I think I've mentioned this before, but I work on the ScummVM open source game engine project - specifically on the feature bringing support to old Director CD-ROM games. A lot of the weird and wonderful 90s games I love use Director, and I'm excited to make them easier to play. Today, we announced a new set of 18 games we're adding official support for, and the start of a public testing window using them: https://www.scummvm.org/news/20230124/
Now, you might say, "but Misty! That's such a weird list! Why didn't you pick something normal?" And to that I say, I'm sorry, I don't know how to play normal video games. If you put me in charge of a list of games, you get something that looks like this.
But beyond that: a bunch of these are genuinely really exciting, whether or not you've heard of them. I want to highlight some of the really cool stuff that's playable now. Here are just a few examples:
- Chop Suey: Maybe the greatest "girl game" of all time, and one of the greatest games ever. Beautiful artwork, great music, wonderful storytelling. Please play this game.
- Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou - A masterpiece of surreal CG by artist Osamu Sato. This has been a cult classic on the web for a few years now, but it's incredibly hard to run on modern systems - or it was, until now!
- iTA-Choco Systems games - Single-person indie altgames from the mid-90s. They're surreal simulations with totally unique art and sound. These games are very special - and also the only games on this list you can still buy today. The Windows versions available from a couple places work great in ScummVM.
- Time Gal - Let me take you to the time warp! This rare Mac/Windows port of the Taito arcade FMV game is silly and a ton of fun.
Some of these are also discs I picked for technical reasons. I hope they're still interesting to players, but they're especially useful for us as things to test obscure or buggy Director features. Some examples:
- Fukuoka Go-Round, a tourism disc for the Fukuoka region of Japan, required a total refactor of ScummVM's loading code because of how it handles one of its transitions. We want to make sure we don't break it again!
- Japan Art Today #7, a retrospective on an early Takashi Murakami exhibit, uses a scrolling text box feature that ScummVM doesn't support yet.
- The iTA-Choco Systems games use a series of unusual Director features that kept them from booting at all until recently. We really don't want to re-break them.
