by Christopher Lane

Created on: February 07, 2007   Last Updated: April 12, 2007

When I think about which computer game is my favorite, I can go through so many of the most recent games out there that I love and have played. But, deep down in my heart the ones that are my favorite are the ones that are nostalgic and from my past. Those games, which are near and dear to my heart, are the old DOS based adventure games. The company that pioneered in making these ground breaking games for their time is the company Sierra. In 1983 they created King's Quest, the first game where the player could control a character in a colorful 3D world. The first time I played this game, was years later, and I was amazed with the story. These adventure games usually have a pretty in depth story, and have the player go through a world collecting items and solving puzzles to move the story along and complete the adventure.

Now this probably seems boring but at the time they were great and still can be great. Sierra was the leading software company that churned out lots of these games. Moving from typing in commands to have the character perform certain actions, to using the mouse to activate hot spots on the screen. As graphics and computers got better, so did the games. Sierra put out 8 different Kings Quest games, they also had a series called Police Quest, where you played a cop tracking down a killer. There are 4 games in the series and the first 3 all use the same character, with the first 2 dealing with the same criminal. They also put out many other series, including Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Leisure Suit Larry, which is a humorous, ADULT series, and Gabriel Knight.

Gabriel Knight is probably the one that I liked the most. The story takes place in New Orleans and deals with voodoo and murder. There were 3 Gabriel Knight games made, but the first is still the best.

There are a lot more than that, and Sierra wasn't the only company making them. Lucas Arts also made a few games in this nature and two of the best are Maniac Mansion : Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle.

A lot of these games are still available to get. You can find them on sites like E-bay. These games were made during the DOS days, so they don't run very well on Windows. But, there is a program that emulates DOS and all the proper drivers needed to play these games and they run pretty decent on that. Sierra has also recently re-released some of its Quest games so that they run on windows, and the whole collection is pretty cheap, around twenty dollars.

Every now and then I pull these old games out and play through them again and again. These games are instant classics and are definitely my favorite computer games.

Learn more about this author, Christopher Lane.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.