eXo Catalog

When I first started eXoDOS it wasn't with the grand idea of preserving as many MS-DOS games as possible. Rather, I simply wanted to sit down and enjoy some games I had grown up playing. Over time, that small collection of games that I stood up on my computer grew into something much bigger. And my mentality behind getting these games running was summed up as "Preservation through Playability". Essentially, if a game was playable, I believed that inherently meant it was preserved.

Over the years though, one of the most important aspects of the projects weren't the games themselves, but the stories that people built on top of them. And this was not something that was being captured. Playing a game you haven't seen in 30 years is like time-traveling 30 years to the past. While working on the packs I would stumble onto games I hadn't seen since I was 12 or 13 years old. The same way a smell or a taste can take you to a different point in your life.

Games can both create amazing shared experiences or escapism from loneliness. When I lost my father at age 12 and had to move across the state, I felt isolated. This was middle school, a time when social bonds were tested and status became important. I didn't know anyone and I really didn't even know myself yet. But I did know that I felt like my little 8088 computer and my 2400 baud modem were a gateway to finding anything. I met people there. I found free games there. I wrote stories and shared them with people.

Eventually I began to meet other people at school who loved computers the same way I did. We shared disks, we shared WAD’s, we dialed into each other’s computers and play Death\Duke matches. The games were a social currency that gave us something to bond over. That in of itself is more valuable than the actual game to a 13 year old boy that feels like an outcast.

Games like DOOM were cultural monoliths, and yet, anyone who didn’t grow up playing it at the time wouldn’t understand what it was truly like. We didn’t spend months playing Episode 1. We flew through episode one in a week or two and then spent months (years!) digging up new WADs (levels) or attempting to apply mods that made all the demons look and sound like The Simpsons. The same way that Minecraft or Roblox today is not defined by the base game, but by the user made content that has sprung up around it.

This website exists as a place to not only browse games from the past, but most importantly, a place to share your stories.

These stories will be part of the preservation of these games. They can be funny, they can be touching, or they can just be random. Whatever they are, they illustrate the human connection we have to these games, and ultimately, that is the real reason we keep coming back to them.