About 

Welcome to The Obscuritory, a blog about gaming’s volatile disasters and hidden gems.

Why?

The gaming industry saw a few big changes in the 90s. Things commercialized. Gaming moved towards the mainstream, and companies and independent ventures sprang up everywhere looking to cash in on the trend. Newer technology made it easy for small teams (or individual people) to make entire games, and later on, the emergence of the CD-ROM drive gave developers a quantum leap in storage capacity. This meant companies could make big, experimental, multimedia-filled games without setting themselves back too much from production costs.

The results were horrifying. It’s not fair to label all the games that spawned from the primordial 90s ooze as shovelware because of the sheer volume of different developers and variety, but hundreds of bizarre and occasionally frightening titles crept onto the shelves before dying painful deaths in the bargain bin. Interactive movies, “3-D graphic quests,” Myst clones, overly elaborate simulations, confusing and complicated genre hybrids, and other unmentionables plagued stores across the country.

Despite being trainwrecks, these games had an undeniable charm. In fact, some of them were actually pretty good.

In the blink of an eye, they all disappeared. At some point, the industry settled down with Half-Life and The Sims.

These games marked an awkward turning point for the medium. The newfound independence sparked roughly a decade of experimentation in a new format, fostering some unusual creative expression in equal numbers of successes and failures. But new technology and other developments instantly outmoded this. The home console boom eclipsed DOS games from the late 80s and early 90s. Just as soon Myst and its CD-ROM contemporaries caught on, 3D graphics relegated “slide show” games to an deprecated niche.

Someone has to try these games. It might as well be me. This blog is a living account of my experiments and experiences with the bizarre and forgotten games of the 80s and 90s. Most posts will detail my impressions of these games, their genres, and the era, bringing in media, resources, and other downloads to show readers what these games were like. I might even recommend a couple.

At the very least, they’ll all get a fair shake – something they never had at retail.

What?

Thousands of games came out in the 80s and 90s. As such, I’ll only be talking about a small portion of these. Specifically, I want to uncover games that are:

• Relatively unknown. Plenty of people have heard of Myst, but not many know about Gord@k.
• For computers. Unless stated otherwise, the games in this blog are for Windows, DOS, and Mac. Game consoles usually have great followings ripe with completionists, and especially for bigger platformers like the Super Nintendo, nothing is “obscure” anymore. There isn’t much point retreading that ground. That said, some systems from the 90s like the PlayStation and Atari Jaguar cater to the same scope as the rest of this blog and might get featured occasionally.
• Unique or different. Derivative titles have some merit, but original games deserve special attention.
• Weird. If it defies conventional norms and rules, all the better. Few games do that anymore.
• Awesome. Lost and forgotten gems absolutely need to be highlighted.

Even things that don’t typically qualify as traditional games are up for discussion; things like edutainment products and reference CD-ROMs died with the 90s too.

Unlike other classic game projects, I’m not out for blood or to ridicule these games for being old and outdated. Every game, even ones from the oft-derided interactive movie genre, deserves a look. That said, if it’s bad, it’ll get what’s coming.

When possible, I want to look at these games’ developers. Their stories can be equally interesting. Some have drifted into other professions, while others are now titans of the industry. Look for the “developer commentary” post tag for articles where I got input from the designers themselves!

I’ll also occasionally write essays on these games and the period. You can learn a surprising lot by looking at this experimental microcosm of an era.

Additionally, the Obscuritory YouTube channel will periodically update with new videos or playthroughs from obscure games. These could be ones already covered by the blog or different games entirely.