Lost Games

These are games that I've encountered in the past, and which I haven't been able to find any information about on the Internet, in part because I may not remember their exact names. City Connection was in this category for a long time until somehow I remembered its (non-obvious) name. Other games that have been found since this page was written are Dart Room, Ninja Warrior, Escape!, and Galactic Empires.

Canadian politics simulator

I have no idea how I'd find this again. It may have been local to the University of Manitoba in the early 1980's, as far as I know.

It was basically a multiple-choice strategy game where you played a politician of some kind. A member of parliament, seems likely. Like, a backbencher, trying to work their way up? Maybe.

It was mostly text-based where it presented you with scenarios as time progressed -- like, what is the political issue you have to deal with this month -- and you chose how to respond.

For example, I remember one of the options was to take a "Red Tory" response.

There were occasionally hi-res graphics, for when you (I guess) made a particularly good, or poor, political move.

There was one that was a crow that had been killed. With an arrow through it? It was paired with some idiom like "killing the crow". It may have been "eating crow"; that seems more likely as an idiom, but I don't remember the graphic involving eating in any way.

Castle game on PET

I remember attending some kind of programming course on Commodore PET computers in the University of Winnipeg's computer lab, and seeing other students playing games on their computers. I'm probably forgetting most of these, but one stands out. It used the graphic characters to display something that looked like a castle, from above, with paths around the edge (as if walking along battlements?), and (I believe) using the spade card suite symbol to denote a guard. And you went along these battlements and fought the guards? Probably, but I don't remember that much of it. I only saw it that one time, so for all I know, it was written by the person who was playing it, and is completely unknown in the rest of the world, but that seems unlikely.

There might have also been spellcasting in this, with the protagonist being some kind of wizard, but I might be conflating it with other games I saw at that time.

Would you two like to join me on a fantasia?

Side-scrolling platformer. You collected coins, among other things, and there was a shop at the end of each level where you could buy powerups.

The protagonists were a boy and a girl and at the beginning of the game a cloaked figure came up to them and asked them WOULD YOU TWO LIKE TO JOIN ME ON A FANTASIA? or similar.

Point-and-click minimal-graphics Windows dungeon crawler

I don't even know if it was written for Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. But I think I was running Windows 95 at the time. It would have been around 1995, anyway.

The main thing that I do remember is that I had a character, who was a Thief, named "Moneybags". After playing the game for some time, I changed their class to Healer. I remember this because I noted to a friend that I would have liked to change their name too, because now it seemed incongruous. But he pointed out that it still fit, because doctors do make a lot of money...

What this means is, it was a role-playing game where characters could change class, and there were Thief and Healer classes, although I imagine there were probably Fighter and Wizard type classes too. The party consisted of several characters. There was a lot of mouse-based UI. It seemed to be a bit low on visuals. I don't remember there being graphics of rooms or characters or monsters — possibly there was a map, but possibly not even that. But I do remember lots of clicking.

First-person espionage maze runner jumper

I probably downloaded a demo of this from a site like Happy Puppy. (which was a site that had free downloads of demos of DOS games. Other games I remember downloading from there include Skunny Kart and Pinball Fantasies.)

This wasn't a particularly good game, but it was a bit strange, whatever it was. You played a spy. You went through maze-like levels displayed first-person perspective.

I say "maze-like" because I don't remember any wide-open areas and I don't remember travelling in anything but the cardinal directions. It wasn't an open FPS like Doom.

I don't remember if there was any shooting at all in it, actually.

I do remember being able to jump up onto higher levels of the maze. Catwalks? Or something similar.

And I do remember there were power-ups. They were displayed as an icon inside a small glass container, like an hourglass. And one of them was a hallucinogenic mushroom which, when you grabbed it, caused your view of the maze to wobble and swim.