What was that?

The Lost Vikings

The game I posted pictures of below is called The Lost Vikings. It is a game that I played on the PC years ago, I can't remember the time or the place. For the longest time I had in my head this vision of an old video game I used to play. Something about three different kinds of dwarves with different abilities who had to work together to get through various levels. Or maybe it was like a dwarf, a wizard, and a troll and they all had to work together to get through the levels. Over the course of the last couple of years this memory has come back to my mind time and time again. When it comes I quickly pop whatever comes into my mind into google as search words

I created searches like…

three dwarfs puzzle old game

dwarf wizard level escape team (interestingly, the first result here opens up a very interesting document that I don't have time to read)

old game wizard shield bubbles (because I remember one level having bubbles)

...and on and on but never to any avail.

Two weeks ago I was sitting at my desk thinking about my upcoming trip to Toronto. I was feeling antsy because Toronto is a 4.5 hour plane ride and I haven't been on a plane ride that long in years. My response to this was to prepare a bevy of media and entertainment for the trip that would guarantee my four-plus hour flight included absolutely no boredom.

Thus for the trip I prepared:

• 4 episodes of House for my iphone
  
• 5 episodes of The Big Bang Theory for my iphone
  
• 6 episodes of Family Guy for my iphone
  
• The season finale of Lost for my iphone
  
• One of the "Star Trek Movies" (which I paid full-admission at the theatre for) for my iphone
  
• Several Strong Bad Emails via the podcast for my iphone
  
• All of the above on my laptop plus 4 more episodes of Big Bang, 3 more episodes of House, and 5 episodes of Fringe, and Star Trek IV.
  
• My Girlfriend's Nintendo DS with an unplayed copy of New Super Mario Bros. And Super Tetris
  
• An unmeasureable amount of reading on my laptop; bible software and the like.
  

I made sure that I booked a seat with a laptop plug.

All in all I estimate that I had about 20 hard hours of media (meaning hours that I could measure) and probably another 50-100 hours of umeasureable media (things like video games, e-books, etc). All for a for hour flight. I think I overreacted a bit.

But I wasn't done.

It occurred to me that this trip would be the perfect opportunity to get a copy of that old game that I could never remember what the name was. "what was the name of that game?" I kept asking myself but the answer never came.

Then it hit me like a storm. "Were they Vikings? Maybe they were Vikings…"

I input "old game Vikings" into google and the first hit was a site that not only described the game but that gave me a link to download it on an old Dos emulator. Inside of an hour I had a version on my laptop, my desktop, and even on a gameboy emulator on my iphone.

Lost Vikings hooray. I finally found you.

Of course the sad irony is that I barely played it on my Toronto trip. I was to busy watching Christina perform a wedding, eating mind-blowing poutine, and getting a feel for the Greater Toronto Area while meeting all kinds of friends and family. On the plane I watched the episode of Lost and that was pretty much it, maybe I played a little bit of New Super Mario Bros. On the way back I watched the princess bride on the airplane seatback screen.

I'm sure you want to see some of the pictures, they are here:

From Toronto .2