EGA Turns 35: 10 Iconic EGA Games of Yesteryear

Thirty-five years ago, IBM introduced a brand-new graphical standard for its IBM Personal Computer line: Enhanced Graphics Adapter, or EGA for short.

Coming on the heels of 1981's CGA (Color Graphics Adapter), which debuted with the IBM PC, 1984's EGA added enhanced resolution and color depth to IBM's graphical bag of tricks. Like the IBM PC itself, third-party hardware vendors soon cloned EGA and began to expand upon it. And software makers began to support it, although slowly at first.

Among its many tricks, EGA could display color text at a higher resolution than CGA (making for a better color word processing experience) and display 640-by-350, 640-by-200, and 320-by-200 graphics in 16 colors. In contrast, CGA could only display four colors at 320-by-200 resolution, making for limited graphical experiences compared to other contemporary home PCs.

The press loved EGA, but like IBM's 286-based IBM PC AT, it was expensive at first, so it took a few years before the EGA/286 standard became common in low- to midrange clone PCs. At that point, computer game makers began to support EGA graphics quite a bit.

Just three years after EGA's introduction, IBM introduced Video Graphics Array (VGA) with its PS/2 computer line, providing yet another quantum leap in graphical fidelity and putting a cap on the useful lifespan of EGA. Still, a large installed base of EGA-capable machines kept EGA game support going well into the early 1990s.

Since I have many fond memories of playing EGA games back in the day, I thought it would be fun to pick out a handful of iconic MS-DOS games that used the graphical standard. There are many more out there, of course, but these titles should give you a good snapshot of the PC gaming space between, say, 1987 and 1991, which I'd arbitrarily cite as the golden age of EGA.

Special thanks to MobyGames for providing many of these screenshots.

1. Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (1992)

In the early 1990s, pioneering shareware firm Apogee Software released a string of very successful and well-received EGA platform games. They started with Commander Keen in 1990 and continued with games such as Duke Nukem, Bio Menace, and Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, seen here. They stuck with EGA for broad compatibility and also due to the fact that many of the games' side-scrolling engines were based on quirks of EGA's design.

Being a late-era EGA title, Cosmo packs quite a bit of technique into a small space, including multi-plane parallax scrolling. It's proof that you can render beautiful, vibrant, and complex PC graphics in a 320-by-200 16-color video mode. As a result, you'll need a beefy machine such as a 386 to run it properly.

2. The Colonel's Bequest (1989)

This gorgeous murder mystery adventure game by Roberta Williams takes advantage of exquisitely shaded graphics drawn by artists Douglas Herring and Jerry Moore. As one of Sierra's final games designed for EGA graphics, Bequest benefited from techniques developed over numerous prior Sierra adventures. Sierra's newer VGA-based game engine rolled out with King's Quest V in 1990, but we can still marvel at the incredible detail skilled artists could render in EGA.

3. Sim City (1989)

The MS-DOS version of Will Wright's famous "software toy" and city-building simulator Sim City supported a wide variety of video modes, including a relatively high resolution 640-by-350 EGA mode at 16 colors. The higher resolution allowed for more graphical detail, which allowed players to see more of their city map on the screen. Later versions added VGA support, but the high-res EGA mode was the way many PC gamers experienced this timeless classic for the first time.

4. Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World (1988)

Might and Magic II is a first-person party-based RPG that draws upon titles such as Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and of course its predecessor title in the Might and Magic Series. Its masterful EGA palette choices and detailed graphics are done so well that they could easily be mistaken for an early VGA game. It's also a deep and satisfying RPG experience.

5. Street Rod (1989)

By now you're probably thinking that mostly RPGs and platform games used EGA graphics, but racing sims such as Test Drive and Street Rod (seen here) used them too. Most IBM PC compatibles at the time weren't fast enough for fluid racing experiences, but Street Rod pulls off a satisfying game with great illustrations despite these limitations. And speaking of sims, Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 also did a great job of utilizing EGA display modes.

6. Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (1988)

Any fan of the legendary Ultima RPG series probably knows that Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1991) made groundbreaking use of colorful VGA graphics. What many forget is that three years prior, Ultima V managed to pull off a very satisfying graphical RPG experience in EGA. In this title, you'll explore a rich RPG world that seems to run by itself even when you're not around. That gave Ultima V a depth that many other RPGs at the time lacked. (P.S. Ultima VI supports EGA too!)

7. The Adventures of Captain Comic (1988)

At a time when Super Mario Bros. was tearing up the home video game market, shareware game designer Michael Denio created Captain Comic, one of the first attempts to capture the side-scrolling platform experience on an IBM PC. At the time of its release, Captain Comic was notable for requiring EGA graphics (no CGA support), which was a bold limitation when many IBM PC clones still packed variations of CGA cards. Captain Comic is a primitive platforming experience by today's standards, but it definitely helped define the EGA era.

8. Wasteland (1988)

If you've ever wanted to adventure through a post-apocalyptic world, look no further than Interplay's Wasteland, a party-based RPG with an overhead perspective and an innovative interface for its time (with mouse support). While the game received releases on platforms such as the Apple II and Commodore 64, its EGA-based MS-DOS port is often considered the most definitive.

9. Commander Keen 4 (1991)

As previously noted, shareware firm Apogee specialized in EGA platform games during the early 1990s. That's primarily because John Carmack of id Software invented a clever smooth scrolling technique that relied on the unusual design of EGA's specifications to work properly. This technique resulted in the popular 1990 shareware title Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, which Apogee released to great success. That led to follow-up games such as Commander Keen 4, seen here, which many consider a pinnacle of Apogee's EGA game releases due to both its gameplay and its skillfully rendered whimsical graphics.

10. Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990)

At a time when some computer game titles dipped their toes into the world of 256-color VGA graphics, Sir-Tech pulled out all the stops with this complex EGA masterpiece, which features fanciful animated monster designs. Wizardry pioneered the first-person party-based RPG dungeon crawler, and that quality shines through in this sixth entry in the series. Despite being the sixth title, Cosmic Forge was actually the first to feature full color graphics and a mouse interface. As such, Wizardry fans loved it, and fans of EGA games can't miss it.