Hover!

At first I thought it was a demo I'd downloaded by mistake. Then it hit me—Hover! is literally just that—a game Microsoft threw into Windows 95 as a class project for the smartest kid in class who had access to some 3D engine and decided: I'm gonna let people ride around on hover boards.

It's a straightforward game where you move around on a hoverboard (you know, the thing from Back to the Future) across a flat map and collect colored balls. That's basically it. You don't have health, you don't have a score in the traditional sense—you just collect and cruise around. Sometimes robots might move around nearby, and you want to avoid them because they can knock you into the water. The environment is flat and monotonous, like someone laid down a gray carpet on a floor and said: this is the world.

The controls are intentionally simple—movement and jumping. No weapons, no combos, no depth. You get it in thirty seconds. The hoverboard itself works kind of weird—it responds slowly, and when you fall in the water, go play with the robots or get back to collecting. Playing isn't technically hard, but there's not even a reason you'd want to come back—there's no goal, no story, no adrenaline rush whatsoever.

Hover! is interesting mainly as the beginning of 3D elements in the system. For Windows 95, it was a curiosity—look, we've got 3D here!—but as a game it was more about the tech than the fun. The graphics are appropriately ugly, the sounds are colorless, and after five minutes you feel like you're lost on some dull school trip. It had no ambition to change that. It's odd in a way, but not wrong—the creators knew what they were doing and decided it was enough that it existed.

Today? More like a curiosity. I'll fire it up in an emulator for a bit to feel what it was like when people first encountered 3D on PC. There's nothing to condemn about it—it's a historical artifact. But playing it for fun would be a mistake. It'll work for you if you want to see how Microsoft played around with technology at the dawn of the internet and Windows 95, not if you want to experience something actually engaging.