20年来，电脑游戏界发生了翻天覆地的变化。1991年时，个人电脑与现在相比落后得多。无法显示硬件加速3D图像，如果不装上昂贵的声卡就只能发出简单的哔哔声，显示器分辨率比今天的手机还低。

尽管如此，那是个游戏的黄金时代。个人开发者凭借创意，便有机会与工作室合作制作出某些确实很棒很有趣的个人电脑游戏。我并非认为如下游戏是1991年十佳游戏，也不打算靠这篇文章引起人们的热议，这些只是那个时代里我最喜欢的游戏而已。

1、猴岛的秘密（LucasArts）

猴岛的秘密

由Ron Gilbert设计的滑稽有趣的图像海盗冒险游戏首作出现在那个时代，笨拙的Guybrush Threepwood和令人畏惧的幽灵海盗LeChuck是本作的特色。这个良好的开局使得猴岛冒险系列游戏历时十年，长久不衰。Telltale Games使这款沉寂多年的游戏再次复苏，于今日制作了多种平台的猴岛游戏。

2、Spectre（Velocity Development）

成长于80年代的我在Atari坦克游戏《战斗领域》中花的时间比当时流行的大部分街机游戏还要多。因此，当Velocity Development发布《Spectre》时，就如同我曾经的梦想变成了现实。这款游戏拥有以线框为基础的3D向量图解，驾驶坦克作战以夺取旗帜。

游戏开始出现在Mac系统电脑上，随后开放Windows版本。如果使用LocalTalk连接器将Mac用户的电脑连接起来，他们就可以额外体验到多人模式，我回想起当年和同事在业余时间的《Spectre》战斗。现如今，《Spectre》仍然未曾消亡，经大幅翻新和提升后投放到iOS系统设备上。

3、文明（Microprose）

文明1

随着这款游戏的面世，Sid Meier于1991年创造了全新的游戏题材，玩家需要在回合制战略游戏中从石器时代文明提升至现代文明。《文明》仍然是视频游戏史上最流行和著名的系列游戏。定居、发展自己的帝国、教会人民如何采矿和耕种、修路、树立敌人并将其击溃；发展科技、建立城市，最终开拓全世界并准备向太空进军。《文明》中涉及的范围之广令人称奇，每个游戏都需要花上数小时才能完成。

4、铁路大亨（Microprose）

铁路大亨1

Sid Meier是史诗之作《文明》系列游戏的设计师，但我最喜欢他是因为其制作了《铁路大亨》，这款游戏让你可以在工业时代萌芽期建设属于自己的铁路帝国。《铁路大亨》比《文明》早发布1年，但1991年及之后的时间里我一直都在玩。《铁路大亨》也因属于“大亨”系列游戏首作而闻名。

我很快就意识到，要成为科尼利尔斯·范德比尔特绝非铺设铁路和驱动火车头那样简单。你需要理解供求关系的本质，玩转股票市场，给股东支付红利，不断升级和改善以保持竞争优势。尽管游戏已是21岁高龄，但其对现代经济学仍有着指导作用，玩起来也很有趣。

5、疯狂小旅鼠（Psygnosis）

疯狂小旅鼠

我曾经误解旅鼠（游戏邦注：居住在北极的小型啮齿目动物）不停集体翻越悬崖峭壁是设计《疯狂小旅鼠》游戏的灵感来源。你需要引导这些两足小动物从一个点走到另一个点，而且它们不能死亡。不同旅鼠有着不同的技能，可用于清除障碍、躲避陷阱和改变地形等等。《疯狂小旅鼠》值得受到褒奖，因为其以前所未见的方式拓宽解谜题材游戏。在随后的几年里，甚至直到今天，《疯狂小旅鼠》是众多开发者崇敬和仿效的对象，这也证实了游戏原作的非凡魅力。

6、银河飞将（Origin Systems）

银河飞将2

Origin于1991年发布《银河飞将2：帝国逆袭》，我也正是从本作开始接触该系列游戏，当时的游戏真得很不错。即便当年PC没有3D显卡，设计师Chris Roberts也懂得如何将你置身于飞船的驾驶室中，帮助Terran联盟抵抗入侵者基拉锡。除了人造3D玩法外，《银河飞将》提供的故事支线令其与众不同，玩家的做法决定了游戏的结局。《银河飞将2》比前作更好，在图像、配音和过场动画上都有所提高，成为过去20年来PC动作史诗之作的主要模板。

7、查克·叶格的空中作战（EA）

查克·叶格的空中作战

飞行模拟器和飞行战斗游戏在1991年已过时，但《查克·叶格的空中作战》（游戏邦注：下文简称“CYAC”）在现实和乐趣间找到平衡点而显得格外突出。在这款游戏中，玩家有机会驾驶许多不同战斗机种，从P-51D野马式战机和FW190等在二战中闻名遐迩的主流战斗机到诸如F-86 Sabre和F-4 Phantom等喷气式战机，甚至还有些许苏联米格系列战斗机。

将CYAC与其他作品区分开来的是与其同名的飞行员，他可不只是印在盒子上的名字而已。名扬四海的试飞员查克·叶格参与游戏之中，还为游戏录制某些音效，这些正可激励玩家。我在Mac系统上玩这款游戏，因其多人联网支持和较高的图像分辨率，确实比微软DOS版本要好。

8、RoboSport（Maxis）

RoboSport

回想下，Maxis确是因其作为《模拟城市》系列游戏的原制作者而闻名。但在1991年，他们暂放该系列游戏，发布《RoboSport》。在这款回合制战略游戏中，玩家制作机器人队伍并在运动场上控制他们。你需要为他们编程，让他们能够聪明地预测到敌人下个回合的动作，在场地上使用对你有利的不同武器和障碍。游戏设计思路独到，因而也格外容易让人沉迷其中，我曾花数晚的时间尝试打造常胜组合。这款游戏也是较早可支持联网的游戏，你可以在LAN上与其他玩家对抗。

9、Llamatron: 2112（Llamasoft）

Llamatron: 2112

我必须立马说明的是，Jeff Minter行为古怪，他的品味并非适宜所有人。但我认为这家伙是个天才，我对《Llamatron》这款20世纪90年代早期的游戏记忆犹新。本作是射击动作游戏，好似给Eugene Jarvis完美无瑕的街机游戏《Robotron: 2084》的一封情书，其特色是美洲驼。

我并没有完全理解Minter在这款游戏中所要表达的想法，这些可怜的美洲驼遭受卷烟纸、可乐罐、汉堡包以及其他敌人一波波的攻击。你的目标是将它们汇集成群来拯救它们。游戏玩起来很不错，也极易让人着迷，游戏中的美洲驼和其他内容显得极其古怪。这款游戏造就了令人难忘的游戏体验，很好地总结了Minter做过的所有内容。（游戏邦注：Minter最近通过称为《Minotaur 2112》的iOS游戏让“击打麻木的反刍动物”这种观点重现。）

10、毁灭公爵（Apogee Software）

毁灭公爵1

1991年，我们首次在电脑荧屏上看到平头动作英雄毁灭公爵。这款横版过关动作游戏让肌肉发达的动作英雄毁灭公爵与Proton博士对决，邪恶癫狂的博士企图实施残忍的计划，利用手上的机器人军队控制全世界。

游戏第一章（游戏邦注：此游戏共有三章）以共享形式发布，你可以免费体验，后面的内容需要向Apogee支付许可费用购买。现在这种事听起来稀松平常，但当时几乎没有人使用互联网，游戏是通过BBS以及刻录的CD和磁盘来传播。因而与在商店中购买盒装游戏相比，这种传播方式明显不同。

我承认《毁灭公爵》并没有开创新玩法，其玩法基本和当时诸如《洛克人》等其他横版过关游戏相同。但《毁灭公爵》的流行程度足以使之发展成今日的系列游戏，当然前提是某天《永远的毁灭公爵》能够得以发布。

11、异形繁殖（Team 17）

异形繁殖1

曾经为Amiga电脑制作过的最佳游戏之一出现于1991年，那就是《异形繁殖》，这款组织严密的射击游戏的灵感显然来源于电影《异形》。《异形繁殖》的玩法与《Gauntlet》很像，玩家在爬满面目狰狞的异形的空间站中突出重围，消灭这些横行的敌人就是你的职责。随着玩家击败一波波逐渐变强的异形，可以通过电脑终端系统来升级和新增武器，最终与异形BOSS对峙。Team 17正努力制作流行的不朽之作《百战天虫》系列游戏，但对某个岁数的玩家而言，他们永远是《异形繁殖》的制作者。

12、Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons（Id Software）

指挥官基恩

我们通常将Id Software同《毁灭战士》、《雷神之锤》等系列游戏（游戏邦注：还有《狂怒》）联系起来，很难想象公司还曾开发过其他作品，然而他们发布过的首个系列游戏是《Commander Keen》。这款横版过关动作游戏以系列片段的形式发布，玩家跟随8岁大的Billy Blaze展开冒险，与致力于在火星引发混乱和摧毁地球的外星人沃蒂冈作战。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

My 12 favorite computer games from 1991

It’s almost impossible to understand how much the world of computer gaming has changed in 20 years. But in 1991, the personal computer was an almost entirely different device than it is today – much more primitive; incapable of displaying hardware-accelerated 3D graphics; barely capable of producing more than primitive beeps unless you’d outfitted it with an expensive sound card; and with a display resolution lower than today’s cell phones.

Regardless, it was a golden age for games, when the creativity of individual developers, paired with studios that took some chances, mixed together to produce some really great, fun games for the personal computer. I won’t stir up a hornet’s nest by declaring these as the ten best games for 1991. But here are a few of my favorites from that particular era.

The Secret of Monkey Island – LucasArts

Ron Gilbert’s hilarious and fun graphical pirate adventure game made its debut at about this time, featuring inept Guybrush Threepwood and the dread ghost pirate LeChuck. It was the auspicious beginning to a series of Monkey Island adventure games that would span a decade. After a period of dormancy it would be resurrected by Telltale Games, which produces Monkey Island games for various platforms today.

Spectre – Velocity Development

A child of the 80s, I spent more quarters in Atari’s vector-based tank game Battlezone than almost any other coin-op machine of that period. So when Velocity Development introduced Spectre it was a dream come true – wireframe-based 3D vector graphics and tank combat, set in a “capture the flag” style game.

The game made its debut on the Macintosh (and was later ported to Windows). Mac users had the added benefit of being able to go multiplayer if their machines were linked using LocalTalk connectors – I remember having raucous after-hours Spectre battles with my office mates back in those days. These days, Spectre exists still – dramatically revamped and enhanced, and now on iOS.

Civilization – Microprose

Sid Meier basically lifted up an entire genre with the creation of this game in 1991, a turn-based strategy game that had you lift up a civilization from stone age roots through modern times. Civilization remains one of the most popular and legendary game franchises in video game history. Settle land, grow your empire, teach your people how to mine, how to farm land, build roads, raise armies and crush your enemies; build technology, create cities, eventually explore the world and get ready to take off in spacecraft. It’s almost scary how vast the scope of Civilization is; each game takes hours and hours to complete.

Railroad Tycoon – Microprose

Sid Meier is the game designer behind the epic Civilization series, but I love him best for creating Railroad Tycoon, a game that let you build your own empire as a railroad baron at the dawn of the industrial age. Railroad Tycoon was released a year before Civilization, but I played it well into 1991 and beyond. Railroad Tycoon also distinguishes itself for being the first in a long line of “tycoon” games.

I found out quickly that there’s a lot more to becoming Cornelius Vanderbilt than just laying track and running locomotives: you had to understand the nature of supply and demand, play the stock market, pay stockholders, and constantly upgrade and improve to stay ahead of the competition. Even for a 21 year old, it was a crash-course in modern economics that was a lot of fun to play.

Lemmings – Psygnosis

The mistaken belief that Lemmings – small rodents that live in the arctic – go over cliffs en masse to their deaths was the inspiration for DMA Design’s Lemmings game. You had to guide these little bipedal creatures – the game’s lemmings – from one point to another without letting them get killed. Different kinds of lemmings sported different skills that you used to scale obstacles, avoid traps, change the landscape and more. Lemmings deserves credit for expanding the puzzle game genre in ways that it hadn’t been before; in the years that followed, and even to today, Lemmings has inspired a host of homages and imitations, which attests to the original game’s enduring importance.

Wing Commander – Origin Systems

1991 was actually the year that Origin released Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, which is where I picked up the franchise. But boy, was Wing Commander cool in its day. Even before PCs got 3D graphics cards, designer Chris Roberts figured out how to put you in the cockpit of a spaceship as you defended the Terran Confederation against the alien Kilrathi. Besides the faux-3D gameplay, Wing Commander distinguished itself by offering a branching storyline – how well you did determined the outcome of the game. Wing Commander II was even better than its predecessor – improved graphics, voice acting and nifty cutscenes; it’s largely been the template that epic, sprawling action games for the PC have followed for the past 20 years.

Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat – Electronic Arts

Flight simulators and aircraft combat games were already old hat by 1991, but Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat – CYAC for short – distinguished itself by balancing realism with fun. You got a chance to fly a few different combat aircraft ranging from famed World War II-era prop-driven fighters like the P-51D Mustang and FW190 to jets like the F-86 Sabre, F-4 Phantom and even a few Soviet MiGs.

But what separated CYAC from the rest was its namesake, who was more than just a name slapped on the box. Legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager actually consulted on the game, and even recorded some voice tracks for the game, which kick in when you need a bit of encouragement. I played this one on the Mac, which was actually better than its MS-DOS counterpart, thanks to multiplayer network support and higher resolution graphics.

RoboSport – Maxis

In retrospect, Maxis is best known as the original creator of the SimCity game series. But in 1991 they took a break from Sim games to publish RoboSport, a turn-based strategy game in which you create teams of robots then move them around a playfield. You needed to program them cleverly enough to anticipate what your opponent was going to do at the next turn, using different weapons and obstacles on the board to your advantage. It was a clever idea and extraordinarily addictive, and I spent many nights trying to concoct a winning combination that would keep me playing to the next level. It was another early game to support networking, so you could go head to head against other players on a LAN.

Llamatron: 2112 – Llamasoft

Let me say at the outset that Jeff Minter is weird, and that his taste doesn’t suit everyone. But I unabashedly think the guy is a genius, and one game I remember from the early 1990s very well is Llamatron. It was a shooter action game, and a love letter to Eugene Jarvis’ impeccable arcade game Robotron: 2084, featuring…well, llamas.

I don’t really pretend to understand what the hell is going on in Minter’s mind, but these poor llamas are assaulted with wave after wave of enemies ranging from cigarette papers to Coke cans, hamburgers and more. Your goal is to save them by collecting them into a herd. The game play was ridiculously fun and very addictive, and the llamas and other stuff in the game were just plain weird. It made for an unforgettable gaming experience – which pretty much summarizes everything Minter’s done. (And file under “beating a dead ruminant:” Minter has resurrected the concept once more for a recent iOS game called ‘Minotaur 2112.’)

Duke Nukem – Apogee Software

1991 was the first time we saw that crewcut action hero Duke Nukem take to the computer screen. This side-scrolling action game pit muscled action hero Duke Nukem against Dr. Proton, an evil madman with diabolical plans to take over the world using his army of robots.

Distributed as shareware, you could play through the game’s first episode (of three) without paying. More than that, and you needed to fork over a license fee to Apogee. This sounds routine, but this was a time when almost no one had Internet access – games were still being distributed either on BBS’s or on compilation CDs and floppies. So it was a pretty radical departure compared to buying a game in a box from a store.

I admit that Duke Nukem’s gameplay wasn’t particularly ground-breaking – it was basically the same style of gameplay as other side scrollers of the day like Mega Man. But Duke Nukem was popular enough to spawn a franchise that continues to this day – well, assuming that Duke Nukem Forever ever actually does ship.

Alien Breed – Team 17

One of the best games ever made for the Amiga came out in 1991: Alien Breed, a top-down shooter plainly inspired by the Alien movies. Alien Breed played a bit like Gauntlet – you made your way through a space station crawling with toothy, clawed aliens, and it was your job to eradicate the infestation. You could power up and get new weapons from computer terminals as you faced off against wave after wave of gradually more powerful aliens, eventually facing off against an alien boss. Team 17 went on to create the popular and enduring Worms game series, but for gamers of a certain age, they’ll always be the makers of Alien Breed.

Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons – Id Software

We’ve so associated Id Software with the Doom, Quake (and soon Rage) series of games that it’s hard to believe that they developed anything else. But develop they did, and Commander Keen was the first game series they ever released. A side-scrolling action game released as a series of “episodes,” the games follow the adventure of Billy Blaze, an eight year old who becomes Commander Keen and has to fight the Vorticons, aliens bent on causing mischief on Mars and destroying Earth. (Source: ZDNet)