Mach 3

When you first boot up Mach 3, you hear a jet engine roar and you know something fast is coming your way. And it's not just any old thing. Some publisher released this game back in 1987 — honestly, I can't remember who anymore — but anyone who had a taste for arcade thrills without the complexity spent time with it on MS-DOS.

You're a fighter pilot flying over a landscape carved from pixels. The objective is straightforward: fly forward, shoot enemies, and try not to crash into a mountain. The game looked pretty similar to other flight-action titles of that era, but it had something that made it more fun than average — like it was so old and straightforward that pure geometric precision just radiated from it.

The controls were logical, though occasionally treacherous. The keys let you move in all directions, you fired with one button, and you had to feel out for yourself just how fast you could move without disaster. The game showed no mercy — if you weren't watching the horizon, you ended up in the mountains. One slip and there are no second chances. That made playing it almost unreasonably frustrating, because the time between the Death Screen and getting back in was the same length as the moment you realize you're an idiot.

Mach 3 wasn't original, but it was confident in its brutal simplicity. When I go back to things like this today, I see how much we've gotten used to "minimum punishment possible." This game penalizes you for anything. No tutorial, no gentle ramp — you get three seconds to rev up and then you're just praying.

Playing it today means remembering why arcade games captivated us. There's not a shred of modern friendliness in it — it's pure reflex and patience test. You can find emulated versions in the browser, and if you want to feel like a nineties veteran with sand still stuck in your head, you've got it. Otherwise, you'll probably have more fun with anything newer.