Prohibition

The bartender looks at you with the gaze of someone who hasn't seen good news in a long time. Behind the counter, a party. Outside, prohibition rages. You've got a few seconds to decide — buy illegal liquor, or call it quits. Prohibition from 1987 is exactly the kind of game that would be completely uninteresting today, but back then it worked on sheer simplicity.

You're a bar employee during America's alcohol prohibition. Somewhere between sympathy and shooting at enemies, the game's behavior strips itself of all logic and suddenly you've got this weird mix of tactics and arcade action. Your goal is to protect the bar, sell illegal booze, and make sure everything doesn't go completely upside down on your watch. The game doesn't even instruct you — that was always the magic — you sit down and figure out what it's supposed to mean.

The controls are dodgy in the worst sense of the word. The creators apparently couldn't decide if this was supposed to be action or puzzle-solving. You move across the screen, click on things, shoot inexplicably evil characters, and suddenly half your health is gone. The graphics are pastel blocks on a black background, sounds like they were made by someone whose hearing was starting to fail. But back then it was enough — the computer beeped, and that was playtime.

Prohibition stays alive more on nostalgia than quality. Players remember it as a bizarre attempt where someone got funding to digitize a theme that didn't fit the game at all. But that meant it had character — something in there was trying, even if it didn't go according to plan.

These days you play it in an emulator mostly out of curiosity. It's not a masterpiece, but a piece of what happened in the nineties somewhere in someone's house for money. If you're thinking you've got it somewhere on your hard drive from a classmate — well, why not. Fifteen minutes of tedious entertainment never killed anyone.