When I was a kid, my parents and I would spend an hour or so every day (+ more in the week-ends) playing adventure games together, and those are some of the fondest memories from my childhood. But there’s one memory I’d rather erase and it’s Rise of the Dragon.

I must have been 8 or 9 at the time and that game completely traumatized me. I don’t think I actually played it with my parents (I must have chickened out after the intro), because I have almost no memory of it, but I must have sneaked in from time to time since there are three scenes I remember very vividly: that scene in the intro where the drug kills the girl, the scene at the end where the bad guy mutates into Bahumat, and above all this scene here. I haven’t touched the game in over 20 years, but that image has been seared into my brain and before I went looking for the pic yesterday I could see it in perfect detail in my mind. (Interestingly, it’s that image that stuck in my mind, not the gorier ones that came a few seconds later; I had probably run out of the room in terror at that point and never saw them.)

Rise of the Dragon provided my 8-year-old self with several weeks’ worth of nightmares. I have to this day an irrational fear of it and I know I’ll never go anywhere near it again.

     

It was such a shame that Dynamix was bleeding cash around this time. Their adventure games were on their way to surpassing the main Sierra ones.