Dark Castle

Maybe it's a side effect of growing older, but I've been thinking this year more than any other how much I miss the early computer games. The only game console I ever had was Atari (never had Nintendo, or Sega Genesis, and certainly none of the fancier ones out today), so computer games have always been predominant in my mind. Specifically, for the Macintosh my father brought home one day in the mid-80s. Among the handful of wonderful games—that was probably as influential to my imagination as He-Man was—was a game called Dark Castle.

The premise was simple: you play a young peasant guy, Duncan, and you enter the castle and defeat the Black Knight because, presumably, he's bad. You pick up bags of stones and throw them at just about everything you can—dodging guards, rats, vultures, mutants, gargoyles, the flaming eye, dragons, and...brooms—until further into the game you gain the ability to turn your rocks turn into fireballs. In the end, you could beat the Black Knight by entering his throne room and pulling five chains that crumbled the pillars beneath his throne. When the fifth pillar cracks, the Black Knight stands up and shouts and then topples into a pit.

Of course, he came back in Beyond Dark Castle.

I know this isn't as interesting to anyone else, but dang...I miss that game. They made a colorized version of it later but it's still only for Macs and I never did go back to Macs. Sad.

So if you could bring back any game from your childhood, what would it be?