Eventually you’ll be able to trade with the Natives and other Europeans. And the Crown graciously makes you pay more and more in taxes for the privilege. When you begin, you’ll primarily be dependent upon the home country for trade and immigration.

You’ll also need to timber the vast forests for lumber to construct basic buildings, while later advanced structures will also require you to mine iron ore in order to make tools. As you grow, you’ll turn those raw resources into more refined products like coats, cigars, rum, and cloth for even greater income. Early on, you’ll accomplish this through fur trapping, silver mining, and/or exploiting cash crops like tobacco, sugar, and cotton, for quick profits. The heart of the game is harnessing the vast wilderness and its resources for wealth and power. For a small price, the fine, old-school, gaming aficionados at gog.com offer the original Colonization, Windows compatible, in all its charming, VGA glory. Today, though, you can bypass all that, if you wish. You’ll brush up on your command line typing in short order. With some reading up and practice, you should be able to navigate DOSBox and its functions fairly effortlessly. This is easily remedied by downloading the free program DOSBox, which creates a virtual DOS environment in which to run those old games and programs. And finally, even with the original discs or files, today’s operating systems will not run Colonization. One, if you were fortunate (like me) to own the original discs (3.5” floppies!), then good luck finding a modern computer with a floppy drive! Second, barring that, the game was nigh impossible to buy, so you would have to download the files from an abandonware site (I’ll not link to any, as some people have ethical concerns with them). Previously, the greater issue for gamers wishing to brave a new world was three-fold. Of course, that was if you could even get the game to run. But quite frankly, for people of my generation, that is part of its charm today.

Without a doubt, Colonization’s graphics are hopelessly out-dated.

Download colonization abandonware