I’m a little surprised that I’m the only one who liked the Oregon Trail best on this list. I figured that one was a little more popular, as iconic as Space Invaders, Pong, and Asteroids.

Anyway, it’s also the seed of inspiration leading up to some of my favourite games of all time, including Dwarf Fortress.

I’ve played all these games or games based directly on them (like Arkanoid instead of Breakout), but only three of them held my attention for more than a few minutes, including Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure - although, admittedly I was kind of lost with these games when I was younger, but loved the idea, and played derivatives of both (text adventure, graphical adventure, and MUDs) during the 1980s and 1990s. But Oregon Trail is a game I put dozens of hours on when I was a kid, and was the game that my family would make sure to have on our computers through the 80s up to the mid-90s and CD-Rom - text adventures (including Zork) were still circulating at the time of Myst, but ceased by about 96/97.

Oregon Trail is still widely available today in the form of remakes.

Looks like Colossal cave has to win this with it's bare hands

Giving this a last minute bump to give people another chance to vote.

Pong and Space Invaders may be more culturally significant, but Asteroids is the one that is still fun to play today. An almost perfect arcade game, and probably the only game from the 70s I would still go back to.

Oregon Trail getting some love 6-7% not great, but not bad :)

As a kid, I thought The Oregon Trail was a new game when my class would go to the computer lab.

I did too! I actually only just learned on this thread that it apparently dates back to 1971, holy shit!

if it's the most important game, it's obviously Pong. As for the best, it has to be Space Invaders. And as for the one that has aged the best, it's the Oregon Trail.

Bumping this thread as I've just been playing Colossal Cave Adventure VR after Ken Williams posted about it in the PSVR2 reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/PSVR/comments/17w7aa6/colossal_cave_released_today_for_psvr2_ps5_and/

What a great surprise, Ken and Roberta were a big part of my childhood with Sierra Online Adventures. Unbelievable they're back in game development.


It actually first came out in Januari, got panned on Metacritic and I can agree with the reasoning behind the bad scores. If you don't have any particular love for this area and unfamiliar with text adventures and their 'logic', it's going to be tough to get into this. (Not helped by the worst aliasing I've seen yet on PSVR2)

The game itself is a faithful remake of the original text adventure
https://dosgames.com/game/colossal-cave-adventure/#dosbox-div
A text adventure come to life in VR.

It does look a lot better already when you get in the cave (proper dark as well) and has all the properties of the old adventures, text adventure mechanics in a VR game! One of the first things you find is an old TV set you can watch a small documentary on, told by Roberta Williams about how it all started. Followed by a long narrated tutorial on how to play the game in 18 tips, and you can call an actual hotline if you get stuck. (according to the video anyway) It's like time stood still.

I explored a bit underground, absolutely loving how it narrates the actual text adventure descriptions of all the rooms as you go around, same with items. I'm going to take my time with this, nothing procedural here, all hand crafted.