Gauntlet

I heard about the existence of Gauntlet before I got to play it.  The time period between these two events seemed extremely long. Nerd needs to play game....badly. Nerd is about to die.  Gauntlet was awesome for its class based dungeon crawling design.  It had amazing use of voice, but the constantly draining health was a pretty lame and inelegant quarter grabber.  The multi-player, party based component is what really took this one over the top.  There is controversy about the origins of the design that lead to gauntlet.  I went to the web to try to confirm the story I heard out of wotc that Richard Garfield had designed gauntlet, but the controversy I found there did not include him....the mystery remains.  Gauntlet is a certifiable classic.

Adventure

I could literally play this game with my eyes closed. By sound alone I was able to complete each objective. I know that most often people say literally when they actually mean to say figuratively, but I mean literally. Up for the sword, down and to the right past the first quacking duck dragon and on to victory! If Adventure had been an mmorpg, I would have had 5 level 80's and been supplementing my comic money selling gold. Adventure also contained the first Easter egg that I knew about. By ingenious use of the bridge and the magnet a secret room could be entered. Inside this room was a text message from the developer and the first truly epic item! I of course refer to the Trans-molecular Speck. A tiny black pixel with almost limitless power. I don't clearly remember what it did but I'm pretty sure it was awesome. Did it allow clipping through all walls? I dunno but I loved it.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The E.T. game always gets blamed for the crash, and I suppose this game is better but licensed games were not off to a great start all these years ago.  This game did recreate some cool moments from the film and it did have some insane puzzles and riveting parachute and grenade action.  The graphics in this could only be kindly described with the term abstract, and that would clearly be a stretch.  I loved Raiders and I wanted to love this game, but this is more Irina Spalko than Marion Ravenwood.