VGA Miner

A screen full of colorful squares and a man with a pickaxe beneath them. That's VGA Miner — a computer game from 1989 that you can only hunt down with difficulty these days in the archives of old DOS titles. Nobody really knows who made it, but that's not what matters. What matters is that it exists and that I remember it.

At its core, it's a puzzle game. Colorful blocks fall from above, you arrange them into rows and columns, same-colored groups match up and vanish. It smells like Tetris, but it isn't Tetris. The playing field is smaller, the logic simpler, the pace slower. Someone took this thing and figured it might be fun. And I believe it was fun, at least for the group of people who programmed it in garages and sold it on disks.

You control it with the keyboard — arrow keys, spacebar, combinations. Nothing complicated, nothing dazzling. The graphics are exactly what the name promises — VGA colors that look like a camel took a bath in your monitor and couldn't be bothered. The sound is restrained, more of a notification than entertainment. But it plays pleasantly, without forced stress. Match the blocks, stick them together, clear them, another six to go. Routine that calls itself fun.

I look at the nineties consciously — we know what came after. Half those games were blind attempts to improve something they didn't understand. But VGA Miner wasn't trying for greatness. It was just a small, quiet puzzle for an evening at the monitor that heated up like an oven. This modesty is its strength today. There's nothing in it that pretends to be something else, nothing that would disappoint you with grand promises.

Who'll like it today? Anyone who wants a twenty-minute puzzle without the fluff. No tutorials, no story, no button to "buy power-ups for real money." Fire it up in an emulator, watch the colored rows connect. That'll be all.