The Animated SVGA Memory Game

The Animated SVGA Memory Game is exactly what the title promises: the card-matching game of concentration, dressed up for the PC. Released as shareware in 1994, it belongs to the wave of small DOS titles that spread on floppies and bulletin boards, aimed squarely at families with a home computer. This edition was the showcase of the whole line, running at 640×480 in 256 colors — a genuinely impressive spec for a small game at the time, hence the proud SVGA in the name.

The rules need no manual. You flip tiles two at a time and hunt for matching pairs, choosing a board of 16, 24, 36 or a full 64 tiles, playing alone or taking turns with a second player at the keyboard. The small boards are a warm-up for preschoolers; the 64-tile grid will humble a trained adult memory just fine.

The real attraction lies elsewhere: every matched pair plays a short animation, and the authors threw in every technique early-nineties computer animation had to offer — claymation figures, morphing effects, rendered 3D objects, hand-drawn cartoons, even scraps of digitized video. For a child each clip is the candy that makes the next pair worth finding; for a modern player it is an accidental catalogue of period animation styles. The shareware release includes only part of the content, with dozens more animations and tiles reserved for registered users.

Honestly assessed, it is a memory game and nothing more — no campaign, no difficulty curve, no reason to play for hours. But judging it for that misses the point: it set out to be a friendly, colorful quarter-hour diversion that teaches a young player focus and recall, and at that job it succeeded then and still succeeds now.

You can open it on oldgame.cz straight in your browser and be playing within seconds.