C:\ArsGames We love games here at the Ars Orbiting HQ, from modern to ancient and all points in between. With that in mind, we’ve partnered with the folks at GOG.com to create a store page featuring a curated list of some of our favorites from GOG’s catalog. At the end of every month, we’ll rotate a couple of titles off the list and add a few new ones; altogether, we have about 50 games to set in front of you. Once or twice a month, we’ll publish a personal retrospective like this one, where we’ll feature one of the games from the list—perhaps a retro game you’ve heard of, perhaps a modern title you missed. Regardless, GOG will have a DRM-free version of the game ready to go. Be sure to check out the earlier articles in the series!
It’s Christmas of 1994, and I am 16 years old. Sitting on the table in our family room next to a pile of cow-spotted boxes is the most incredible thing in the world: a brand-new Gateway 66MHz Pentium tower, with a 540MB hard disk drive, 8MB of RAM, and, most importantly, a CD-ROM drive. I am agog, practically trembling with barely suppressed joy, my bored Gen-X teenager mask threatening to slip and let actual feelings out. My life was about to change—at least where games were concerned.
I’d been working for several months at Babbage’s store No. 9, near Baybrook Mall in southeast suburban Houston. Although the Gateway PC’s arrival on Christmas morning was utterly unexpected, the choice of what game to buy required no planning at all. I’d already decided a few weeks earlier, when Chris Roberts’ latest opus had been drop-shipped to our shelves, just in time for the holiday season. The choice made itself, really.
Credit: Origin Systems / Electronic Arts Gimli and Luke, together at last! Gimli and Luke, together at last! Credit: Origin Systems / Electronic Arts
The moment Babbage’s opened its doors on December 26—a day I had off, fortunately—I was there, checkbook in hand. One entire paycheck’s worth of capitalism later, I was sprinting out to my creaky 280-Z, sweatily clutching two boxes—one an impulse buy, The Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual, and the other a game I felt sure would be the best thing I’d ever played or ever would play: Origin’s Wing Commander III: The Heart of the Tiger. On the backs of Wing Commander I and Wing Commander II, how could it not be?!
The movie is on my computer!
It’s easy to pooh-pooh full-motion video games here in 2026; from our vantage point, we know the much-anticipated “Siliwood” revolution that was supposed to transform entertainment and usher interactivity into all media by the end of the millennium utterly failed to materialize, leaving in its wake a series of often spectacularly expensive titles filled with grainy interlaced video and mediocre gameplay. Even the standout titles—smash hits like Roberta Williams’ Phantasmagoria or Cyan’s Riven—were, on the whole, kinda mediocre.