exQUIZitely 🕹️
@exQUIZitely • 14,771 subscribers
Not everything was better in the past, but I post about the things that were - mostly games from a long forgotten time. I also created exQUIZitely, a quiz site.
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"Good evening, Professor. I see you have driven here in your Ferrari." If I had to pick one intro that blew me away more than any other, it has to be the one from Another World. This is as close to perfection as it gets. The pacing, the camera work (gliding through Lester Knight Chaykin's body and then seeing him from behind - pure genius), the subtle sound effects, the tension rising in perfect sync with the music, the way he casually sips a soft drink like a boss while running a particle acceleration experiment - and then gets blasted out of this world into… well, another. Éric Chahi created this game almost entirely by himself. That was 35 years ago now, and anyone who played games back then still remembers it. True greatness.
exQUIZitely 🕹️28,777 views • 1 day ago
An average picture that you save on your phone or PC has a size of around 400 kilobytes. It doesn't do anything, it's just a static image. Now divide that by the factor 10, so you drop to 40 kilobytes. That's the size of The Last Ninja, developed by System 3 and published in 1987. I still struggle to comprehend, even in the slightest, how programmers back then did what they did - and the worlds they created with the limitations they had to work with. I was simply blown away by the graphics (isometric on the C64 with such an amazing level of detail - simply gorgeous) and absolutely mesmerized by the kickass sound. What Ben Daglish and Anthony Lees conjured up musically will forever be part of gaming history - an iconic masterpiece. 40 kilobytes man...
exQUIZitely 🕹️634,869 views • 2 months ago
In an interview, Richard Garriott stated that Ultima VII: The Black Gate was "the most masterfully executed of the Ultima series". He has also stated that the game was, along with Ultima IV, his own favorite overall. It was one of the most complex and longest roleplaying games I ever played. The world is truly massive, and only if you're into deep lore and long texts/stories (and being a rather patient player), this epic classic is for you. I sometimes wonder how terrible such a game would do today, with players' attention spans maxing out after a few minutes at best. Maybe that's exactly the reason why they don't exist anymore? Back in 1992, The Black Gate was both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, being widely regarded as the high point in the series. Ultima VII is the first game in the series that runs entirely in real-time, and only pauses when the inventory, the menu, or a dialogue is open, significantly affecting combat. This was one of the bigger changes from the predecessors and something that a turn-based RPG fan had to get used to. It certainly took me some time. I'll take an educated guess and say that if you were a fan of RPGs back in the day, you played this wonderful masterpiece.
exQUIZitely 🕹️14,576 views • 1 day ago
Pang (1989), originally released in Japan as Pomping World and known in North America as Buster Bros., is a perfect example of a game with an extremely simple premise and incredibly addictive gameplay. You instantly understand the goal - yet it still takes ages to master. In other words, it hooks you right away and keeps you engaged for a long time. Despite its high level of difficulty, it never felt unfair. Only the chosen few actually reached the finish line after 50 levels. I never did. Did you?
exQUIZitely 🕹️19,390 views • 2 days ago
Grand Theft Auto VI (often called GTA 6) is widely considered the most anticipated game of all time. The franchise sold half a billion (!) copies - trailing only the Mario and Pokémon franchises. This is how it all started in 1997 - from very humble beginnings to global icon.
exQUIZitely 🕹️44,178 views • 7 days ago
Imagine creating a single game that allows you to retire at 28... River Raid (1982) was special for more than one reason. Obviously the game is an all-time cult classic. It wasn't just "good for its time" - it was legitimately excellent in terms of design and pushed technical boundaries. However, what stands out the most is who created it. Carol Shaw, a solo female creator delivering a million-selling classic in a male-dominated space. To give you a better context: In 1982 the gaming industry extremely male dominated, only 3% of the developers were women - and only a fraction of that in leading roles. Shaw started at Atari in 1978 (one of the first ever women in such a role) and moved to Activision. River Raid is her most famous work, and she's widely recognized as one of the earliest professional female video game designers/programmers. River Raid became hugely successful - lucrative enough for her to retire early - and helped normalize women in game development. It was a quiet but significant milestone in an era when the field was just forming and considered to be "just for guys". Today's gaming industry is still male dominated but the ratio is not 3% women to 97% men anymore, but around 25% women to 75% men. Carol Shaw didn't just push technical but also social boundaries, normalizing women in the gaming industry.
exQUIZitely 🕹️72,737 views • 13 days ago
While developing Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984), Will Wright built a map/level editor for the islands and factories. He discovered he had much more fun creating and tinkering with the maps than actually playing the helicopter shooter. That experience directly inspired him to make Sim City (1989). The map editor in Raid on Bungeling Bay became the foundation for the city-building simulation that evolved into Sim City. Here's a quote from an old interview: "To create this game I had to draw all these islands that the helicopter would go bomb... Instead, I wrote a separate program, a little utility, that would let me go around and build these islands real quick. I also wrote some code that could automatically put roads on the islands... Eventually I finished the shoot-’em-up game part, but for some reason I kept going back to the darn thing and making the building utilities more and more fancy." Thank you, Bungeling Bay map editor! You were the origin of gaming history!
exQUIZitely 🕹️39,209 views • 7 days ago
The most "claustrophobic" game ever? Descent (1995) is a first-person shooter developed by Parallax Software, notable for being the first FPS with fully true 3D graphics and six degrees of freedom movement. Players pilot the Pyro-GX spaceship through mineshafts on various planets, infected by a virus that has turned mining robots hostile. There you go, the whole story in one sentence! Movement is the game's hallmark: full six degrees of freedom allows free flight in any direction - forward/backward, left/right (slide/strafe), up/down, and 360° rotation - creating disorienting, stomach-churning zero-gravity combat. For someone like me, being claustrophobic, this was both tough to play yet highly fascinating. I feel Descent is an underrated game that got a bit lost in the shuffle of other great games around the mid 90s.
exQUIZitely 🕹️842,146 views • 5 months ago
Diablo II is widely considered by a large portion of longtime Diablo fans to be the best game in the franchise. 🔥 Diablo (1996) 🔥 Diablo II (2000) 🔥 Diablo III (2012) 🔥 Diablo IV (2023) The overall dark tone and punishing gameplay felt more immersive and "hardcore" than later entries, if you read up on the feedback on Diablo forums. It was grittier, tougher, and also allowed for more variety in terms of playstyles, adding a lot to its replay value. So, is Diablo II the truest to its RPG roots, and the one with the best lore and gameplay?
exQUIZitely 🕹️65,497 views • 13 days ago
Behold! The self-proclaimed Mother of All Games! Scorched Earth, by Wendell Hicken, was released as shareware in 1991. It wasn't going to win awards for groundbreaking graphics, yet it's one of the best multiplayer games ever - highly addictive with endless replay value. It let you customize a huge range of settings, from gravity, wind, and meteor showers to many others. Building on earlier games like QBasic Gorillas, it took the concept to a much higher level, supporting up to 10 players with far greater complexity and variety. You set angle and power to aim, with a wide choice of weapons (unlike the banana in QBasic Gorillas, for anyone who remembers). Computer-controlled enemies ranged from difficulty 1 (Moron) to 10 (Cyborg). No other game has named its lowest difficulty level so perfectly! Wendell Hicken, the Quentin Tarantino of game developers!
exQUIZitely 🕹️75,115 views • 17 days ago
Being a kid in the 80s and playing Operation Wolf is one of the best memories I have of that era. The Uzi-style machine gun was mounted on the cabinet (how epic was that!), with realistic recoil feedback. As a kid growing up watching Stallone and Arnie movies, this game was beyond awesome. You're basically a one-man army on a hostage rescue mission in enemy territory (a generic South American-inspired "banana republic" setting). The goal is to fight through six stages: Jungle, Village, Ammo Dump, Prison Camp, and Airport - to free captives and escape safely. The game feels heavily inspired by 80s action movies like Rambo and Commando, with over-the-top carnage and just mowing through whole platoons of enemy soldiers - in other words: Pure fun! Hard to find the right words to describe the feeling but I am sure that anyone who grew up in the 80s will have played this game at some point in time.
exQUIZitely 🕹️62,159 views • 14 days ago
Most games are designed to test a player’s resolve - their reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and speed. They are, at their core, exercises in stress tolerance. And then there was Anno 1503 (Max Design, 2002). It emphasized peaceful economic growth and meticulous island management in a glorious 16th-century setting. Visually stunning, packed with incredible attention to detail, and featuring a soundtrack that could almost put you in a meditative state. Don’t take my word for it - just listen.
exQUIZitely 🕹️92,953 views • 22 days ago
Some of you will be old enough to remember this. Defragging - and it actually did serve a purpose. It was essential for optimizing slow, mechanical hard drives by rearranging scattered data into contiguous blocks. By doing so increased data load times (since the physical head of the hard drive didn't have to move that much). However, what I remember most was the almost hypnotical satisfaction of seeing all those little blocks flashing, being organized, and just "knowing" that it was good for my computer. In times when you fiddled around with autoxec.bat and config.sys, when every little Kilobyte of RAM mattered, and when hard drives were measured in Megabytes, not Terrabytes, the weekly routine of defragging almost felt like cleaning up your room.
exQUIZitely 🕹️530,285 views • 4 months ago
The last "modern" game I ever played was World of Warcraft, from 2004 to 2010, the end of Wrath of the Lich King. I know there were MMORPGs before (and after), but when the original World of Warcraft launched in 2004, it felt closer to "perfection" than any game before or since. Nothing has changed that feeling to this day. What changed was the game itself after the death of Arthas in Wrath of the Lich King. The original WoW felt so vast, so open, and so alive - it’s hard to put into words. There was no min-maxing yet, no speedruns, no parsing records, no gear score requirements. If you were really "pro," you connected with friends or guildies via Ventrilo. There was no WeakAuras, no threat meters, no Questie guiding you. You quickly learned that even the most expensive vendor gear was trash compared to quest rewards. You had to walk from Elwynn Forest to the Redridge Mountains - and if you dared peek across the river into Duskwood, the spiders there would one-shot you (I’m sure we all did that). The first time you equipped a green item! The first time you swapped it for a blue! And the envy of seeing someone with purple gear, omg! Saving up for a mount and the catharsis when you could finally afford one! The first time you entered the Deadmines, the foolish solo attempt on Hogger only to realize instantly it was a death sentence, stepping into Alterac Valley battlegrounds and being in awe of its size, wiping on Ragnaros again and again before finally killing him, and the sheer joy of celebrating together with your guild. The excitement and awe of entering Naxxramas for the first time, struggling to down Patchwerk, the teamwork, the slow progress, seeing Sapphiron dead on the frozen ground and being moments away from Kel’Thuzad… so close! It truly felt like a massive world - not just in size, but in stories. The announcement of The Burning Crusade and the Dark Portal appearing in the Blasted Lands; you couldn’t wait to walk through it. Then the ultimate climax when Wrath of the Lich King launched, eventually facing the most badass character in gaming history: Arthas. World of Warcraft was magic. Until it wasn’t. Just like Blizzard was once the greatest game studio of all - until they weren’t. Warcraft used to be tough, glorious and epic... now it's pink Disney fluff. Nothing has recaptured that feeling from 2004 to 2010. I wonder if anything ever will again. I sometimes watch the trailer of the original WoW. It still hits close to the (gamer) heart…
exQUIZitely 🕹️416,881 views • 3 months ago
This one definitely qualifies for the often-cited "Kids today will never know"… The original release of Windows 95 famously came on 28 (!) floppy disks. Because the operating system required roughly 40 MB (nothing now, but pretty big back then) of space, and each standard 3.5" floppy disk only held 1.44 MB of data, the massive set was Microsoft's way of supporting older computers that lacked CD-ROM drives, which were still quite expensive at the time. Installing Windows 95 required hours of manually swapping disks, and a single corrupted disk could ruin the entire process - the horror! Downloading and installing 40 MB today would take just a few seconds. Back then, it took half an afternoon (or longer if you hit that dreaded corrupted disk).
exQUIZitely 🕹️38,700 views • 10 days ago