Mahjong or mah-jongg is a tile-based game that was developed in the 19th century in China and has spread throughout the world since the early 20th century. It is played by four players. The game and its regional variants are widely played throughout East and Southeast Asia and have also become popular in Western countries. The game has also been adapted into a widespread online entertainment. Similar to the Western card game rummy, mahjong is a game of skill, strategy, and luck. To distinguish it from mahjong solitaire, it is sometimes referred to as mahjong rummy.
Wolfenstein 3D is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software and FormGen. Originally released on May 5, 1992, for DOS, it was inspired by the 1981 Muse Software video game Castle Wolfenstein, and is the third installment in the Wolfenstein series. In Wolfenstein 3D, the player assumes the role of Allied spy William "B.J." Blazkowicz during World War II as he escapes from the Nazi German prison Castle Wolfenstein and carries out a series of crucial missions against the Nazis. The player traverses each of the game's levels to find an elevator to the next level or kill a final boss, fighting Nazi soldiers, dogs, and other enemies with a knife and a variety of guns.
Commander Keen is a series of side-scrolling platform video games developed primarily by id Software. The series consists of six main episodes, a "lost" episode, and a final game; all but the final game were released for MS-DOS in 1990 and 1991, while the 2001 Commander Keen was released for the Game Boy Color. The series follows the eponymous Commander Keen, the secret identity of the eight-year-old genius Billy Blaze, as he defends the Earth and the galaxy from alien threats with his homemade spaceship, rayguns, and pogo stick. The first three episodes were developed by Ideas from the Deep, the precursor to id, and published by Apogee Software as the shareware title Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons; the "lost" episode 3.5 Commander Keen in Keen Dreams was developed by id and published as a retail title by Softdisk; episodes four and five were released by Apogee as the shareware Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy; and the simultaneously developed episode six was published in retail by FormGen as Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter. Ten years later, an homage and sequel to the series was developed by David A. Palmer Productions and published by Activision as Commander Keen. Another game was announced in 2019 as under development by ZeniMax Online Studios, but was not released.
John D. Carmack II is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D computer graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes.
Softdisk was a software and Internet company based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Founded in 1981, its original products were disk magazines. It was affiliated and partly owned by paper magazine Softalk at founding, but survived its demise.
A Mahjong video game is a video game that is based on one of the many ways to play mahjong. The majority of mahjong video games are developed and released in Japan and use the rules for Japanese Mahjong, although several have also been made for American Mahjong and several Chinese versions of mahjong. Many mahjong video games, especially among those released in Western territories, do not depict the actual game of mahjong but rather mahjong solitaire.
Shisen-Sho, sometimes referred to as 'Shisen', 'Four Rivers' or simply 'Rivers,' is a Japanese tile-based game which uses Mahjong tiles, and is similar to Mahjong solitaire. The objective of the game is to match similar tiles in pairs until every tile has been removed from the playing field. Numerous computer based versions of the game have been developed.
Microsoft Mahjong is a computer game version of mahjong solitaire published by Microsoft. The version titled Mahjong Titans was developed by Oberon Games and included in Windows Vista and Windows 7. It takes advantage of the new graphical user interface (GUI) of Windows Vista, and includes features such as tile set and background choices. The game did not make it to Windows 8; however, a standalone version, developed by Arkadium and published by Microsoft Studios, can be downloaded from the Windows Store free of charge and played without download on the web.
Shadow Knights - The Shogun of Death, also known as Budo - The Art of Ninja Combat, is a platform game created by id Software and published by Softdisk in 1991. Shadow Knights was the first game created for Softdisk, who paid $5000 for it as part of id Software's contractual obligation to them. Shadow Knights was marketed by Softdisk as part of The Lost Game Collection of ID Software.
Microsoft Minesweeper is a minesweeper-type video game created by Curt Johnson, originally for IBM's OS/2, that was ported to Microsoft Windows by Robert Donner, both Microsoft employees at the time. First released as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1 in 1990, it was first included in the standard install of Windows 3.1 in 1992, replacing Reversi from Windows 3.0. Microsoft Minesweeper was included without major changes in all subsequent Windows releases until Windows Vista, at which time an updated version by Oberon Media replaced it. In Windows 8 and later the game is not included with a fresh Windows install, but Microsoft Studios has published an updated version of it, developed by Arkadium, on Microsoft Store.
Shanghai is a computerized version of mahjong solitaire published by Activision in 1986 for the Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, DOS, Macintosh, Apple IIGS and Master System. Shanghai was originally programmed by Brodie Lockard. It was released as an arcade game by Sunsoft in 1988.
Commander Keen in Keen Dreams is a side-scrolling platform video game developed by id Software and published by Softdisk in 1991 for DOS. It is the fourth episode of the Commander Keen series. The game follows the titular Commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius, in an adventure in his dreams as he journeys through a vegetable kingdom to defeat the evil potato king Boobus Tuber and free enslaved children from the Dream machine. The game features Keen running and jumping through various levels while opposed by various vegetable enemies; unlike the prior three episodes, Keen does not use a pogo stick to jump higher, and throws flower power pellets to temporarily turn enemies into flowers rather than shooting a raygun to kill them.
Mahjong solitaire is a single-player matching game that uses a set of mahjong tiles rather than cards. It is more commonly played on a computer than as a physical tabletop game.
Adaptive tile refresh is a computer graphics technique for side-scrolling video games. It was most famously used by id Software's John Carmack in games such as Commander Keen to compensate for the poor graphics performance of PCs in the early 1990s. Its principal innovation is a novel use of several EGA hardware features to perform the scrolling in hardware. The technique is named for its other aspect, the tracking of moved graphical elements in order to minimize the amount of redrawing required in every frame. Together, the combination saves the processing time that would be otherwise required for redrawing the entire screen. Carmack designed the software engine based on a scrolling display for large images from the 1970s.
A tile-matching video game is a type of puzzle video game where the player manipulates tiles in order to make them disappear according to a matching criterion. In many tile-matching games, that criterion is to place a given number of tiles of the same type so that they adjoin each other. That number is often three, and these games are called match-three games.
Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye is a 1990 video game published by Activision.
Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons is a three-part episodic side-scrolling platform video game developed by Ideas from the Deep and published by Apogee Software in 1990 for MS-DOS. It is the first set of episodes of the Commander Keen series. The game follows the titular Commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius, as he retrieves the stolen parts of his spaceship from the cities of Mars, prevents a recently arrived alien mothership from destroying landmarks on Earth, and hunts down the leader of the aliens, the Grand Intellect, on the alien home planet. The three episodes feature Keen running, jumping, and shooting through various levels while opposed by aliens, robots, and other hazards.
Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy is a two-part episodic side-scrolling platform video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in 1991 for DOS. It consists of the fifth and sixth episodes of the Commander Keen series, though they are numbered as the fourth and fifth, as Commander Keen in Keen Dreams is not part of the main continuity. The game follows the titular Commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius, as he first journeys through the Shadowlands to rescue the Gnosticenes so they may ask the Oracle how the Shikadi plan to destroy the galaxy, and then through the Shikadi's Armageddon Machine to stop them. The two episodes feature Keen running, jumping, and shooting through various levels while opposed by aliens, robots, and other hazards.
Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter is a side-scrolling platform video game developed by id Software and published by FormGen in December 1991 for DOS. It is the seventh episode of the Commander Keen series, though it is numbered as the sixth, as Commander Keen in Keen Dreams is outside of the main continuity. The game follows the titular Commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius, as he journeys through an alien world to rescue his kidnapped babysitter. The game features Keen running, jumping, and shooting through various levels while opposed by aliens, robots, and other hazards.
Slordax: The Unknown Enemy is a vertically scrolling shooter developed and published by Softdisk in 1991. The developers of the game left to found id Software soon after its creation, and Slordax was also marketed by Softdisk as part of The Lost Game Collection of ID Software along with several games created by id on contract for Softdisk.
