20 Games that Defined the Apple II

20 Games that Defined the Apple II January 3, 2013

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Ancient Gaming, entertainment.
Tags: Apple II, YouTube
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A little video my friend Scott sent me.

The games shown are, in chronological order:

Not a bad list. A lot of the games on it were on multiple systems, so I think they more define computer games in the 1980s rather than the Apple II specifically. But not bad. I played most of them.

If I were making the list I would probably strike Battle Chess and California Games from the list, as they came so late in the the cycle. Prince of Persia is a bit questionable for me as well, as I played it on the Mac much later on. But Wasteland was the last Apple II game I ever bought, so that plays into it. What defined Apple II games for me came much earlier in the life of the platform

Instead I would add Aztec and probably Autoduel. I would also substitute in Epoch (which doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry) for Elite, Ultima III in for Ultima I (which I think was just a better, more popular game), and probably Seven Cities of Gold for one of the over-represented-on-the-list RPGs. And I would have a strong desire to get F-15 Strike Eagle in there somewhere. And Pinball Construction Set. And Taipan! as well.

There is the problem with making such lists. I can look at all those Apple II games and pull out quite a few great ones.

And, as a side note, Oregon Trail is one of the games in the video I never played.

At least not on the computer.

Instead, that was a game we played as a teacher driven role playing game when I was in 7th grade. True to the spirit however, when people refer to playing the video game version it sounds exactly like our role play version. As young boys, my friends and I all loaded up our wagon with guns and as much ammo as possible and most of us went on to die of dysentery.

Comments»

1. HarbingerZero - January 3, 2013: Wow, up to this point I’m not sure I knew anyone else who had done the classroom version, lol. I loved it. I have some of the material I’ve cobbled together over the years from various teacher sites.

F-15 was my first flight sim and my first *real* computer game, by which I mean it wasn’t Bouncing Babies or Armchair Quarterback. I definitely think it should be on the list.
2. Gorbag - January 3, 2013: Did you play Castle? Top-down adventure game, monochrome, using only ASCII characters for graphics. That was the first game I ever played, on a COMPAQ “portable” computer (that weighed about 40 lbs). My dad got a new hard drive for it at some point, and we were certain it wouldn’t *ever* be full – 40MB! Games were the size of text files, hundreds of k at their largest. And then :graphics: happened… Space Quest should be on that list too.
3. Gripper - January 3, 2013: I loved Autoduel – was a ton of fun! But I also played most of the games on the list.
4. bluelinebasher - January 3, 2013: Bolo, Taipan, and One on One (Dr J vs Larry Bird) are some that I remember playing quite a bit.
5. Wilhelm Arcturus - January 3, 2013: @Gripper – I think part of what made Autoduel great was the limitations of the medium (crappy 80s computer systems) forced Origin to append RPG elements to the Steve Jackson Car Wars game. It became a Car Wars campaign rather than just cars shooting at cars.

@Gorbag – That sounds like a Roguelike game, in which case it should probably on the list of ways I wasted school processing resources in college.

@HZ – The funny thing was that the teacher who did the Oregon Trail unit with us was one of the first teachers I recall having a very leftist leaning classroom agenda. He was going to fix the world by indoctrinating the youth! Previously he had talked about sports, and what was a “real” sport and what was just gratuitous violence. Soccer, basketball, and baseball were sports. American football, boxing, and auto racing, as examples, were clearly not sports and should be shunned. And hunting was not only not a sport, but clearly murder.

So we started off the Oregon Trail and he gave us our supply options and budget. Most of the boys filled up their wagons with guns and ammo. I think this caused him great mental anguish and he at first suggested then demanded we rethink our choices.

That was, I think, my first ever conflict with a GM over whether I was playing the game “right,” something repeated frequently in the years after. Eventually he gave up and let us die of dysentery and lead poisoning.
6. John Dougan - January 3, 2013: I’d have put Muse software’s Robot War on the list. We burned a lot of time on that, both running games and brainstorming strategies
7. Gaff - January 3, 2013: This is obligatory–my first flight sim was “Flight Simulator 2.0″ on the IIc–i assume ver. 1 was on the Apple II. I have bought every new iteration of Pirates! that has come out in the last 30 years after playing the original Apple version.
8. nelsonminar - January 3, 2013: Nice video. Such a joy seeing that goofy 1 bit-per-pixel graphics with 6+ colors.

It’s strange to see Oregon Trail on there and not Lemonade Stand. And if there were room for Rocky’s Boots too, why, that’d be swell. And I’d swap Archon for Battle Chess!
9. Kelly - January 4, 2013: Sundog: Frozen Legacy should be on there, although I found performance on my //c to be awful. I ended up buying it again for my Atari ST and finally got to enjoy it all the way to completion, and in execellent color. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy
10. Drebin - January 4, 2013: Good lord, Oregon Trail.

How many spare cart axles did YOU take along?