Hacker News Reader

Comment by canada_dry | Hacker News Reader

Quite the extensive collection... hundreds of zipped game files.

I've been searching for years to find an early multiplayer DOS lan game (~1990) that I believe was called 'Trek'. You separately controlled multiple ships to protect your base and attack others. It was basic ascii graphics but my friends & co-workers spent hours playing via local lan setup.

Hoping it's in this collection!

View on HN

Trek (1985)?

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trek http://exodos.the-eye.us/public/eXoDOS/Games/Trek%20%281985%...

Hot damn... yup!! Thank you.

Such a great game for its time. Edit: it's modem <-> modem not LAN so a max of 2 human players. So I assume we were using null modems to play together in the same room.

Seems likely that this Carlton McLawhorn [i] from Wendell NC is the author (and also an avid rocketeer and scoutmaster).

[i] https://stricklandfuneral.com/carlton-carl-bruce-mclawhorn/

Is this a dos version of the much older mainframe game? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)

Slightly inspired by it maybe, but verry different (real-time vs turn based is biggest difference).

oh, I remember playing EGA Trek.

There was VGA Trek also.

Oh, if we're doing one of these threads, my white whale is a mid-80's CGA DOS game where you set off in search of a lost ... uncle? and have to solve puzzles and avoid hazards.

There are two parts I remember very clearly. The first is that you have the choice when you leave the house at the beginning of either bringing along a walking stick or something else, and if you don't choose the stick, there's a part on an outdoor trail where you twist your ankle and lose the game.

The other part I remember is getting shrunk somehow and ending up in a drawer full of drinking straws. You have to work your way through this tube maze, but some of the straws are clear (invisible) and if you wander into one accidentally, the game lets you know it was so narrow that you get stuck in it forever, lose the game, and die.

There's an "MS-DOS Gaming!" group on facebook where these kinds of questions get asked all the time, usually with answers or follow-up questions pretty quickly. I'd try there.

I’ll point folks over to https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmyjoystick/ (Like “tip of my tongue,” but for games.) Just a solid community helping people find long-lost games.

Might as well mention a game I remember playing but can never find.

It was a brown-ish DOS platformer, I remember it was distributed (to me) as "mario" even though it was not a Mario clone. Probably EGA graphics? The most similar one I've seen is one of the Dangerous Dave games, but I don't think it was that! It's not "Monuments of Mars" either.

Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it, or maybe it was a small project someone made and never properly released.

edit - "Rick Dangerous" looks similar too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNEgrJ9wejo

On the slim chance anybody remembers: I've been fascinated back then by a game I've only seen in magazines. It was some kind of war simulator with a greenish vector graphics map of the north Atlantic. I think you could coordinate everything from that view and give very detailed orders. Must be well before 2000.

You can try the game browser at MobyGames. A game that may help you decide which filters to use is Harpoon. Harpoon was black and white on the Macintosh and colour on other platforms, so it's probably not the game in question. Greenish vector graphics implies that it is a game from the 1980's.

(For reference: https://www.mobygames.com/game/harpoon )

Oh. I think it might have been Harpoon II. The screenshot at https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/harpoon-ii/screenshots/ga... looks like it might be what I remembered. I'll have a look. Thanks a lot!

Edit: I'm now sure that's it. I even found a scan of the original gaming magazine (the German "PC Player") with the test I read back then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com