I am, by nature, a non-gambling man. I have severe risk-aversion. So it is very rare that I’ll run into the software store and get something without first playing a demo, asking around, or reading a review. However, every once in a long while I do make an impulse purchase. Whenever I do this I rarely end up with something mundane – it will either be a favorite or (more commonly) utter crap. Still, I’ve found enough gems doing this over the years to encourage me to keep doing it.
The best example of this is the 1994 classic System Shock. I saw it on the shelf and was drawn by the
strange box art. I asked the guy at the store if it was any good. He didn’t know anything about it. I picked it up. I put it down. I read the back four times, but I couldn’t figure out if it would be something I would like. It was $40, which was a hefty price tag for me at that point in my life. Finally I flipped a coin and bought the dang thing.
What followed was several weeks of near obsession. The game seeped deep into my pores and eventually infected me to the point where all other games were judged through my myopic System Shock lens. It instilled in me a love for “open-ended first person roleplaying”, a genre so small I doubt there have been ten titles that could be described this way since 1994. From there I went on to play System Shock 2 and then the various incarnations of the Thief series. (Which are close cousins to System Shock gameplay-wise.) Eventually I wrote a novel based on the game.
I think I got my $40 out of it.
I picked up Planescape: Torment in the Bargain Bin for $10. It was pretty old by the time I tried it. It was already considered a “classic” by some, although I’d totally missed it. I had no idea what I was getting. In fact, I thought the game was called Planetscape: Torment. I thought it was sci-fi. I only got it because it was $10. I didn’t love it as much as some, but it was still an excellent and interesting RPG, and a steal for ten bucks.
Sometime in 2000 I saw
Outcast in the bargain bin at Sam’s Club. The game was less than a year old, and it was already in the big bin of crumpled boxes alongside awful shovelware videogame compilations and low-quality games based on movies that failed at the box office. There were a half dozen copies of the game in the bin, which is a sure sign that it was a stinker. Still, the graphics on the back of the box looked astounding. My system was within the system specs. Could my 300mhz computer really run a game that looked like this? I had to find out.
To this day I don’t know why the game sold so poorly. The graphics were amazing. The voice-acting was excellent, in an age where programmers all too often did their own voice work. The game was stable. It was long. It was imaginative. The AI was good enough to keep up with games of today, and was way ahead back in 1999. The music was of stellar quality, recorded by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The dialog was lots of fun.
Consession: The quests got a little tedious late in the game, and parts of the game were a little cliché. Still, that is hardly a reason for the game to wind up where it did, which is in with the dregs of PC software.
Master of Orion was a good one. I’d just installed a CD drive into my computer, and was looking to build my collection of CD games and move away from floppies. MOO was one of the only CD titles in Wal-Mart that day, so I bought it. This was a silly reason to buy a game, but it worked out.
I also want to mention that 1999 was an incredible year for PC gaming. Planescape Torment. Unreal Tournament. Quake III Arena. Starcraft. Age of Empires II. Everquest. Homeworld. System Shock 2. I think I’m forgetting a couple, but you get the idea. I don’t think we’ve had a year like that one since.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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