Outlaws – LucasArts’ Western FPS That Became a Cult Classic
Retired U.S. Marshal James Anderson. Quiet life. Gang of outlaws murders his wife and kidnaps his daughter. Anderson picks up his revolver and goes after them. That is the entire premise and it does not need to be more complicated than that.
1 September 2025Interstate ’76 – The Groovy 1970s Car Combat Classic
In 1997, Activision released a vehicular combat game built on the MechWarrior 2 engine, set in a version of 1976 America where oil shortages had turned the highways into war zones, scored entirely with original funk music, and starring a vigilante mechanic named Groove Champion who drove his murdered sister’s modified car across the Southwest dispensing justice.
29 May 2025Super Skidmarks – An Amiga Classic with a Comedic Twist on Racing
Acid Software were a New Zealand developer who spent the early 90s making games for the Amiga that understood something a lot of their contemporaries didn't: that a top-down racer lives or dies on its handling model, and that getting the handling model right is harder than it looks and more important than almost anything else you could spend your development time on.
5 January 2025Super League Manager (1995, Amiga CD32) – A True Test for Football Management Fans
Super League Manager, developed and published by Audiogenic, sat firmly in that second category. It is not Championship Manager. It was not trying to be Championship Manager. What it was trying to be was a competent, honest football management simulation on hardware that was not ideally suited to the genre, and on those terms it largely succeeded.
13 December 2024Liberation: Captive 2 – An Amiga CD32 Cyberpunk Classic
Before Deus Ex arrived in 2000 and got credited with inventing the immersive sim, there were games doing the same basic things in less celebrated corners of the market. Liberation: Captive 2 is one of them.
13 October 2024Roadkill – A Chaotic Top-Down Shooter with a Twist of 90s Attitude
Vision Software's Roadkill, a top-down vehicular combat game that had no interest in the CD32's troubled context and every interest in putting you in an armoured car and seeing how long you lasted. It is not a subtle game. It is not trying to be.
11 October 2024Ripper - The 90s FMV Game That Slashed Its Way Into My Cult List
Ripper is set in a near-future New York where someone is committing Jack the Ripper-style murders, except the murders are happening in cyberspace, which in 1996 was considered a fresh and alarming concept rather than the premise of a fairly standard thriller.
8 October 2024Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair – A Hollywood Simulator Like No Other
The industry had collectively decided that Full Motion Video was the future, that putting actual celebrities in games was the logical endpoint of interactive entertainment, and that if you could fit a Hollywood director's face on a disc and charge thirty quid for it, you absolutely should.
7 October 2024Big Red Racing: The Chaotic Classic '90s Racing Fun
Released in 1995 by Big Red Software and published by Domark, Big Red Racing was a racing game in the same way that a bouncy castle is a form of architecture. Technically accurate. Missing the point entirely.
5 October 2024Ecstatica: A Weird and Wonderful 90s Horror Game
Released in 1994 by British developer Andrew Spencer Studios and published by Psygnosis, it was a horror-adventure set in a cursed medieval village, rendered in a visual style nobody had seen before and has barely attempted since.
3 October 2024Gorillas.Bas: The Retro Game That Launched a Thousand Programmers
What none of its successors quite replicate is the specific texture of playing Gorillas the way most of us did, huddled around a monitor with someone you know, passing the keyboard back and forth, the CRT throwing pale light across the room while the rest of the house got on with its evening.
1 October 2024