In Situ Gaming: Syndicate Wars

Image Source

Being a fan of Abandonware, that is, games that have fallen out of copy-right or sale and so they can be distributed for free, I have often been made aware of the matters of content and container. Most basically, to run many old games from the early 90s or late 80s, one must often use Dos emulator like Dos-box that will simulate the environment of a period computer.

However, some games exist on the edge of the Ms-Dos age and can occasionally be coaxed to work with more modern windows systems without augmentation, but in so doing they will sometimes display curious attributes that reveal basic design assumptions at the time of the game. One specific example was booting up a copy of the original Syndicate Wars game, a cyber-punk tactical isometric shooter. Certain aspects like the animations and the speeds of some transitions in the game behave impossibly sped up because the game is not used to such high processing speeds from the CPU.

This is interesting because one is immediately made aware of just how much hardware and software interplay to make a thing like a computer game possible. Far more them the computer simply being a facilitator of the game engine, the computer also constitutes part of the construction of game environment and its qualities, the two are inseparable.

It’s these sorts of thing which make such obvious ‘virtual containers’ like Dos-Box are required to allow old games to be enjoyed today at all.