DOOM and the raiders of the lost hours

My first PC compatible computer ran DOS and Windows, and OS/2 and... DOOM.

In between rounds of development work on Liberty BASIC I would take breaks playing DOOM.  By today's standards this is a crude looking game, but back then it was really groundbreaking.  Playing it in a dark room was a good way to scare yourself half to death.  Today I would surely consider it rather tame.  The only thing that really compared to it was a game called Ultima Underworld which was actually a smoother and more detailed real-time 3D game.

In the world of PC gaming it really was all DOS.  Running Windows or OS/2 sucked up too many resources from what was typically a 33MHz 80486 computer.  The game would not play well.  Even when running DOS you needed to use HIMEM and play all the tricks in the book for there to be enough memory.

Other games that wasted my time included Falcon 3.0 which is probably the perfect air combat simulator and a cool game called Theatre of War which was sort of a real time version of Chess, kinda.