McGee

McGee is one of those games you'd definitely borrow on a floppy disk from someone back in the day and never return. A unique piece from the early nineties, when anything could be written for DOS and nobody felt ashamed about it.

It's a puzzle-platformer with minimalist graphics and sound that shouldn't boast about itself. The main character — some fellow named McGee — moves around the game screen and collects objects. On paper, it should be a puzzle: get through the level, grab what you need, reach the end. In reality, it means you have to figure out the logic yourself, because the game doesn't really explain what you're supposed to be doing.

The controls are as simple as everything from that era — arrow keys to move, spacebar for something. The graphics are partly pastel green, partly gray, partly I can't remember anymore. When McGee moves across the screen, you feel that the programmer did what he could with what he had. Today, pixel art fans would sign up for that kind of aesthetic, but here it's more a consequence of hardware limits and the time that wasn't available for development.

McGee belongs to that category of games that were played because they existed, not because they were brilliant. It wasn't bad enough for someone to reject it, but it wasn't good enough to be talked about either. Today, almost nobody knows about it. Emulators and archives saved it from complete oblivion — that's all it got.

When you want to play it now, it's nostalgia for the obscure. Not for the days when big things existed — for the time when such little things just were. McGee isn't a game you'd hunt for like gold. It's more a walk through history, a detective trip back into DOS archives.