i noticed the watermark in the corner of the screenshots, so i scrolled through every single game in squakenet’s “late 90s” category; i didn’t find it, but i did find a lot of other neat games:
Rally-Sport (1996) - PC Game this one looks like a made up game
Mechanik (1997) - PC Game this polish train sim
Lifebane : Deathrights (1996) - PC Game this game that i couldn’t find any more info on
and more!
this is my recommendation to browse video game databases some time! either just clicking around randomly, or choosing a specific platform/year to browse in full or whatever, it can be really interesting!
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Keeping the watermark was intentional! I thought this one might be a bit too hard / unknown so I kept it for future sleuthing.
I will say… That website gets the year incredibly wrong. 
I’ll post some “gimme” screenshots in a few days if no one has cracked it by then!
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Cool find! It looks like this game never came out. I found some information from a French abandonware website and went hunting.
First, I found the source of the write-up they use on the page. Not much to go on here.
Here’s the developer’s website. It’s a miracle this was captured at all, even if it was captured so poorly. And what’s this??? A credit’s page! It looks like Bobby Prince was attached to the project. That’s crazy! I wonder how close this got to finishing.
That page also shows the existence of two other projects, Stellar Conquest and Bane: Disposable Heros. I played link tag to find more information on Lifebane but it seems like the urls with relevant info were never captured. Dang.
Still, credits are the most important thing. I wonder where they are now? Exciting discovery!
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i wonder if this is an internal company training tool ala that mcdonalds ds game
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hmmm
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That’s Quandaries.
I’ve never played it, but it looks even better than the ethic training I am expected to complete in Common Era Two Thousand One Score and Four.
The DoJ logo is the crucial clue for finding a reference to this game.
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Ding ding ding! We have a winner! I’ll post more info when I’m not on mobile.
Sorry if my pick was too hard! I thought this game was really interesting and thought more people should know about it. (It’s much better than the two OSHA video games at least.)
I was really into DOS abandonware as a kid and trying out games in weird, unconventional genres. Through websites like Home of the Underdogs and Abandonia, I found this weird Serious Game tucked away in the Life Sim categories and decided to play it.
As some of these screenshots illuminate, Quandaries was a serious game developed as an ethics training tool for U.S. government employees. While pretty dry, it was an amusing, different experience that stuck with me, esp. for a kid that was peripherally aware of serious games but didn’t have too much hands-on experience at the time.
Quandaries was written by Bob Bates and developed by Legend Entertainment, best known for adventure titles like Eric the Unready and the popular FPS Unreal II: The Awakening. If you’re wondering where all these actors came from, well, they’re actual Justice Department employees that posed as characters for the game!
I always wondered how the game leaked online and wanted to do some research after choosing it for my pick. Turns out, it never leaked online! It was freely released to the public on the Department of Justice website (archival link)!
While the DOJ website itself didn’t have an official press release, I did find this brief article from Government Executive (which is surprisingly still up!) that details how the game came to fruition and confirms the game’s release year as 1997. Some websites conflate the release year with The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary, which is why the release year can vary so much.
(We can make a reasonable assumption that it was released online around October-ish due to the date the article was published, but the Internet Archive doesn’t go back far enough for us to corroborate).
The article is worth reading if any of this has been remotely interesting to you. And if you want to know where Janis Sposato may have gotten the original idea from after reading the article, this completely unrelated article from the Washington Post possibly illuminates the lightbulb moment for its conception!
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I’m fascinated by early serious games. I like that they (a) describe it as a role playing game and (b) acknowledge the bureaucratic absurdities of rules, like being able to use a government-issued gun but not ammunition in a public shooting competition. The lit-nerd in me would love to do a reading of the sort of compounded absurdities of the game (the same actors doing so many roles, the contrived situations) both making light of and attempting to resolve the regulatory absurdities of the ethics rules. But I would need to play the game more to test that idea out.
I’m traveling right now, but I’ll get the next game together by Tuesday.
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This first screenshot hides some vital identifying elements. Can you guess a game from just the instrument panel?
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I remember playing this on apple II in grade school. My 5th grade teacher was a NASA nut. There’s no way that I’m going to think of the name though.
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Project: Space Station, I believe.
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@Death_Strandicoot, you got it in one!
Project Space Station was one of the first legitimately obtained Commodore 64 games I played. I vividly remember the box, which features a shuttle taking off surrounded by design that was very much of its time.
In my memory, the game was basically a management simulation that also strung together a few minigames, like EVA for installing space station modules and landing the shuttle. The management elements mostly went over my head, but I gradually learned investing in R&D and loading modules on each shuttle launch. It was a game for someone who dreamed of going to space camp or being a future program manager.
Lawrence Holland, the programmer, may be a familiar name. After programming a few games for HesWare (which I think was going under around the time Project: Space Station was released), Holland went freelance, programming a number of World War II flight sims. Then LucasArts hired him to make Star Wars flight sims, which is how we got X-Wing as well as TIE Fighter, all the way to X-Wing Alliance. I do see a little bit of his early management sim sensibilities cropping up in TIE Fighter, like the careful, detailed menus and options available during flight and all the in-game technical documentation. This PC Gamer retrospective provides a history of his involvement with TIE Fighter that briefly touches on Project: Space Station.
After completing the Star Wars flight sims, he did Star Trek Bridge Commander, and after that he made a few other titles, like NBA and Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Mermaids. More recently, he seems to have been working on the sort of stuff that doesn’t end up with credits on Mobygames, like mobile and casino games.
Bonus: 1994 interview from a CD-ROM magazine (Interactive Entertainment):
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Most of the the credit should go to @Chekhonte for the Apple ][ hint.
I don’t know if I can think of something suitably obscure. I’m pretty basic.
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Is that the Transformers Tiger Electronics LCD game?!
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No, but very good guess!
Karnov! And thank you for tapping directly into my very specific obscure game knowledge.
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