Of all the Golden Joystick Awards 2025 winners, Schedule 1 arguably stood out as one of the most unique – after all, it is about running your own drug empire… but, what if it wasn’t?
After launching into Early Access on Steam, Schedule 1 took the web by storm and currently sits with “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews eight months on. Players praise it as a fun management game, with many spending over 100 hours in-game. At the Golden Joystick Awards, Schedule 1 further proved itself with a win and a nomination, bagging the Breakthrough Award and going up as a Best Early Access Game contender.
https://dosgames.com/game/crime-fighter/
In this, you play your way to become a crime lord. You make money by pickpocketing, pimping, dealing drugs, stealing car stereos, breaking into banks, kidnapping children for ransom money and killing cops to get their guns.
Back then, you didn’t buy games from Walmart (the gaming market wasn’t big enough for that), you bought them via mail order.
We had a game like that in graphing calculators we passed around at school.