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Officially Licensed, Corporate Mandated Fun - 1996 Style!
Introduction
Released in 1996, Microsoft’s “Return of Arcade” pack was the second in a series of officially licensed collections of arcade games designed to showcase Windows’ gaming performance. This collection from Namco consists of Dig Dug, Galaxian, Pac-Man and Pole Position!
Script
In 1996, Microsoft released the “Return of Arcade” pack, a collection designed to showcase the sheer unbridled gaming performance of their newly released Windows 95 operating system via the medium of…
…15 year old arcade games, of course?
Anyway, to demo this, we’re gonna need a Windows 95 machine.
That’ll do!
And here it is, the wonderful Microsoft Return of Arcade box, with these lovely Namco characters on here. So we’ve got a bit of a preview of some of the games that are included - we’ve got the ship from Galaxian here, we’ve got Dig Dug here, we’ve got Pole Position, and of course, Pac-Man himself.
But first, before we have a look at the back of the box and indeed what’s inside the box, let’s talk a little bit about the history of the Microsoft Arcade series. So, in 1993, the original Microsoft Arcade pack was released, and that was actually available for Windows 3.1 and the Apple Mac, oddly enough, for 1993 - and they were all officially licensed Atari games, so that one included Asteroids, Battlezone, Centipede, Missile Command and Tempest. And if you’re wondering why I’m reviewing the second one in the series rather than the first one, it’s because I haven’t managed to get my hands on Microsoft Arcade yet, but I certainly will be covering that at some point in the future on the channel, so make sure you’re subscribed for when I finally get around to that.
Anyway, this is the second installment in the series from 1996 as stated, and these are all officially licensed Namco games - so, as mentioned, we have Pac-Man, Pole Position, Galaxian, and Dig Dug on here. Now, I found quite an interesting fact about this pack online, and that’s the fact that it sold 335,176 copies in 1996, which actually made it the eighth bestselling PC game of the year - and in the year 2000, they actually released an Anniversary Edition of this - such was its popularity - and the only difference between this and the Anniversary Edition is that they added Ms. Pac-Man to the collection.
[Now tell me, Noah, I’ve always wanted to know - what is the difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man Really?]
[Well, she has a bow on her head]
[That’s it!?]
Finally, in 1998, to round out the series, we got Revenge of Arcade, and again that was an officially licensed collection from Namco, and included Mappy, Motos, Ms. Pac-Man, Rally X, and Xevious - and, of course, Microsoft would later go on, I guess, to release Xbox Live Arcade on the original Xbox and later the Xbox 360, which included a lot of these arcade games and more - so, quite a rich history of arcade gaming from Microsoft, I guess.
So just before we get this installed on our lovely Windows 95 PC here, let’s have a look around the box, and indeed inside the box. So we’ve already checked out the front here, nice arcade inspired artwork there, as it is, and on the back, we have some screenshots of all of these games - as you can see, these run in Windows 95 windows, which we will have a look at once we get this up and running, of course, and they’re also advertising on the back here the Windows Entertainment Pack, which I remember very well - there was the Best of Windows Entertainment Pack, which had stuff like Ski Free and Chip’s Challenge, I think, I seem to remember - so that’s another potential one to have a look at in the future - and of course, the original Microsoft Arcade, which I just mentioned, from 1993.
Now, the system requirements on here are actually really nice, these will actually run on a fairly low end system - especially considering the overhead that you would get from, of course, running Windows 95 - so, the requirements that we have here are a personal computer with a 486 DX/66 or higher - this is a Pentium 100, so it should easily be able to handle these games. Windows 95, of course, 8 megabytes of RAM, 6 megabytes of available hard disk space, a 3.5 inch high density disk drive, local bus SVGA video with 256 colors, and we need a mouse, soundboard plus speakers or headphones required to hear audio, and joystick recommended - well, that’s something to potentially try, actually - and we have the dates of the actual games on here as well: so, Pac-Man, copyright 1980, so that was 16 years old by this point. 1982- 1979 for Galaxian, and 1982 for Pole Position.
So, there we go, some quite old games by this point, but a nice little collection of games, and all officially licensed and packaged up nicely for Windows 95 - so, let’s take a look at what we actually get in the box.
Oh my goodness, now this is good old fashioned - I tell you what, we’ll get the actual cardboard part out of the way - this is the good old fashioned Microsoft corporate packaging with these, if you remember these, you know, these disk packs from stuff like Windows 95 and even DOS yeah, and this seems to come on three floppies. “Microsoft Return of Arcade” - and as you can see, these are- they look very similar to the Windows 95 installation floppies - I wonder if I’ve got some of those lying around? Let me just go and have a quick look…
Yeah, so here we go - I’ve got a Windows 95 installation disk here, which is disk 18 apparently, and there is the Microsoft IntelliPoint Mouse Driver - and as you can see, this Return of Arcade disk is very much in the same vein, so they went with that lovely corporate 1996 Microsoft packaging rather than trying to make it look fun at all - you know, these are only games, fun doesn’t matter, just the corporate image! But anyway, it doesn’t really matter what the installation media looks like, I just thought that was quite an amusing observation.
So this is a quick start guide - so essentially just to set up Microsoft return of arcade, turn on your computer and start windows 95, insert disk one, double click “My Computer”, run the setup - and it shows you what the icons look like if you have any any trouble finding those - and we have a license here, a lovely in depth, very corporate looking license. Well done, Microsoft!
This is- what is this!? Registration cards, addresses to return your registration card, depending whereabouts in the world you are.
This is the registration card and that’s not been filled in and submitted - so how to register your new products, technical support from the first call you make - and yeah, look at that. That’s brand new and untouched. Whoever the original owner of this Microsoft return of arcade pack was, didn’t actually bother to register it - look at this, three Concorde flights to Paris to be won every month! So you could have registered this and potentially won a flight on Concorde - now that is actually quite a cool competition, isn’t it?
And warranties, limited warranties - the fun and games never stop in the world of Microsoft in 1996. So, yep, some pretty boring paperwork there. Anyway, let’s get on and actually get this installed.
So we’ll insert our first disk…
As per the instructions, go to “My Computer” and run the setup program. Hopefully these disks are all okay, because if they’re not, I’m going to have to go online and try to download this from somewhere.
“Setup has found that this disk set has already been used by pre-installed user. Only the legal owner of this product may reinstall it, either to update an existing copy…”
“You can continue to install, but you should be aware that it is protected by copyright law and international treaties. Unauthorised reproduction…”
Yeah, that’s fine - and we’ve got our product ID there…
It’ll be fine!
“You need to restart Windows to complete the installation.” - then I will do that.
So just as an interesting aside - as you can probably see I have the Microsoft Plus! pack installed here in Windows 95 which is a whole different story in and of itself, but this is actually the reason that I discovered - or shall I say rediscovered - the Microsoft Return of Arcade pack in the first place because if we go to Microsoft Games here…
…I actually have the Return of Arcade Trial, and this I actually installed as part of the Microsoft Plus! pack for Windows 95. So there was a free trial available which was just Pac-Man. Now, I’m not actually sure how this differs from the the actual final released version, but one thing that I have read online is that this is actually a 16-bit application, and this does actually run in Windows 3.1 - so evidently this was an earlier build of the game or something - I haven’t compared it to the final version.
And when you go to quit, you get this message here: “Thank you for playing the Microsoft Return of Arcade trial version. Contact your local software dealer for the retail version of Microsoft Return of Arcade, which contains the complete arcade versions of Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaxian, and Pole Position.”
So there we go - that was the trial version. But we’re not here to check out the trial version now, of course, we are lucky enough to own the proper full boxed version. So let’s have a look at these games - and I guess we may as well go through them in alphabetical order, I guess, so I’ll start with Dig Dug, one of my favourite games - that doesn’t mean I’m any good at it, but I do claim that it is one of my favourite games.
So when these start up, they have this quick help: so to start a one player game, click one player game on the game menu, or press F2. To start a two player game, click two, click two player game on the game menu - oddly enough - to move at Dig Dug, use up arrow, down arrow, left and right, use space bar to explode monsters or crush them with rocks. The object of the game is to rid each level of monsters - as we should hopefully know!
And just before I actually go in and start a game, one thing I should also point out is that you can actually - of course we can change our controls here so we can use joystick control and I will check that out a little bit later on in the video because I do have a few PC joysticks here - we can customise the controls if we like and also if we go into “Customize Game”, you can actually change a lot of the parameters - so, on the original arcade cabinets, there would be DIP switches, and you’d actually be able to configure various different parameters of these arcade games, and they’ve tried to replicate this here in Windows itself, which is actually really useful, so you can give yourself loads and loads of lives, and you can change the number of points needed for the first bonus life, and all of this stuff here, and, yeah, this customisation actually applies to all of the games in the pack, so I thought that was quite an interesting thing.
Anyway, if we press F2…
[Dig Dug noises]
So - a pretty competent version of Dig Dog, I have to say. You know, it works perfectly fine - I think, yeah, so there is an option to go full screen, of course, this is originally a vertical game where the screen would have actually been vertical in the arcade cabinet so we’ve got these bars at the side, the “Return of Arcade” - that’s quite an ugly thing, I don’t know if you can change that. Would be nice if it would just be black or something, I guess, but anyway, we can play the game full screen, which is quite cool.
And this also gives me the opportunity to show off one of my favorite features of these arcade packs, and that is if you’re playing a game and the boss comes around the corner - you can press Escape and it instantly minimizes! So you could have Excel or something open, you could be playing Dig Dug, and you hear the boss coming, hit the boss key - Escape - and it instantly pauses the game and minimizes it, and then once you’ve finished your boring conversation, you can just fire it straight back up, unpause it, and off you go!
Anyway, like I say, I do enjoy Dig Dug, but I never claimed to be any good at it… So we’ll check out the next game in the pack. If we go to “Microsoft Games”, “Return of Arcade”, “Galaxian.”
An absolute stone cold arcade classic - so, again, it looks like to start a game, F2, I guess the controls are all standardised across all of these games. We’ve got the horizontal arrow keys to move your ship left and right, and press the spacebar to fire missiles - and again, if we go into “Customize Game”, we can change the number of lives, the points needed for a bonus life, ship speed, and the rate of fire - now that is interesting, okay.
But we’ll just play it as is with the default settings, and we’ll play it in this lovely Windows 95 window as well - so F2 for a new game…
[Galaxian noises]
Yeah, this isn’t a gaming channel - I should point that out! Anyway, that’s Galaxian - and yeah, seems like a very- I’m not sure if these are actually emulated, because like I say, the customizations in here do seem to correspond to the DIP switch settings that you used to get on the original arcade cab. So are these actual arcade ROMs that are being emulated?
I’ll tell you what, let’s have a look - in MAME, for example, you have to press 5 to insert the coin and then 1 to start a new game, and it skips all of that. Didn’t have “Free Play” or anything flashing up on the screen so maybe not. Let’s just see if we can find any-
Right, so they are all self contained, just Windows executables - we’ve just got a config file for each game. What’s in here?
That’s just the setup installation program, I think. There is a readme.
“Important information about Microsoft Return of Arcade. Welcome to Microsoft Return of Arcade.”
We’ve got how to set it up, this is just those instructions again. “Beginning to play, just point and click.”
Learning to play, customise the games… Sound! A listing of the supported cards. So it uses DirectSound - so there’s where your Windows 95 connection comes in. AdLib Gold is not supported! Oh dear.
“Faults have also been encountered in certain situations on the Roland RAP 10 and the Gravis Ultrasound Max.” The Roland RAP10, what is that!? That’s not the sound card I’ve heard of.
“How to get the fastest screen action,” there was an option in there - and I guess if you’re playing this on a slower system it says here you can decrease the size of the game window: “The larger the window the more your computer must work to update the game screen”, that makes sense.
So yeah, how to resize the window. You can decrease the number of colours used for your video display. So yeah, we can knock it down to 256 colours, and we can turn off the sound.
“Screen savers will not activate while running Microsoft Return of Arcade, even if a game is paused or minimised.”
Oh, and you can use the mouse to steer in Pole Position! Anyway, we’re here to play arcade games, not to read readme files, so let’s carry on. But yeah, apparently we can steer with the mouse in Pole Position - we definitely need to try that. Pac-Man next, a classic, and another game that I should - a bit of a spoiler alert, another game I’m not very good at - so F2 to start a one player game, and this one’s just on the arrow keys as you might expect - and what are our customization options here?
So we have number of lives, points needed for a bonus life, difficulty, game speed, Pac-Man speed, monster speed, monster movement, you can reset the high scores - and one thing I haven’t pointed out yet is this full screen update option, which is on by default and I’ve just left it on - but “If you experience any problems with the graphics in this game, select full screen update” so that’s obviously a DirectX thing, is it? Maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. Anyway, let’s start a new game… So, it runs through the attract mode, as you might expect from the arcade game - nothing about inserting coins or anything like that, there isn’t a “Free Play” thing that comes up at the bottom of the screen. So, yeah, is this slightly tweaked or have these been rewritten from the ground up just for Windows? I will try to find out.
But for now, let’s play some Pac-Man.
[Pac-Man noises]
A ha! So, it also has the intermission screens in as well, that’s cool.
Huh! Very good.
Anyway that’s enough Pac-Man for now. Yeah, it’s a really great version of Pac-Man, that is. So, go through to our fourth and final game of the Return of Arcade Pack - of course, Pole Position.
“To steer, use the horizontal keys or your mouse. To switch between low and high gears, click the right mouse button or press spacebar. To accelerate, press the left mouse button or the up arrow key. The goal is to successfully place in the qualifying lap, enter the race, and then complete three laps of the course to win.”
Very good, and we’ll check out the options for this one: additional time to qualify, we’ve got additional time to complete race, and car skidding on, and I noticed in that readme file it actually said that you could turn that off if you wanted to increase performance among other things, so that’s quite interesting - we haven’t got that full screen redraw option here, that’s interesting.
Anyway, let’s try with the keyboard first…
[Prepare to qualify!]
[Pole Position noises]
What is going on with that audio!?
Not that I can blame the audio for me being absolutely terrible at this game, but we do seem to be farting our way around the track here.
So, one thing I will say in my defence is that there seemed to be lag there - it was quite unresponsive. I don’t know if it’s the performance of this PC - as I mentioned, this is a Pentium 100, so it’s well above the minimum required specs of a 486DX - But yeah, there just seemed to be quite bad input lag there, which is quite strange. We’ll try this with the mouse, shall we? Although I’m not sure that will improve the situation…
[Prepare to qualify!]
[More Pole Position noises]
Ah!
Oh, that’s a bit more responsive, actually.
Yeah, that’s much more responsive, wow!
That’s really cool - doesn’t make me any better at the game, of course, but…
…the amount that you’ve stared does directly correlate with how far you actually move the mouse, which is-
I did say it wouldn’t make me any better at the game, didn’t I? But there we go. So as mentioned on the box, these games do apparently support joystick input as well, and I must say, I’ve never actually plugged a joystick into this machine, so that will be quite an interesting thing to test - and you’ve probably spotted in my studio backdrop here, I do have a couple of QuickShot joysticks, so let’s get one of these hooked up.
Yeah, I’m not sure if I really want to lick that…
Oh well, that’ll do.
Oh?
I must admit I was expecting there to be a “Game Controller” option in there, but maybe not. Okay, let’s go back to Pole Position actually, because I think that will actually benefit from this analogue joystick.
“Player Controls”, “Joystick Control” - ah, so you actually- oh, you can change the mouse sensitivity. Ah, that’s quite cool.
“Calibrate the joystick” - “Joystick is not responding. Either the joystick is unplugged or there is no joystick driver installed. Please correct your settings and try again.”
“Do you want Windows to search-“ No.
“Gameport joystick” - there we go.
“You are using other hardware that conflicts with the hardware you are trying to install. You can have two choices. You can continue or exit. To continue installing…”
I’m sure it’s fine.
Yeah, we’ll keep that.
Oh, “Crystal PNP Audio System Joystick” - that is there!?
“Device is working properly.” What!?
Okay, we’ll remove that then…
So, I’m in DOS mode at the moment, and as you can probably see, this is Doom - I’ve never actually played Doom with a joystick - so “Center the joystick and press button 1”.
Okay, that’s promising.
Upper left…
Lower right…
What? Ha ha!
What? Ah! What on earth? It’s very dark…
I can’t actually see what I’m doing - there we go.
I have never played Doom with a joystick before - it works quite well! Does the second button… He says it works quite well…
Ah! The second button is for your switches and stuff.
[Doom noises]
Anyway, okay, so that proves that the joystick is actually working - so this is evidently some kind of Windows 95 driver issue.
Okay, bear with me.
Right, so we’re back in Windows and there’s this “Joystick” option in the control panel - I don’t remember seeing that before, was that there before? Anyway, I’ve rebooted the PC so it’s not like this is a plug and play thing or anything like that somehow activated it. I don’t know. I have no idea what’s going on, but anyway, so “Advanced”… “You currently have only one global driver installed” - which is the standard game port driver, as you might expect. We’ve got joystick one here. Two axis two button, which this is. And if we go to “Calibrate” - “To set the centre position, leave the handle centred and press one of the buttons…”
“Move its handle in complete circles several times and press one of the buttons” - I mean, this is working.
“Confirm the centre position.”
“You have successfully calibrated your joystick.” - and if we go to “Test”, button one, button two, button one, button two. That’s all working. Okay.
I’ll just go into options, player controls, joystick control. Let’s give this a try.
Didn’t come up with that error this time, so that’s quite promising.
[Prepare to qualify!]
Prepare to qualify - so is it forwards to accelerate, or is it? Oh no, it’s the button.
Ah, this works! Oh..
…and we are farting our way around the track once more. Doesn’t make me any better at the game, of course.
It’s quite nice - it’s responsive. I think I prefer the mouse. I’m just not used to using this joystick, I guess.
Yeah, I think I preferred the mouse control, actually - although I could definitely get used to this.
Oh! Ha! Oh, I hadn’t spotted that before. So yeah, the high scores actually - the scoreboards actually take keyboard input, so these can’t be the original arcade ROMs, these must be actual proper you know, things that have specifically been written from the ground up for Windows 95. So yeah, the joystick input works, we have keyboard input and everything else. Ah, very good!
So, there we have it - the Microsoft Return of Arcade Pack from 1996, a bit of officially licensed corporate mandated fun for Windows 95. And, apart from the fact that I am absolutely terrible at all of the games, which, to be honest with you, is probably something that should be expected on this channel by this point, I think it’s a great package: all of those configuration options, it runs well, the various input options, even the joystick input works well when you can actually get it working - but to be honest, I think that’s probably more of a Windows 95 thing than anything to do with this pack.
So if you have any suggestions for similar stuff that I can check out on my various PCs here in the studio, I’m all ears - please do let me know down in the comments. Also, if you have any memories of these packs, these weird and wonderful Microsoft things from over the years. But that’s all I have for you for this video, so big thanks as always to all of my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and indeed my YouTube channel members, and a big thank you to you for watching - and hopefully I’ll see you in the next video.
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