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You’re in elementary school, and the weather’s no good. Perhaps beginning a lifelong love of the rain, you realize that at lunch, you won’t be sent outside to stand against a wall while a kid with an overactive pituitary gland punts Voit balls at you. Instead, your teacher speaks the two most beautiful words a pale, shy child can hear: indoor recess.
Now, rather than demonstrating your unfamiliarity with your rapidly growing limbs, you can instead stay inside and draw, read, or if you’re very lucky, get on the school computer. What’s waiting for you there? A game that a PC manufacturer or kindly computer science teacher has hidden behind just enough folders for the school not to remove.
Bugdom
Pre-packaged on some of the classic, colorful-bubble shaped iMacs, many schoolkids of a certain age spent lunch periods forever replaying level one like an electronic Sisyphus.
Nanosaur
Or, if you were really lucky, your iMac might have the much less kid-friendly Nanosaur. I mean, you were a dinosaur with guns and a jetpack — the actual game could have been just one JPEG file and kids still would have loved it.
Oregon Trail
Fond memories of your whole friend group gathering around a screen as your little explorers crapped themselves to death from dysentery, while you hauled 3,000 pounds of buffalo meat.
Carmen Sandiego
I never remember even looking for Carmen Sandiego. It was more just mashing buttons to make new art come up.
Microsoft 3D Pinball: Space Cadet
No school employee knew enough about computers to get Space Cadet Pinball off Windows XP, and we all benefited.
Kid Pix
You’d think that Kid Pix was an art program, but it was more accurately a sort of audio synthesizer for funny sounds that also happened to make colors appear.
Putt-Putt
I’d replay this, honestly, but I’m too afraid I’m going to get stuck on a puzzle as a 34-year-old.
Treasure Mountain
Thanks to the early days of programming, this was mostly mashing the “net” button like a rat with free access to the treat dispenser, hoping it would eventually land on the right pixel to trap one of those elves.
Backyard Sports
If this came out today, a bunch of people on Reddit would be mad at how inclusive it is.
Math Blaster
This game is the only reason I can do even simple division, and half of that has to do with the alien that looks like a Simpsons character.
Number Munchers
Looking back, this game may have a lot to do with my lifelong love of weird little freaks.
Solitaire
Nobody’s first choice, but it never let you down. If no one else got me, I know Windows Solitaire got me.