Turing Family Christmas Card 2017

A Christmas card as a game — who would have thought of that? Yet Turing Family Christmas Card 2017 is exactly what the name promises. It's not a classic adventure, it's not a puzzle game, it's not a shooter. It's an interactive greeting from a family that felt like sending something more than a sweet message via email this year.

It's a small DOS application you can run on an old computer or in an emulator, and it introduces you to the Turing family through a few scenes, dialogues, and animations. The content is quite personal — you'd say you're looking into a home photo album equipped with a mouse and keyboard. It's not a game in the traditional sense, where you'd solve tasks or try to achieve a goal. Rather, it's a digital take on a Christmas greeting that takes its time introducing you to the little family.

The actual gameplay (if you can call it that) consists of clicking, reading, and perhaps experimenting with elements on screen. The graphics are simple, in the spirit of 1980s or early 1990s computer aesthetics. There's nothing here that will dazzle you with virtuosity, but that very modesty has its charm — it's sincere and doesn't stray from its essence. The audio is rather minimal, but that's fine. What's interesting is that someone decided to send a greeting this way at all; that says more about the creators than anything else.

Today, only those who received it back then or stumble upon it by chance will remember it. It's not a work that changed the video game industry. But that's precisely its magic — it's unique, unrepeatable, and if you found it in a browser, it would be worth a few minutes of your time just to feel what it was like when a family said to themselves: let's make our own Christmas game.

Who will like it? Those who collect curiosities, those with a soft spot for the DIY approach to computers, and those who enjoy playing archaeologist with video game culture. It's not an entertaining experience in the classical sense, but a ticket to the past. Proof that not every game needs to be grand to have value.