THE REALARCADE GRAB-BAG

Considering who I am now, it's surprising to think that video games being such a driving force in my life was not a constant from the beginning; it wasn't until I was 12 years old that I was pulled into the world of mainstream console games. Before that, my gaming experience was mostly Toontown, licensed junk on the Wii and GBA, and various games on the now long-dead RealArcade launcher that dominated my time.

RealArcade as it is now is a whisper; a largely forgotten piece of games history in the form of a dinky pamphlet slotted next to the great behemoth tome that is Steam, as most of its content was targeted towards a casual audience and thus not particularly prone to attracting the passion that drives people to archive these things. Such as it is, it was only within the past few years that a project surfaced with the goal to collect and preserve as many of these obscure curiosities as they can find, along with the launcher itself. Many of them still quietly haunt other storefronts, their developers long since folded into the giants of the day like PopCap and Big Fish Games, but just as many—realistically, many more—remain sealed in this little time capsule.

Unfortunately for me, I am too much of a coward and a lurker to join their Discord and ask for help troubleshooting these things, so as it stands I do not know how to convince the launcher that I own these games I Definitely Legally Bought On The Very Alive RealArcade Store and didn't just download the .rgs files for from this archival project. As such, of the ones that open at all, I am stuck playing the free demo versions that unceremoniously close the game once an hour of playtime has passed and never allow you to reopen it again.

Since playing so little of these games hardly qualifies them for my to-be-annual "games completed" article, I have decided to take advantage of this to turn it into sort of a lightning round format. Each one will consist of around three games, which this page will act as a hub for whenever I get the itch to go through a few. Let's plumb the depths of the 2000s Windows obscurities that shaped my childhood and see what else I missed the first time, an hour apiece.