X-Wing Nostalgia

X-Wing was one of my favorite games when I was a kid.

I played it on my family’s rather old 386. It didn’t have a CD-ROM drive, and didn’t really have a “gaming” sound card, which meant the sounds were primarily bleeps and bloops. Doom ran if you shrank the screen size down to postage stamp dimensions. I was able to reduce the graphics quality of X-Wing enough to make it playable.

And play it I did. I didn’t have a joystick, but managed to get along well enough with the mouse¹. At one point I decided that I would kill every single enemy in the game that was killable. This meant hanging around after missions ended to attack the additional TIE Fighters/Bombers/Interceptors they would send after you to “encourage” you to wrap it up. It also meant attacking the Frigates and Star Destroyers, usually by myself. I managed to pull it off in the first campaign but gave up shortly after that.

At some point I realized that you could have multiple accounts in the game. And those other accounts could be your wingmen in missions. So I took my best pilot, copied it several times over, then added them back to the game so that every wingman I had was at the Top Ace level.

TIE Fighter was also an important game for me, though by the time I got it (and a computer that would run it) I was getting ready for college and wasn’t as obsessive as only a 14 year old Star Wars fanatic could be.

Both games are now on sale at gog.com. I don’t know if I have the time to go back and try to relive the glory days, but I’m awfully tempted.

Written by Scott Williams who lives and works in sunny Phoenix, AZ. Twitter is also a place.