I’m sure all of us have some game or movie or book that we remember, even when the name itself has been forgotten to us. Strangely enough, at least in my case, I often have fond memories of these forgotten stories, despite the contradiction of forgetting the name of something I claimed to have enjoyed. Recently, I happened quite by chance upon a few movies I saw as a duckling whose names I had previously forgotten (in case you’re curious, The Pagemaster was one of them), and it made me all the more determined to hunt down the name of an old PC game I remember playing long ago. The game was probably released in the mid to late 90’s. And it involved exploring a medieval castle. The game was in first-person, but there was no battling, and it was set up like a maze.

In order to progress through the maze, I thought you probably answered questions or something. I could see in my head the stone wall of the interior of the castle, and I was vaguely aware of some certain background music. With just those details to go on, I started searching the Internet for the name of this game.

I had seriously been obsessed with tracking it down for years, and I finally found something that might be the game I so desperately sought. The game was called MindMaze, and it came with Encarta Encyclopedia, but I couldn’t get a clear release date. Maybe 1996 or 1998? I looked the game up online, and even though there were some differences I don’t recall, I think it was the game I had been looking for.

Basically, you explored a castle by clicking on doors or people and answering random trivia questions in order to proceed. The funny thing is how faulty our memories are. I remember the game to be a lot more free-roaming, when in actuality it’s more of a point-and-click kind of game. I also thought the game was more 3D when the graphics are more flat and cartoony.

And yet, the more I watched someone play the game and caught little snippets of the background music, the more the memories all came flooding back. This is the game I had been searching for, that “super awesome game I played a long time ago, where you got to explore a medieval castle”.

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