For years I thought that I’d lost my old 386 games. The first PC games that I ever played. They’re much of the reason that I’m contributing to this site today. I knew I had the hardware laying about here and there, but I could never find the old games I used to play. Recently, however, when cleaning out the old garage, a cache from my gaming past was recovered. For those interested in joining me while I wax nostalgic a little bit, read on.

 Among the stash I found Night Shift, an old Lucasfilms game. Thinking back, I don’t think I ever played this game a whole lot, because it was hard. I mostly liked it because it had characitures of Darth Vader, C3PO and a Stormtrooper on the box. Hey, I was, like, five! Anyway, all that I remember from actual gameplay is that the guy you controlled looked suspiciously like Mario and it involved wrenches, somehow. This brief Wikipedia entry could probably explain the game better than I can. I’ll just say, they don’t make manuals like that anymore. Unless, of course, you’re one of the few who has played Contact for the Nintendo DS.

Also found was an old Price is Right game, but I won’t bore you with the details of that. I don’t really have any memories of it other than being able to audibly recall how awesome the “come on down” jingle from the show sounded on my computer speaker(s).

The real gem recovered was the very first PC game I ever played, F-15 Strike Eagle II, created by Sid Meier at MicroProse in 1989.

I played this game a LOT. I don’t think that I ever even beat it. If I recall, I could never figure out how to land after I’d completed the objectives. I just flew around and tried to take out all of the enemies. Always fun was trying to gain a bunch of altitude and then do a full flip without stalling or crashing into the ocean. Good times. But I’ll shut up now and simply provide you with a link to a review I found that has some screenshots from the game.

Finally, I’ll leave you with some pictures of the hardware that I’ve managed to hang on to. From left to right, top to bottom, you’ll see the motherboard (complete with unidentifiable/removable RAM and tape to keep the battery from flapping around), two pictures of the hard drive (80MB!), the floppy drive, a serial game controller card and finally an IDE controller card. I know I have the 24MHzCPU around here somewhere, but it’s no doubt buried under a myriad of NICs and Voodoo cards.