games that were on your school computers

THRESHIN

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PC gamer posted this article about games that were hiding on your computers at school.

https://www.pcgamer.com/what-was-the-best-game-on-your-school-computers/

Fun little nostalgia trip. For me it was quake 2. The computers at my high school were nothing special even when they were new so we were a little limited. Q2 running software mode did the trick. Used to have LAN games over lunchtime.

The admin we had didn't really know how to do her job very well. By the time I graduated we had figured out how to bypass every roadblock she put in place. Tried to stop us from accessing control panel and file explorer, bypassed the internet blocker (go to hell Bess) and our hiding place for Q2 was in a shared network folder named 'common'. Only thing that was done to hide it was change quake2.exe to paint.exe. took them a couple years to find it and had to resort to extortion. One kid got busted so they threatened to suspend him for 2 weeks or he could show them where we hid it and take 2 days detention.

Good times that was.
 
Probably nobody will know this as this is a tech demo developed by someone locally, but every computer at school had to have it, at least the ones capable of running it. Soft body physics in 1997.



Apart from this the most common game was scorched earth. And we managed to sneak in doom a few times, even played some DM.
 
Early days:
Kid Pix Studio (not really a game, but hella fun)
Oregon Trail
Lemmings
Dr Riptide
Meavis Beacon teaches typing

Later days (HS): (We had a tech teacher who was awesome and hosted "computer club" after school on thursdays. Basically just a LAN party on school PCs every week, then we started bringing our own computers
Quake III Arena
Unreal Tournament
Tribes 2
Day of Defeat (before steam)
Battlefield Vietnam / 1942
 
At my school, we kept installing The Descent and Unreal Tournament. Our IT guy couldn't stop us, we kept doing it. He never figured out how to block us from installing them, so he would uninstall them daily, so I don't think he was that great of an IT guy.
We kept doing it from 2002-2006.
After I graduated, I can only hope that someone kept it going.

In Middle School, our IT guy actually installed Half-Life, and encouraged us to play against each other, and use the level editor.
 
We had Deep Freeze installed on our computers and admin blocks. We normally played Starcraft, Tron (Armagetron), and one of the iterations of Worms.
So one of the benefits of Deep Freeze was that when the computer was rebooted all evidence of our gaming activity was wiped out as well.
Our CAD teacher didn't care if we gamed as long as our work was turned in and complete.
 
Cross Country Canada, Number Munchers, and Carmen Sandiago were big in my grade school years.

Junior High was mostly web browsing (internet started to get mainstream at this point), and, iirc, this is when newgrounds-style flash games were all the rage.

But, high school, that's when things got good for us. There was a drafting teacher there that had his own separate network of PCs and he let his students install all the good games on it. Original top down GTA, Quake 2, Star Craft - whatever we had. I remember him having a huge 19" CRT monitor that we were all jealous of too.

Special kudos to our Grade 10 Computer Science teacher, though; I remember him letting us all play LAN DooM on our last day of class (Seymour destroyed everyone).
 
I spent next to no time in our HS lab which was basically worthless. I actually helped our teacher doing reinstalls and other low level tasks rather than do the busy work that our CS class was.

By the time HS came around I was already busy lanning. Playing Quake II. Fallout I/II, Shogo, Half-Life, Diablo, StarCraft, Soldier of Fortune, etc. None of those games were on school computers though...

But I remember elemetary school games though. Which at the time was Apple IIe’s I believe. I remember Oregon Trail, number cruncher, mavis beacon. In 4th grade is when they started teaching us typing. Despite this, it’s still surprising to me to this day that so many people I know don’t know how to type. And this was.... 1992-1993?
 
Middle school in the mid-'80s. Commodore 64s up in the library. I got a copy of the original Summer Games to play on it. We'd have various competitions. We went through many of the cheap Atari-style joysticks running the 100m dash.
 
Myst was one they actually let us have. played it a ton... I had Doom on a couple computers..

With my knowladge that I did have back then, teachers would often rely on me to get computers working again because the IT department was a part time guy
 
In elementary it was Oregon trail and other classic DOS games. We were given two hours a week to go to the library and play them.
In middle school, the PCs had Hover installed. That was a fun one, and Ive actually hunted it down and played it relatively recently.
In high school, I brought whatever game I felt like that would fit on the USB sticks of the day. 03-06, brand new computers that were updated every year I was there with new models. In 02 as a freshman at a different school, I used my TI-83+ for games instead as the computers there were ancient. There were some pretty awesome 83+ games... including a port of the first level of the original Wolfenstein 3D and some of Super Mario (well kinda... different level layouts but same looks and stuff).

And if I remember correctly, I think there was a flight simulator built into one of the Microsoft Office products.... Excel?
 
Cross Country Canada, Number Munchers, and Carmen Sandiago were big in my grade school years.

Junior High was mostly web browsing (internet started to get mainstream at this point), and, iirc, this is when newgrounds-style flash games were all the rage.

But, high school, that's when things got good for us. There was a drafting teacher there that had his own separate network of PCs and he let his students install all the good games on it. Original top down GTA, Quake 2, Star Craft - whatever we had. I remember him having a huge 19" CRT monitor that we were all jealous of too.

Special kudos to our Grade 10 Computer Science teacher, though; I remember him letting us all play LAN DooM on our last day of class (Seymour destroyed everyone).
Still have Cross coutry canada and carmen sandiego on dosbox.
 
Downloaded the halo demo on our comp lab PCs. Port 80 was filtered, but was still able to get it over https, and when that got patched up we used a proxy on port 80.
 
When I was in elementary school we had the typical Apple computer with Oregon Trails and math/word muncher. Never really used a computer in middle school and high school we played unreal tournament and quake 3 all the time on the crappy HP computers we had.
 
Only the stick figure animations we coded ourselves and stored them on a cassete tape because they were cheaper than floppy disks at the time. Yea really.
 
nothing, our pc"s at school did not have hard drives, we needed to boot them up with those big floppy disks
 
I never knew cross country Canada was that popular. We had it in public school. We used to play it on those crappy unis icon systems...at least that's what I think they were called.
 
Lemonade Stand on Apple2 in high school math class. That's about it. Went the metal and machine route instead.

 
Doom and SimCity 2000 were my jam during grade school computer labs. The actual "education" game from MECC that I spent way too much time in was probably DinoPark Tycoon.

 
Near the principals office we had about 15 computers I forget what they were but they had cartridges and people would spend like 5 minutes eating lunch and goto the nearby school arcade it was a joke really.
 
For us it was Nexuiz v2.2.2, I think its called Nexuiz classic now. It was great because it ran on pretty much any os, Mac, Linux, Windows, and was easily customizable, you could even configure it to prevent it from trying to reach out to the internet so it wouldn't trigger an entry on the campus firewall logs. we had copies hidden all over the place.
 
Armour Alley? I think some side scroller bit like Raiden but more old school and less Japanese style, I'd actually love to play it again but not sure of the proper name. Was on Apple IIs or something, yeah showing my age there lol.
Pretty sure it came with the computers but who knows. Once I got to 13 we had our own laptops.. and that was a lot harder to control - HL, Quake, Doom, you name it but what they did to restrict that was to ensure we were running the shittiest S3 Virge GPUs possible. The K6-2s did very well on Total Annihilation though could handle all the TAUCP etc mods, only limit then was 160mb of ram for map sizes.
 
Oregon Trail
Zaxxon
Scorched Earth
Number Munchers I think? Some kind of math and typing games at any rate.
 
In my junior high we had apple IIe machines. They were locked down, but my friend had the principal's password and we'd go after school and "hack" the computers to play spectre vr.



Fun times.
 
Half Life, Counterstrike 1.6, Age of Empires 2. I remember playing on the local LAN with my friends back in high school.
 
Early apple computers in grade school, Oregon Trail. In high school lots of GL Quake and Counter Strike.
 
Elementary days was Number Munchers and Oregon Trail
Middle School days was Doom and Quake 1/2
High School was UT99, Quake 3 Team Arena, Half-Life DM
 
It wasn't till University that we had computers capable of gaming. CS Lab, where we installed Doom on eventually Duke 3d (my last term).

Good times, but gaming till midnight, often meant, coding till dawn...
 
Ouranos!

491256-ouranos-commodore-pet-cbm-screenshot-tornado-hit.png
 
I manged to get D2 working in middle school they had 4 or 5 pcs that could run it and we would play lan games .. the teacher that ran the lab knew about it and was cool about it...then one of my friends mom found out thew a hiss fit teacher got suspend and that was the end of that. By HS i had a laptop and would sit in the back of the room playing random games then i made 'friends" with the it guy and found the password for the unfiltered wifi where i could pay WoW
 
Screenshot_20200701-084329_Bing.jpg



This is what we had in gradeschool the bullies would always grab the good games.
 
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Early days:
Oregon Trail
Word Munchers/Number Munchers
Home Alone
Wheel of Fortune

Later days:
Monster Truck Madness
Sim City (I think?)
Amazon Trail
Reader Rabbit
Math Blaster
Doom
Quake

Doom and Quake were done behind the teacher's back :D
 
Armagetron advanced, envirobear 2000, CS 1.6 portable, island hopper, OE cake, probobly a few others.
 
I pretty much only remember Oregon Trail, some Math Adventure game, and Jeopardy. Then in one of my classrooms we had a Genesis for some reason with Mortal Kombat of all games when I was in like 4th grade (~'94).
 
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