"Not all good things ever last"

MC-DOS

What if Minecraft had been released in the 90's for the MS-DOS system?

• Inspired by Quake I, Deus EX, Cruelty Squad, MCSX, Baldi’s Basics, Elder Scrolls and ARGs.

December 23rd, 1995.

I was twelve years old when my parents divorced. I remember the date better than I remember most of my childhood. Funny how the mind works. I can barely recall what I ate yesterday, yet I still remember the sound of my father's suitcase dragging across the hallway floor, the front door closing behind him, and the silence that followed.

He never really came back.

My mother tried to keep things together, at first. She cooked, cleaned, went to work, and pretended that nothing had changed. But the bottles began appearing in the kitchen cabinets, then under the sink, then in places I wasn't supposed to look. Eventually, she stopped pretending. I learned to recognize her footsteps by the way they dragged across the floor. I learned when to stay in my room, when to keep quiet, and when to pretend I was asleep.

That Christmas, I didn't ask for anything. I had stopped expecting much.

Then, on December 30th, a package arrived from Europe. My uncle, who worked at Eidos Interactive, had sent it over late. Inside was a game I'd never heard of, tucked away in a plain cardboard box. Its name was written on the label: Minecraft.

It was strange, even back then. A world made of blocks, stretching endlessly in every direction. There were caves to explore, monsters to fight, and mountains that seemed to go on forever. You could build anything you wanted. You could tear it all down and start again. Nobody yelled at you for making mistakes. Nobody left without warning.

For the first time in months, I had something to look forward to.

I spent entire nights sitting in front of that computer, the faint hum of its fans drowning out the arguments downstairs. I remember the warmth of the monitor against my face, the little crackling sound the speakers made when the music started, and the way the room felt almost peaceful when the rest of the house was asleep.

Sometimes, I built things just to have somewhere to hide. Other times, I built things because I wanted them to last.

I suppose I was trying to make a home of my own.

The years passed, and the game grew alongside me. I watched every update, every new feature, every strange addition to a world that never seemed to run out of secrets. When the official releases finally stopped coming, I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn't. I found a local clan, made friends, and joined a server that eventually became something more than a place to play.

We built towns, fought wars, explored ruins, and spent nights laughing over things that probably wouldn't have been funny to anyone else. I can still remember their voices. The way one of them always complained about the smallest things. The way another would stay online long after everyone else had gone to bed. We had our own jokes, our own traditions, our own little world.

I thought we'd always be there.

Then, one day, I left.

I don't remember deciding to leave. Life simply pulled me away. My mother went to rehab, the state became involved, and I eventually found myself studying, working, and trying to build something resembling a normal life. My father and I grew distant. The old house became a place I avoided thinking about, and the people I had once spent every waking hour with slowly faded into the background.

I told myself that growing up meant leaving things behind.

I didn't realize how much I had left behind until it was too late.

Spring, 2025.

The news came through a phone call. My father was dying, and the house had been passed down to me.

I remember sitting in my apartment afterward, staring at the wall with the phone still in my hand. I hadn't spoken to him properly in years. There were things I'd wanted to ask him, things I'd wanted to say, but grief has a peculiar way of arriving before you know what you're grieving.

I didn't cry. Not then.

I told myself I had no reason to return. The house was just a building, old memories trapped inside four walls. Whatever remained of my childhood had been gone for years.

And yet, something kept pulling me back.

So I went.

The house stood at the foot of a low range of hills, far enough from the nearest road that the silence felt deliberate. It was a modest, two-story building with pale walls and a sloping roof, the sort of place you might pass without a second glance. The garden had grown wild around the edges, and the narrow path leading to the front door was cracked in places, with weeds pushing through the gaps.

Someone had been maintaining it. My father had arranged for trustworthy people to look after the property, and it showed. The windows were intact, the doors were secure, and the roof hadn't given in to the weather. Still, the house looked tired. Not abandoned, exactly. More like something that had been left waiting.

I stood outside for a while, looking at the upstairs windows.

My old bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of the hallway. I could remember the shape of the curtains, the little marks I'd made on the doorframe to measure my height, and the way the afternoon sun used to fall across the carpet. I wondered if those marks were still there.

I wondered if I wanted them to be.

The front door opened with the same stubborn resistance I remembered. Inside, the air smelled of old wood, dust, and something faintly metallic. The entrance hall led into the living room, where the furniture had been covered and arranged almost exactly as it had been years ago. The staircase creaked beneath my weight. A narrow hallway stretched toward the kitchen, and the walls still carried the faint discoloration left by old picture frames.

There was a small dining table near the kitchen door. I remembered sitting there with my father on the rare evenings when he came home early. I couldn't remember what we talked about. Only that, once, he had laughed at something I'd said, and I had spent the rest of the night trying to make him do it again.

I stood there longer than I should have.

The kitchen was clean. The cabinets had been shut, the counters wiped down, and the old sink polished. I could almost picture my mother standing beside it, staring out through the window with a glass in her hand. For a moment, I was twelve again, waiting to hear whether she was in a good mood.

I hated how quickly that feeling returned.

Upstairs, everything seemed smaller. My childhood bedroom was still there, though most of its furniture had been moved or covered. The walls looked faded, and the floorboards groaned in familiar places. I walked to the corner where my desk used to stand and found myself remembering nights I'd rather have forgotten, nights when the computer was the only thing keeping me company.

That was when I remembered the box.

I had hidden it years ago, tucked away where nobody would think to look. Back then, I'd been terrified my mother might find the diskettes and sell them for money. It sounds ridiculous now, but to a twelve-year-old, those little pieces of plastic and metal were worth more than anything else in the house.

I found it where I'd left it.

Inside were the old disks, carefully stacked, their labels yellowed with age. Most were marked with names and dates. One, however, had only a strip of paper tape across its front.

Minecraft.

I almost laughed. It was such a childish thing to have kept all those years. I had spent a lifetime convincing myself that I'd moved on, and yet there I was, sitting on the floor of my old bedroom, holding a diskette as though it were something precious.

Perhaps it was.

The computer was still on the desk downstairs.

An old machine from the early 2000s, its casing yellowed and its vents clogged with dust. Beside it sat a pair of bulky speakers, their cables tangled together, and an all-in-one Windows 7 PC that had clearly been used to keep the place functional. I had to wipe the desk before I could even set anything down.

I brought the diskette reader I'd taken with me, connected everything, and waited for the old machine to wake up.

The fans rattled. The screen flickered. Somewhere inside the case, something clicked twice.

I installed the ancient DOSBox emulator and dragged the executable from the diskette. I remember smiling at the absurdity of it all. Here I was, a grown man with a job, responsibilities, and a life of my own, preparing to play a game I'd discovered when I was twelve.

For a little while, I felt happy.

The title screen appeared.

The colors were familiar. The music was familiar. Even the strange little details I'd forgotten came back to me with a clarity that made my chest ache. I leaned back in the chair and listened, letting the sounds fill the room. Outside, the evening light faded over the hills, and the windows slowly turned black.

Then I noticed something.

I couldn't say what it was. There was no obvious error, no broken texture, no missing sound that I could point to. The game looked exactly as I remembered it, yet the longer I stared, the less certain I became.

It was the sort of feeling you get when you return to a childhood home and discover that one of the rooms seems a little smaller than it should be. You know something is wrong, but you can't explain why. You start questioning your own memory instead.

I checked the files. I restarted the game. I sat through the intro again.

Nothing changed.

And yet, I couldn't shake the feeling that I had forgotten something important.

Something I had once known.

Something I had spent years trying not to remember.

My hands were cold. I could hear the computer's fans turning steadily beneath the desk, and beyond that, the house was silent. Not the ordinary silence of an empty building, but the kind that makes you suddenly aware of every small sound you make.

I glanced toward the hallway.

For a moment, I thought I heard footsteps upstairs.

I waited.

Nothing.

I told myself it was the house settling. Old buildings made noises. Memories played tricks on people. I had been through a difficult few days, and perhaps I was simply tired.

There were a dozen reasonable explanations.

I chose to believe every one of them.

The game was waiting for me.

I moved the mouse, pressed a key, and watched the screen change.

I had come back to remember my childhood. To revisit a world that had once given me somewhere to hide, somewhere to belong, somewhere I could pretend things were going to be all right.

I didn't know why the thought of returning made me feel so afraid.

I only knew that somewhere, buried beneath the familiar music and the old pixels, there was a memory that refused to come back.

And whatever it was, I had a feeling it had been waiting for me just as long as I had been waiting to return.

Welcome Home.