Yeah, hopefully there are a few more people out there who want to talk about this game or any of the really old ones.
I can’t be 100% sure but I believe Jack Nicklaus' Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf was my first experience with a golf video game. My friend had an original Nintendo and we would play a golf game sometimes and I think that was it. We’re talking around 1989 or 1990 and I was only 5 or 6 years old at the time so it’s pretty hard for me to remember for sure. I don’t think my friend was ever too excited about golf though, it was more like once in a while I convinced him to play it.
We played way more Mario Bros. 1 and 3 then anything else.
I got the SNES for Christmas of '90 when it first came out. With friends it was still mostly playing Mario, now Super Mario World, but I got Hal’s Hole In One Golf with it and could play it whenever I wanted to. It wasn’t a particularly notable golf game, my parents got me it with the SNES and it was probably the only golf game available at launch of the SNES. Later I got The Irem Skins Game, and I frequently rented but never got True Golf Classics: Pebble Beach Golf Links. I think the reason was we were never able to find it in the store to buy it. Times have changed.
There was a version of Jack Nicklaus for SNES but I never played it. I think the Pebble Beach game was the best of the bunch but I may think more highly of it because having not owned it, I couldn’t overplay it. All of these games suffered from lacking replay value due to there being only one course you could play on them.
We got our first computer in 1995, an IBM Aptiva just after Windows 95 came out, and it came with JNSE. I became a PC gamer pretty much from the moment we got the computer and never looked back to consoles again. The depth of what you could do with PC gaming was beyond compare because of how you could customize your playing experience and eventually I got into full-fledged modding of games. For JNSE it mostly meant creating courses. I was 11 or 12 years old at the time so not much notable came out of this time period in course design for me. It was more like experimentation and formative years.
My version actually came with about six stock courses from what I remember. It included some courses that were a part of some kind of designer contest that Accolade sponsored. You could edit any course in this game and I remember being upset with myself for wrecking one of those design contest stock courses. It was years before I was able to restore it because the computer didn’t come with the game’s original disks, only a computer wide restore disk that I didn’t know how to use.
We didn’t get the internet until late ’96 or early ’97. The first site I ever landed on for JNSE was Dave Honan’s which is why I still have his page archived in my links. I distinctly remember the struggle to figure out how to get a course from his site to load. The barrier was the dreaded zip file. It seemed like a long time but this was kid time so it was probably only a couple days or a week.
I still remember figuring out how to use PKZip was a real ah ha moment though.
The second JNSE site I ever ran into was Brian Silvernial’s, and the second course I ever got off the internet was Cypress Point. This was a real step up from the courses I previously played. It is up there at the top in wow factor on first play of any course for me because he did things I didn’t know were possible like changing the color palette and the course was just overall great. It made quite an impression. The fact that I'm now friends with him and play regular online golf games with him, staring about 10 years after that, and got to meet him in person about 20 years after that, is still a pretty cool thing to me that I never would have imagined then.
I also was big into racing and racing games and got hooked on the Papyrus NASCAR and IndyCar racing simulations which were published by Sierra. It was through the ads about other games that they include in the box with games you buy that I found out about Sierra publishing its first golf game, Front Page Sports: Golf. If not for that I may have stuck with the Jack Nicklaus series but I never bought the later games, instead I got FPS: Golf when it first came out in ’97 (which eventually became the PGA series) and the mouse swing had me hooked. However FPS: Golf didn’t have a course designer so I continued on with JNSE alongside it. I ended up playing JNSE fairly regularly from 1995 until 1999 when PGA ’99 came out as the first version of that series that had a course designer. I had some unfinished work in JNSE that I finished up in the year 2000 before I fully converted over to PGA '99 and PGA 2000.
I had JNSE running in DosBox on my XP machine and would play it a few times a year until late 2009 when I retired that PC and built a new computer with Windows 7. Amazingly I’m still running that PC. It used to be a new PC every 5 years before that but this was my first self built PC and I built it top of the line. The games since then haven't pushed the hardware like they used to, so I haven't felt the need to upgrade other than a video card I got from a friend about 4 years ago. Anyway, JNSE never got up and running on this computer so I haven't played it since 2009. I'd like to get it up and running again someday when I have time though.
I thought I’d start a general post to see how people got interested in any of the Jack Nicklaus series of games (not necessarily just JNSE)…
