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There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90's where there's this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.
One of the earlier games I had on a CD-ROM. Back then it wasn't a disc tray. You eject an entire disc jewelcase-like thing and put your cd inside the case and shove it back in like a floppy disk.
Two movies from the 90s... "Ruben and Ed," and "... And God Spoke."
And God Spoke was a revelation the first dozen times i watched it, it was full of tiny little blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments. Haven't seen it in years.
Ruben and Ed is just surreal, with at least two scenes that have stuck in my head lo these thirty years.
I don't think it's totally forgotten, but an old nes game no one talks about called Bump n jump. You play a buggy in a top down style racer; think spy hunter. You're meant to race to the end of levels, crashing into (or avoiding) other vehicles for points. You can jump over bridges and gaps as well, and each level ends with a huge leap of faith ocean jump.
I feel like it was largely forgotten in gaming history, but I loved it when I was a child I put many hours into it.
Back in the heyday of flash videos and before youtube, there was a clerks spoof featuring marvel comics heroes that I remember as being enjoyable, clever, and ultimately just a good tribute/ripoff of the source material. I have no idea how to find that again.
My dad brought home "Xexyz" for NES one year. I have never heard anyone ever reference this game in any nostalgia reviews and had to actually go look up the name myself after vaguely remembering it as that side-scroling NES game that started with an x.
Temple of Apshai
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apshai
You've never heard of it, and modern RPGs wouldn't exist without it.
There was a game I played on my grandma's TurboGrafx 16 many years ago. I cannot remember the name, and searching over the years still has me befuddled.
It was a racing game, but with an RPG element where you had to continually upgrade your car and take on local race champs. I loved it and cannot for the life of me find the damn thing.
Edit: holy shit I think I found it. Final Lap Twin
Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. It was a tex based strategy game on the TRS 80 written in basic. You played a feudal lord and tried to grow your empire. Each turn was a year. It was a text only game, but I'm pretty sure they had a graphics version at one point. When I say graphics, it was the upper half of the ASCII character set mapped over to block characters. This was in the 70's.
Operation Sandman, amazing movie with Ron perlman and also the adventures of Pete and Pete
This is an odd one. Deep Africa is an episode from an obscure series called Inflated, which came out some 20 years ago. I remember someone at a party having a VHS of it.
It features blowup dolls as the main characters. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen it, probably hasn’t aged well, but I remember aspects of it being funny, if not absurd.
Nintendo game called Solomon's Key.
It was a great early puzzle game.
This song I downloaded from a file sharing application in the early 2000s. I've been searching for the artist for about two decades, nothing (the forum posts that come up when you search for it are also me).
Cherry Coke had a promotional game called something like The Lost Island Of Alanna they gave out in the mid 90s. There was a little attack of them in the waiting room of the principles office at my school.
It was a pretty well done short Myst-like.
When you beat it the reward was a guide to read secret messages that were hidden in the squiggles that covered the cherry coke label at the time.
Right offhand, Rita Pfeiffer. There have been times where I was her only Spotify listener. Probably also nobody has heard of Knife the Puppets but me and my wife. My favorite musician at the moment is probably Ashley Virginia, a little known folk singer out of North Carolina. I've been obsessed with the Hushabyes since Lindsey Verril of Little Mazarn introduced them to the world. I'm getting a cassette player mostly for New New Sincerity, Lindsey's label, but there are some cassettes I want from the Spinster Sounds collection.
I'm sure I've seen some ultra rare movies, but I watch so much weird old trash that I have no idea how well known any of it is. I've seen Tales from the QuadeaD Zone twice. I follow Blood Tea and Red String on Instagram. I excited for the sequel. One of my all time favorite movies is a 1977 X-rated version of Cinderella with full song and dance numbers (a few of them genuinely fantastic!) and Sy Richardson as the fairy godmother.
EDIT: I forgot the real crown gem! We own a copy of the original cut of a movie called Freedom Deep! It's basically a feature length music video for a band called Goya's Child. The version of Freedom Deep you can find online is the new cut. It has lots of obnoxious narration over the music and nonsense 9/11 content thrown in. The rare DVD version is still not a great movie, but it's a painfully fun ultra long grunge music video! Oh I need to make some people I work with watch Freedom Deep.
There was this one game called calling for the wii. Since the Wii controller had a speaker, it would ring like a phone and you would answer it, then followed by game's sound out of it as if you are talking on the phone. Plus it had a story I found interesting.
"Mail Order Monsters," which came out in the 8-bit era (mine was C64). Basically, you started out with a "base monster," like plant, insect, reptile, etc. Then you battled someone else's. The winner got some money, which could be used to upgrade your monster with abilities, extra limbs, and so on. You could save your monster on a floppy disk and battle on someone else's system.
My love affair ended when a friend figured out how to hack that data file on the floppy and make an invincible monster
How about Wally Gubbins? A series of silly skydiving videos. My father has a ton of them on VHS. I loved it as a kid. I just looked, you can even find them on YouTube. So maybe not that obscure.
In terms of software I remember having several ad games. So, games that are basically just an ad. I had a Bifi game. Some weird game about colours where I don't remember what it was for. And a "game" about Chesterfield Cigarettes. I remember that I had to install QuickTime Player to run it. It was basically like Google Streetview when you walked into buildings with a few interactive elements put in. No idea where I got it. Might even still have the CD somewhere.
Edit: I found the Chesterfield thing: https://archive.org/details/see_you
When I was a kid I saw this stop motion animation on tv about a little kid afraid to go to bed. This crescent-moon headed bird man comes and steals his eyes. It ends with the boy, blind, stumbling around in the dark.
It was awesome.
Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret.
Given the amount of videos on these games you'd think they were super popular and well known, but when they were brand new nobody knew about 'em. To this day, I rarely find anyone who actually played them when they were first launched on an actual DOS computer and not through GOG and DOSBox.
Even today, it's rare that I run into people who know how awesome they are. They had it all; bitchin' graphics, insane action, amazing FMV with actual acting and costumes... Other than the controls, they still hold up today.
Most obscure videogames I ever played:
A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don't remember its name and I've never seen it since.
A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.
Fleet Command! I've played it. Fun little tactical naval game. I think it was originally released as Jane's Fleet Command.
I don't remember anything about VB scripting, though.
In the 70s we had a cassette tape kids story about a wizard who lived in a mountain and kept all the winds in a box.
The story was about someone who went in and retrieved the winds.
It involved blowing up sections of passageways (the narrator talked of lighting the blue touchpaper), and the wizard woke up and chased the hero.
He had a walking stick so his steps were reproduced including that, and he was calling, "My wind! Somebody's stolen my wind!".
I think it was probably on the front of a magazine or something. I don't know if it's a traditional story or something written for that production but I thought it was brilliant at the time.
OK, I'll go all-in on this:
2000 AD Comics' Nexus, The computer game.
Made for the Commodore C128 computer (which oddly ran Microsoft Basic), it was a simple single-screen platform shooter with the twist that you could pile up the bodies of your enemies and use them as platforms.
I had this game I swear was Atlantis related, but involved you flying a tri-plane, shooting down other planes. It was very cool.
Captain goodnight. Still one of the best games I've ever played. First game I saw that allowed piloting planes, helicopter, jeeps, tanks and run around killing enemies all with a solid story.
There was this old game called Twistingo that my grandma had on her computer. Made by a long defunct company called eGames, it was basically like if Zuma and Bingo had a child. There were balls with numbers that'd slowly advance down a track, and you had one or more bingo cards. If the ball had a matching number on your card, you'd click on the number and the ball would vanish. If the balls reached the end, you lost. Really fun game, I still have the old disc for it.
Toomba 2: The evil swine return is a piece of nostalgia I can never share
My brothers and I had a handheld game in the 80s that was basically a star wars knock off. It even started each attack sequence with a fast version of a star wars theme. The enemies were all Tie Fighters (all digital pieces that lit up when active been off when not), and you shot them with lasers Galaga-style. If you died, it played part of Jupiter from The Planets by Gustav Holst.
It was called ASTRO Thunder.
