To a person unfamiliar with this world, this may sound dull and irrefutably boring. I implore every one of you to bear with me, for the world of DOS is like no other; there's a reason why Jim Hall wanted to make a free replacement for MS-DOS when Microsoft announced its planned demise, there's a reason why so much work has gone into DOS emulators like Dosemu and DosBOX (years after its demise) and more importantly, a reason why there's a myriad of 'classic' game download sites.
I don't think we can begin to examine any DOS games before we take a look at the game that (in my opinion) made DOS games so popular: id Software's DOOM.
DOOM is basically the first-person shooter (FPS) that started it all. Wolfenstein 3D was really the one that started it all, but DOOM's improvements over Wolfenstein 3D made it extremely popular. DOOM brought things like lighting differences, non-perpendicular walls and room height differences. That doesn't sound like much, but it's really the difference between a forest and an office of cubicles. It also brought weapon swaying while moving, adding to the "realism" of the game. The differences in technology are outlined here.
DOOM had it all. It had so many different levels and episodes, the ability to load custom graphics and levels, lots of different weapons. You could spend days playing this game. For 1993, it was BAD ASS. It definitely raised the bar for computer games forever.
Three years later, Duke Nukem 3D came out. In essence, it was almost just like DOOM, but introduced some very appealing and popular features: more manly and sexual game content (strippers, Duke's famous phrases he says throughout the game, steroids) and more usable items like a jet pack and cooler weapons, like the "freezethrower." It was basically DOOM, except with aliens, more items and more attitude.
In DOOM, the player's character never says a word; it is an emotionless being. However, Duke is a sort of bad boy role-model, overly macho and unafraid of anything. And of course, he dons a cool pair of sunglasses. It also left a lasting impact on games as we know it.
Next we have a few games that never gained mainstream popularity, but are more than worth mentioning for their content and gameplay. I'd spend countless Summer nights playing these games...they defined a time in my life as well as the DOS gaming genre.
Tyrian was the arcade style scrolling shooter to have on your PC. Its Adlib music, rich and colorful graphics, and gameplay that changes every time makes it one of my personal favorites that I still play to this day.
One of the really cool things about this game is the ability to buy/upgrade just about everything on your ship, heck, you can even buy different ships. You got to pick from a handful of weapons, shields, generators and accessories, some of which wouldn't show up unless you took the right path in the game. That's the other cool thing, the ability to choose which planet to go to next. Most of the time, you have no choice, but sometimes you'd be able to pick which asteroid or planet to go to next. Not to mention there are secret levels all over the place. Some secret levels even have secret levels.
MegaRace isn't much of a game, but the music by Stéphane Picq is unforgettable and for the time, the graphics were awesome. If the cars had more features and there were more levels, it would've been a lot more popular. That and all of the video sequences featuring Lance Boyle are really annoying.
As I said though, there's not much to the game...you chase other cars and destroy them by either firing at them or ramming them until they explode. That aside though, let's just say that the music really brought your sound card to life. The music featured in this game is like no other.
Last but not least comes Cyberdogs and its sequel, C-Dogs. Both were written by Ronny Wester. I don't know much about the guy, but he wrote these two really cool games and released them as freeware, which is awesome. This was rare because most games of the time you either had to play as shareware
(more commonly known as a demo), meaning you could only play a level or two before having to buy the game, or you just had to straight up buy the game.
Cyberdogs isn't as good as the sequel, but it was different and cooler in the sense that you got points for killing things, collecting items and blowing up things in order to buy new weapons and armor. My favorite is the PowerGun, it shoots relatively fast and only took one shot to kill/blow up most things. Gameplay was intense in the later levels though, the more advanced enemies moved so fast you literally had about half a second to react or they'd just kill you. C-Dogs featured a level editor and some more advanced weapons, like grenades, molotovs, etc. It also introduced a multiplayer game mode. The biggest improvement is the player's ability to do a dash, which was really useful for dodging and fighting mobs. This game is very fast-paced on some of the more harder levels and would be INSANE if you could play it online, which brings me to the next paragraph.
Ronny Wester released the source code for these games in 2002 and two developers rewrote C-Dogs for Windows/Mac/Linux and called it C-Dogs SDL. I wish I could say something nice about this remake, but I can't. When I run C-Dogs SDL, I only get 22 fps (frames per second) tops, which makes for really slow and choppy gameplay. Running the original DOS version, I get close to 70 fps. They have plans of making it playable online, but it'd be useless unless they can make some optimizations to make it a lot faster. The remake needs a lot of work, but you can check it out here.
You just have to admire the work that went into making these old games. Nowadays, basically the only obstacles to making a game are using a 3D modeling program like gmax or Blender to make some unique characters and getting some decent music for your game. There are tons of game engines out there to choose from, like the Unreal engine and the Quake engine. There's some tweaking and customizing involved, but it's nothing like what it took for these old games. First of all, they started from scratch. Most of the graphics you see here (excluding the prerendered graphics from MegaRace) were hand-tweaked by the pixel to get the best looking graphics. They didn't have all these special programs to make nice looking textures or models/sprites. Space limitations meant that they had to have the music hardware synthesized instead of using actual recorded music, like in newer games. That meant that they had to compose the music using a tracker on a computer, sometimes having to find the right combination of waveforms to produce the certain sound desired. Most importantly, these games had to be optimized to hell in order to make up for no dedicated graphics, extremely slow processors and very little RAM to work with. A lot of old games were already written in lower level languages, but past that needed core parts of the game to be written in assembly language, which is the closest you can get to writing actual machine code. This allowed games to run smooth as glass on 33 MHz processors.
So how can you play these games? The easiest way would be to get a DOS emulator, probably the best of which is DOSBox. It allows you to play pretty much any DOS game at nearly the same speed as with the real thing. If you can get your hands on an old old computer (one with a 90 or 133 MHz Pentium processor would be perfect) that has a real sound card in it, you can download and install the latest version of MS-DOS. Or, you can try FreeDOS, a free MS-DOS replacement that comes with a lot of free tools, including a web browser (Arachne) and the infamous 4DOS. I recommend using DOSBox though, that way you can play old DOS games on just about any computer. It's a lot easier.
Once you've got access to DOS, you can check out some of the many classic game download sites, like Best Old Games and Classic DOS Games. If you're a big torrent downloader, you can find huge DOS game collections on any torrent site. This is not illegal, as all of these games are either in their redistributable shareware form, or have since been released as freeware.
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