Dalton’s Software Etc. knew or cared about the warning. Wasteland Herpes, here I came!

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I had unofficial copies of The Eidolon and Koronis Rift back in the day, and I was asking myself the same question. I was usually pretty good at sussing out gameplay without an instruction manual, but not with those two games.

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I still haven’t figured out which game this is

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Looks like Cyber-Lip.

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I was a RPG addict loving my C64. I walked into a store and there it was, Dungeon Master, running on an Atari ST. The 3D walls and floors flowing from the demo had me memorized. A year and a half later it was mine.

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GTA

Of particular note here is the BBFC ‘18’ sticker on the box. I was 14 when it came out. It caused a storm of moral panic thanks to The Daily Mail et al calling to ‘ban this sick filth’. Needless to say, it gained a fair bit of notoriety (aka playground prestige) at the time due to the controversy. All the cool nerds of that age wanted to play it, including me.

Given that the BBFC was still pretty trigger happy when it came to censorship back then, especially for games, the rumour mill had it that GTA may actually get withdrawn from sale. As a result, I nagged and begged my dad to go out and buy me a copy while it was still possible (it was kinda close to my birthday), which he dutifully did (I have a cool dad!).

Unfortunately he took it back to the shop less than a week later without allowing me to play it (I have an uncool dad!). Not sure whether that was due to the rating or the fact that the ban never actually happened. I suppose that coupled with the fact that it hadn’t technically been my birthday for several weeks meant it was an overly expensive and unwarranted purchase for us at the time. So back it went.

I got to endure lots of other kids just banging on about this bloody thing for months afterwards. Which made me FOMO all the harder. Unfortunately, everyone else was playing it on Playstation, which I didn’t have, so I wasn’t able to loan a copy when they were done with it. Eventually, one of the scant few other PC gamers in my clique got it about a year later and after deploying my Wiles I was finally able to play it too.

It was ok.

On reflection other than the FOMO I think I mainly obsessed over it because I loved me some Lemmings, and the devs were still going by DMA Designs at that point. I can’t say that I expected to play as, nor see, a Lemming in GTA, but I’d spent hours drawing the little buggers all over my jotters and whatnot when I was a tad younger* and consequently held DMA in high regard.

* Upon discovering that there were ‘real’ lemmings that were actually cute little rodents, I demanded one as a pet. I ended up with a gerbil instead.

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That is, ah, quite a choice of composition.

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Does anybody know know what @John_Many_Jars did for a living back then?

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…or who?