Oh my word. I’m ten years old all over again. I’ve found Digger.

Of course our old Amstrad PC1512 didn’t have a colour monitor, so we didn’t get it in glori­ous techni­col­our, but it was still fiendishly addict­ive and ace fun. Me and my mum would spend hours trying to get past those evil nobbins and hobbins.

Its really bizarre but within a few minutes of start­ing it up, I’m remem­ber­ing all of the old tactics I’d use to get through level one unscathed, whilst maxim­ising the amount of gold I got and even killing enough baddies to earn a cherry. Its still frust­at­ingly diffi­cult to get away from the hobbins, even with years of exper­i­ence playing much more grown up games.

within a few minutes I’m remem­ber­ing all the old tactics

And the music! Popcorn, the William Tell Overture (I think) and all the others. Its so cool to be able to play it again.

The mad thing is that these days it requires a relat­ively decent PC to work properly, and even then the sound gets all messed up. Back then it ran on a humble 8mhz 8086 (thats about a squil­lion gener­a­tions of processor ago).

There’s DOS, Windows, Unix/SDL and Java versions for you to play with over at Digger.org, so you’ve got almost no excuse for not being able to run it. Go have fun, NOW!