Last week on my birthday I issued a blog challenge for folks to write about an obscure game of their choice. As the challenge states, what is “obscure” is incredibly subjective and I just wanted folks to pick what they thought was obscure and have fun. I was shocked by how many people decided to participate and decided to do a roundup of all the ones I knew about. If I missed yours, please let me know in the comments. Technically the challenge isn’t over, there’s no end date, if you want to write about an obscure game then go ahead. I had so much fun reading all of these and I hope that you do too.

Let this be a lesson that if it’s your birthday, you can issue a Blog Challenge and people will actually do it. I hope you consider doing your own blog challenge and if you like any of the posts in this roundup, add the blog to your RSS feed reader.

The Blog Posts

This is a post that starts off being about Dragon Strike and an unreleased prototype but goes into how your ttrpg should have some sort of gimmick.

Silas praises the indie horror visual novel Fledgling Manor.

wildweasel writes about the simulator Gazillionaire, which I never played but somehow have a boxed copy of it sitting on my shelf. So maybe it’s time for me to finally open that one up and give it a go.

I love the Heretic and Hexen games so it made me happy that someone else enjoys Heretic 2, which has not been rereleased.

Grayson has launched a blog to write about game and the first post is about Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Grayson admits that this stretches the definition of obscure but I think it gets a few points for talking about the N64 version of the game, which I believe was exclusive to Blockbuster.

Folks, we got a post about The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. This game rules and you should all play it. Look at this in-game ad for Cheese Girl! I know the blog post here isn’t as big of a fan of JP3, but I also recommend that one. Love the series!

Pete Davison writes about the racing game Jupiter’s Masterdrive for the Amiga and Atari ST. I’m a big Amiga fan and always love learning about games for it I never heard of before.

SpindleyQ talks about the experience of type-in games, and specifically the game Micropuzzle, for the Commodore Vic-20.

Mono by Binary Zoo is an indie shmup from the 00s, before Steam took off, an era I love to read about. Looks like you can download it from the Internet Archive too.

I knew of the Monster Rancher series but never even knew it had spinoff games like Monster Rancher Hop-A-Bout.

Nikhil Murthy, designer of wonderful games like Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation, has a post about the lost game Who’s That Brown created for the rap group Das Racist.

Odama is a Gamecube game that I remember wanting to really play but never have, but I’m happy to hear that it’s weird and rules.

Operation: Inner Space is a game for Windows 3.1 I never heard of, which is always exciting to learn about, and I also get very excited when a shareware developer from the 90s is still selling that game on their own website.

I saw a few folks posting screenshots from Road Trip Adventure and now I know what the deal with that game is.

I also like when people write about games that are completely average or don’t quite work but still have interesting or good bits in them, so I appreciate this post about Shepherd’s Crossing.

I was so happy to see a post about Shockwave web games, more specifically ones using the Lego license. Shockwave games are a whole thing that I never see anyone talk about these days but I played so many of them.

It’s great when folks write about their memories of playing a dead MMO because even when the files are preserved and the game is still playable, the one thing that can’t be recreated is the experience of playing it at launch, so at least folks can write about what it’s like, such as this post about Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. I’m not the biggest Richard Garriott fan but I think he’s really interesting.

Weird games that shipped with versions of Windows are another thing I love to read about, so thanks to The Works of Egan for this post on Tinker, a puzzle game I never heard of.

LEMONPOPPYSEEDGAMES has launched a new blog and the first post is about the ttrpg Quest.

I challenged folks to write about very obscure stuff, unfinished prototypes, lost games, etc and this post delivered with Zombie, a game that the author doesn’t even know where the game came from.

And then finally, if I’m going to tell people to write about an obscure game then I suppose I should too. So I wrote about Croustibat, an advert adventure game for fish sticks by the folks that made the Gobliiins adventure games.

And obviously not everyone can drop everything to write about an obscure game so some folks were kind enough to recommend older blog posts they wrote about obscure games.

Goose recommends the GBC game HamTaro: Ham-Hams Unite.

Gretchen covers so many obscure games on her Backloggd including Shadowgate 64, which I have played but it was decades ago and now I want to revisit it.

Eli wrote TEN pages for a journal about the Sega CD game SWITCH / PANIC!

If you like these posts, you may also like The Obscuritory, Ephemeral Enigmas, and Michael Coorlim’s blog.