Everything old is new again

For me, the peak of commercial PC gaming came in the first half of the 1990s, and ever since then the field has been in decline. It's obvious (yet strangely unacknowledged) that the industry is in a bad shape today, with the only thriving areas being strategy, FPS games, and of course the MMORPG. Entire once-prolific genres, like the graphic adventure, have all but disappeared. Truly great games now hit the PC at the rate of only a couple a year. At the peak of the industry it was more like one every one or two months. Skeptical? Find an old issue of PC Gamer from 1990-1995 and see how many games they reviewed that you or your friends still remember fondly.

Fortunately a few of these old classics, instead of fading into nostalgia, earn the privilege of rebirth through open source engines and remakes, ensuring that they will continue to serve their purpose of entertainment for years to come. Here are five classic PC games that can be enjoyed today on a variety of platforms. There are no half-finished projects here, no ugly clones, no idealistic Sourceforge endeavours that culminate in abandoned bug-ridden test builds. Each of these projects provides a fully functional and stable gaming engine which should match or even surpass the experience of the original. Most of these projects require data files (graphics, sounds, maps) from the original games. Where to find these, if you don't already possess them, is left as an exercise to the reader.

• Game: Star Control II (1992). Engine: The Ur-Quan Masters. It's sad that more people haven't played this excellent space exploration/combat game that also features an unexpectedly good story. No data files to hunt down for this one since they were open sourced with the application -- just download and play.
• Game: Ultima VII (1992). Engine: Exult. Behind U7's primitive graphics lies an RPG rich with interactivity in a way that only a handful of games before or since have ever managed. Sick of playing RPGs where NPCs stand around like idiots day and night just waiting for the hero to show up and talk to them? U7's population have lives. Also, this is no 20-hour casual game; U7 (in its two parts) is one of the biggest RPGs ever.
• Game: Sam and Max Hit the Road (1993). Engine: ScummVM. I chose Sam and Max because it's my favourite of the LucasArts games, with quirky graphics, excellent voice work and a script as funny as anything else ever written for a game, but ScummVM plays pretty much all the LucasArts games of the era, including classics like Day of the Tentacle, the first three Monkey Island games, and the underrated Full Throttle.
• Game: Marathon (1994). Engine: Aleph One. This one is going up on trust because I haven't actually played it for more than 30 seconds, but Mac users rate Bungie's Marathon series very highly. Now everyone gets the chance to play this trilogy of FPS games, released to the community by Bungie. Why not try making a list of the areas where Marathon is better than Halo?
• Game: Transport Tycoon Deluxe (1995). Engine: OpenTTD. A flawlessly accurate implementation of the strategy game I lost my youth to. Except now it does online multiplayer. I find myself in some kind of retro-gaming heaven.

This list isn't at all exhaustive and there are more of these projects springing up all the time, some of which are bound to eventually reach the stage where the games are polished and playable. Someday you might be able to play UFO: Enemy Unknown, the two Ultima Underworlds, or the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, etc). on your Mac or Linux box. But I'm glad I can't do that yet -- my free time's already spoken for. Back to OpenTTD!