exQUIZitely 🕹️
@exQUIZitely • 17,293 subscribers
Not everything was better in the past, but I post about the things that were - mostly 80s and 90s games. I also created exQUIZitely, a retro quiz & trivia site.
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22 kilobytes. I often think about the technical limitations that game designers had to work with in the 80s - both in terms of software and hardware. To me, the game that stands at the very top is Elite (1984). Elite is smaller in data size than many modern text files or desktop icons, yet it lets you freely explore a multi-galaxy-spanning universe that felt gigantic and virtually limitless. Think about this for a second: The core game code on the BBC Micro version has roughly 22 KB of memory. The C64 version from 1985, which I played as a kid, isn't much bigger. Now think about what Braben and Bell turned those few kilobytes into: a massive universe with eight galaxies, each containing 256 star systems (for a total of 2,048 planets per system). Each system featured unique details: government type, economy, technology level, population, commodity prices, and even descriptive text. Oh, and by the way, the game also rendered 3D wireframe ships, stations, and planets in real time on a 2 MHz 6502 processor. This is no slight on today’s game designers. They work with what they have, and that's okay. But when I think about the worlds that some old school programmers created with the tools they were given, it sometimes breaks my brain trying to to even remotely understand how they did it. Not megabytes, not gigabytes... kilobytes!
exQUIZitely 🕹️37,729 views • 3 days ago
The Last Ninja (1987) is generally considered the best-selling C64 game of all time. 🥷 Over 750,000 copies of the C64 version sold in Europe alone. 🥷 Multi-format sales exceeded 2 million units worldwide. 🥷 System 3's Mark Cale has claimed around 4 million copies sold in total. It's not the most complex game in history, but possible one with the biggest "wow" factor when first playing it. Marveling at the incredibly beautiful pixel art graphics, listening one of the best soundtracks ever (Ben Daglish, Anthony Lees), the game was hitting perfectly on that 80s Karate and Kung-Fu vibe, which probably captured every teenage boy's mind at the time. Closing in on 40 years and The Last Ninja still gives me nerd chills more than any other C64 game.
exQUIZitely 🕹️46,779 views • 5 days ago
I played World of Warcraft for many, many years (stopped around early Cata days). The one thing that stood out to me more than anything was its massive size. It was literally a world. And it felt huge because you had to explore everything by foot (to start with anyway). This might be a hot take but I always felt that some of the magic got lost with the flying mounts and teleports later on. The upgrade from walking to getting your first mount was nice (it felt like a real milestone) but the flying mount and teleports turned a once massive world into a set of waypoints. I know it's all under the umbrella of convenience but I felt that the world really started to shrink and lost a big chunk of its charm. It wasn't about exploring anymore, it was about getting to the next dungeon or raid as fast as possible, relegating everything else to secondary importance, including all the little details, NPCs, caves, coastlines, mountains, and everything that that was once so wonderful to explore.
exQUIZitely 🕹️728,650 views • 2 months ago
To me, Blizzard is the undisputed king when it comes to the best game intros. The amount of effort and sheer awesomness that went into StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm still blows me way and gives me nerd chills, even 13 years after its release. The camera angles, the pacing, the landed Viking being swatted away by the Ultra, the Nydus popping up behind the line of marines and tanks... and then seeing that massive Battlecruiser crashing into the city in the background. Simply everything about it is glorious perfection. If they ever decide to make a movie in that exact style with all the StarCraft lore, boy would I pay good money to see that. One can dream...
exQUIZitely 🕹️380,136 views • 1 month ago
One of the most fun racing games ever for the NES! Who remembers this one?
exQUIZitely 🕹️96,162 views • 16 days ago
Exactly 37 years ago on October 3, 1989, a game was released that took the world by storm. Prince of Persia (by Jordan Mechner) had such fluid and lifelike animations, that gamer-jaws were dropping left, right, and center. Rightfully so. But that alone wouldn’t have made the game such a massive hit and gaming-culture icon, I think. Prince of Persia also popularized the “cinematic platformer” genre (Karateka, Mechner’s earlier game, introduced it, though on a much smaller scale), with its immersive atmosphere, deadly falls and traps, and a real sense of weight and physics in movement. Jumps and sword swings had to be timed precisely; mistiming felt punishing but realistic, and also far less cartoonish than typical platformers. It wasn’t just a straight left-to-right platformer either. You had to go back and forth, open pathways through hidden mechanisms, and more. It always felt like it had some Indiana Jones moments with adventure and exploration elements. The one-on-one duels were more tactical than button-mashy, again diverging from the arcade-style norm of other platformers. You had to read your opponent’s stance, parry, and strike at the right moment. Brains over brawn. The sense of realism is ultimately what set it apart from the stereotypical platform genre of that era. Prince of Persia felt more “human,” had greater story depth, and made you think, not just react. You could argue that it paved the way for Another World, Flashback and other greats of the 90s. Mechner is one of the very few true pioneers of gaming history.
exQUIZitely 🕹️163,995 views • 28 days ago
It’s 1983 and you're playing Star Wars at the arcades for the first time, after watching the movies. Words cannot describe it. For perspective: other popular games around that time were Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Qbert, Joust, and BurgerTime... all great in their own way. But Star Wars literally catapulted you into a whole new universe. The graphics were nuts, and so were the digitized voices and sound effects straight from the movie (“Use the Force, Luke!”). To top it all off, John Williams’s iconic score delivered maximum nerd chills. This game will forever be linked to one of the best arcade eras ever.
exQUIZitely 🕹️132,256 views • 1 month ago
Imagine seeing this for the first time in 1983! In terms of graphics, this wasn’t just miles ahead… it was basically a whole other dimension. Yes, the difficulty level was insane, but even just seeing one more screen or getting past one more trap was so worth it.
exQUIZitely 🕹️394,653 views • 3 months ago
Still one of the best beat 'em ups I've ever played, especially in two-player co-op mode. This legend is closing in on 40 years and still makes my gamer heart beat a little faster. Picking up the dropped weapons was such a blast! Double Dragon (1987, Technos Japan).
exQUIZitely 🕹️28,556 views • 7 days 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 🕹️635,957 views • 6 months 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 🕹️866,186 views • 9 months ago
The majority of games from the 90s would show you a rather generic "game over" screen when you died. Your character would freeze, disappear, maybe even flicker or change colour... but it was rarely a core mechanic or spectacular death animation. Enter the 1991 classic Another World (also known as Out of This World). It wasn't just famous for its beautiful in-game animations but also quite notorious for its high degree of difficulty. It partially made up for the frustrating "game over" moments by presenting the player with a rather large number of unique, rotoscoped death animations, 16 distinct scenes to be precise. These include: ☠️ Being dragged under by tentacles at the start ☠️ Poisoned by a slug bite ☠️ Mauled by the large beast ☠️ Shot by lasers (crumbling skeleton) ☠️ Impaled on spikes ☠️ Falling from height resulting in a broken neck ☠️ Blasted by steam vents ☠️ Crushed by rocks or boulders ☠️ Strangled by an alien ☠️ Various other environmental or combat deaths Quite possible the most visually stunning death animations at the time?
exQUIZitely 🕹️97,624 views • 1 month ago
What was the most expensive game you ever played? For me it was Gauntlet, hands down. And it's not even close. Let me tell you why... In 1985, the arcade version of Gauntlet was released. There was an arcade mall a few kilometers from where I lived, so my friend and I would ride our bikes there almost every weekend for about a year. One game credit cost 50 Pfennig (roughly US$ 0.25 at the time), and we’d each spend around 10 Deutsche Mark per weekend, totaling about 500 Deutsche Mark (roughly US$ 250) over that year. In the mid 80s that was some serious cash for a teenage kid. So yeah, Gauntlet was the most expensive game of my life.
exQUIZitely 🕹️20,392 views • 8 days ago
