Jetset

First, the sound. A shrill synthetic tone like a microwave timer—that's what Jetset created, and I remember nothing else from it. A 1982 game for early PCs, an era when every kilobyte counted and graphics were science fiction. I'm skeptical about details of what actually happens on screen, because Jetset is notorious for leaving almost nothing in your memory.

It's something like an arcade shooter or action game from an unmemorable publisher—the exact genre and plot are shrouded in the fog of time and fragmented memories. PC games from the first half of the eighties were often experiments in what fits in memory and still runs on a monochrome monitor. Jetset gets lost somewhere in that historical confusion, where kids downloaded whatever from BBS and played what was there, not what they wanted.

You play it much like dozens of similar titles—keyboard controls, simple graphics, objectives you're no longer sure about. What remains is a sense of routine: fingers on the keyboard, monotonous sound, a screen without major surprises. It won't grab you, just bore you a little. Jetset is the archetype of a game you played because it existed, not because it was good. Today all that's left is a historical uncertain "what was that anyway?"—there are dozens of games like this from that era. It aged so much that it was never particularly young.

You can play it in an emulator by digging into retro game archives, but prepare yourself to run out of patience before you form any specific memory of it. It's more of an obligatory pit stop for PC game archaeology fans than actual entertainment.