Everyone who plays games a lot has a favorite era that set their expectations and defined what they find fun for years to come, and it’s difficult to talk about classic computer games without dating yourself—either as younger or older. Which era counts as “classic” or formative will depend on the individual.

In my case, the formative glory days were the 1980s and early ’90s, and the platform was MS-DOS. And while I did play popular commercial releases from publishers like Apogee and Epic, I mostly played shareware releases. Today, we’re going to look at some gems of that lost era.