So on this week’s episode of This Week in Technology Alex Lindsey begins to go on an on about this collection of old Apple II games at Virtual Apple that have been redone to run under Active-X controls with the Explorer browser. I thought it might be interesting. it’s not. It’s crap and you need a joystick to have any real fun. But I promised I’d post it.

There must be 200 games here. Click on the letter of the alphabet at the top to find your fave.

One thing is for sure, these games were pathetic by today’s standards.



  1. Jim Scarborough says:

    “Crummy Apple ][ Game” – isn’t that redundant? The Atari 2600 was better for games!

  2. Dale says:

    Ok, well, I won’t be the one to point out the irony in requiring Windows and Internet Explorer to use an Apple ][ emulator, but then, I just did.

    I was so looking forward to playing Oregon Trail or perhaps Number Munchers because playing those games in second grade weren’t so bad the first time around…

  3. Esteban says:

    I miss screwing around in BASIC. There’s really no modern equivalent.

  4. El Zoof says:

    Heathens, the pair of you! Who can forget the heady pleasures of such games as “Gamma Goblins”, or the original “Zork”? Could the Atari 2600 play such classics as “Apple Panic” or “Escape from Castle Wolfenstein”?

  5. Gregory says:

    actually python is pretty good from the “just play with it” standpoint

  6. Atari is giving thier old games a way for free on CD…
    Some of the classic games will never vanish….

  7. BTW…Digital Life NEW YORK CITY was a blast! They had some really cool games at the event and the booth babes where amazing. 🙂

  8. sirfelix says:

    I’m glad these games have survived … so future archeologists have evidence of what cause the beginning of the Second Dark Ages.

  9. Hey! Watch it now! I happen to think they were the golden ages! It was a time when computers held an unknown mystique. We didn’t know what they were capable of, so our imaginations ran wild.

  10. Named says:

    Looks like his web server is hosted off an Apple II.

  11. Miguel says:

    Besides needing a 5,25″ floppy drive and 5,25″ floppy disks, what would you need to, on a PC, copy those images to disks? I’ve got a couple of II’s at home (a II Europlus, the European version of the IIe, and a lovely IIc, both working) and I’d like to get some software running on thhem beauties 🙂 FS 2 would be great!

  12. triplight says:

    Pathetic only if you measure games by the amount of polygons they can draw, rather than imagination. Many of those games were mind-blowing at the time; Castle Wolfenstein, Ultima, Tass Times in Tonetown, Oo-Topos, Airheart and Choplifter, to name a few. Even one of the earliest Apple games, Sabotage, survives today in the iPod — it’s now called Parachute. You know not what you speak of, Dvorak!

  13. OhForTheLoveOf says:

    Mr Dvorak said, “One thing is for sure, these games were pathetic by today’s standards.”

    Casablanca, On The Waterfront, and A Touch of Evil were crappy movies by today’s standards because…. no wait… wait…. no… no, they actually are not… in fact, they are brilliant films…

    When I attend LAN parties, I’m always a bit dismayed when these kids come in, with amazing custom built rigs, and crazy mad skills, and they’ve never heard of System Shock, or never played the original Wolfenstien, or aren’t aware that Interstate 76 has never been bested in the underrepresented auto combat catagory…

    Gaming is an art form, and its the new art form. It will supplant the motion picture as the dominate form and designers will be held in the same regard as directors are today. To an extent that is happening now… Carmack, McGee, Miejer, Renyolds, just to name a few…

    These games are the equivelent of what Rescued By Rover, The Kiss, or The Great Train Robbery were to cinema. They need to be archived, studied, and seen by anyone who is really interested in gaming.

    These games were decidedly not pathetic then, and they didn’t become pathetic because they got old any more than a 1966 Mustang is a junker because its old… These games were groundbreaking. They were made by pioneers carving out an art form were none had existed before. They were not developing electronic toys for kids. In fact, they were creating the building blocks for a whole new industry and a form of entertainment that would endure for generations to come. These guys probably could not imagine then what a monster they were birthing… But now that it has been born, it is truly a sight to behold.

    So, rather than tell people the games are crappy… Instead tell people to get a joystick…

  14. Rand al'Thor says:

    And the site doesn’t load for me. I just get the following:

    “This is the placeholder for domain virtualapple.org. If you see this page after uploading site content you probably have not replaced the index.html file. ”

    🙁

  15. Back in the early 1980’s Thier was just as much excitement around pac-man and other atari games as games of today.
    Before that us kids played cards, checkers, chess pinball, knock hockey and fuzz ball.
    It’s more fun in playing the game and being with friends than the game it self.
    And the girls looked like girls not stuffed animals like Rosie and Oprah.

  16. OhForTheLoveOf says:

    Okay… But what do Rosie and Oprah have to do with this?

  17. Joe says:

    John, you are so outdated. But unlike you, these games had great value. The people that created them were trailblazers. What have you contributed? Non-QWERTY keyboard using old geezer.

  18. Jogos says:

    Seems like his web server is hosted off an Apple 2.


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