Did you know Prince was the star of his very own (sort of) video game? It was a secondhand purchase, since the game isn’t produced anymore. Instead, I pulled a 14-year-old Sony VAIO out of my closet.
Did you know Prince was the star of his very own (sort of) video game?
Prince Interactive surfaced in 1994, right when the introduction of CD-ROMs was changing the world for PC users. It launched after Mystand The 7th Guest, along with a flood of other “Myst-alike”puzzle game knockoffs.
Of course, this one starred Prince, meaning it was inherently weirder than any of its contemporaries.
After his unexpected passing on Friday, I went looking for Prince Interactive. Even at a time when game streaming has turned “Let’s Play” videos intoa big business, there’s almost nothing to be found online. So I did what any other bereft Prince fan might have done: I ordered Prince Interactiveon Amazon.
It was a secondhand purchase, since the game isn’t produced anymore. What’s more, the 22-year-old CD-ROM is ancient enough that it can’t run on any Windows version more recent than XP.
If you have a registration key for any of the earlier Windows versions, it’s possible to set up a virtual drive using software like DOSBox and install Old Windows from there. That wasn’t an option for me. Instead, I pulled a 14-year-old Sony VAIO out of my closet. It still ran, and it had Windows XP.
Perfect.
Popping the CD-ROM in the drive which spun as loudly as you’d expect I loaded the setup executable and was greeted by this image:
A dizzying gauntlet of “OK” prompts followed as the setup process copied the files to their destination and advised me about editing my autoexec.bat(!!).
Before it finished, the installation app warned me in two consecutive pop-up messages to reboot my computer.
The whole thing was a welcome reminder that, nowadays, computers work for us (most of the time) and not the other way around.
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