Checking my calendar, I noticed that it's now been about 28 years since my family got our first x86 PC - a Pentium 75 box with 8MB of RAM and a 1GB hard-drive, along with a monitor and a Hewlett Packard printer, sold by Escom, using the Commodore branding that they had then-recently bought (complete with little official "C=" case-badges slapped on their beige-boxes). However, these machines had nothing to do with Commodore - they were just generic Intel/Windows 95 affairs, with the Commodore name used on them in order to gain consumer trust. I never got on with Windows (that was my first exposure to it and it was awful and never got any better), but I'm not here to talk about that - I'm here to talk about the games!

As I expect most GOL'ers are old enough to remember, back then PC retailers would throw in massive bundles of usually-slightly-older software as a value-add - bundles like these, of course, all served the purpose of showing off what your new hardware could do, and were therefore roughly equivalent to console pack-in titles (another practise which has all but died out in this day and age), except with PCs you typically seemed to get a whole lot more. Some things never change, I guess!

The package that we bought came with the following;


Aces: The Complete Collectors' Edition (MS-DOS), which contained A-10 Tank Killer, Aces of the Pacific, Aces over Europe, and Red Baron.


Award Winners Gold Edition (MS-DOS), which contained Elite Plus, Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker, Sensible Soccer: European Champions, and Zool.


Award Winners Platinum Edition (MS-DOS), which contained Civilization, Frontier: Elite II, and Lemmings.


SoftKey Shareware CD-ROM Power Pack (Windows 3.1), which contained heaps of freeware and shareware games and utilities - some good, some of dubious usefulness.

Non-gaming-wise there was also Hutchinson's Multimedia Encyclopedia 1995 and Quicken.


And on top of all of that, we got to choose one new release as well - we went for Lemmings 3D (MS-DOS), the big-box for which also contained the Lemmings 3D Winterland demo, and a sample packet of Jelly Belly jelly-beans, since that company had sponsored the game.

To me at the time, this all seemed reminiscent of the sorts of pack-in bundles that Commodore (the real one, not Escom masquerading as them ) had done in the past, as well, having gotten the Commodore 64C Mindbenders/Night Moves pack some years earlier.

I must be honest, I miss this sort of thing - not only did you get a whole lot of software, but the tangibility of it really added something to the experience, too.

Anybody else got any good memories of old PC game/software bundles?