I challenged the gods of time, memory and technology and (miraculously) prevailed.
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For nearly thirty years, I knew Rising Lands only as “the pumpkin game.” That was the entire label my memory had kept. I did not remember the title, the developer, the publisher, or the genre with any useful precision. I remembered an isometric viewpoint, a damaged landscape, small figures moving across the screen, and something that felt strategic, perhaps an RTS or something adjacent to one. But the clearest surviving detail was a small orange crop. It may not even have been a pumpkin in the strict sense, but that was the name I gave it, and that name became the clue.
It is strange what memory chooses to preserve. The image was not a hero, a logo, a cinematic, or a dramatic piece of key art. It was a food resource: an orange patch or object sitting in a post-apocalyptic world. It should not have lasted with that much force. Yet across decades, after the title and context had fallen away, that small piece of the world remained visible. Everything else became uncertain. The pumpkin stayed.
As a child, I did not understand the game as a system. I did not have the language for resource economies, technology trees, faction behaviour, base-building, diplomacy, or post-collapse world design. I only had the impression of a world seen from above: land, people, danger, and some form of rebuilding. In the middle of that, the orange crop seemed to mean survival. It was the most basic sign that the world was still functioning, that something could be gathered, grown, stored, or used. Long before I understood the structure of the game, that image had already explained something essential about it.
For years, the memory sat in the background without a name. It returned occasionally when I thought about old PC games, CD-ROMs, and the particular visual atmosphere of 1990s strategy software. I would remember the isometric view, the earth tones, the sense of a world after disaster, and then the pumpkin would appear again, oddly sharp compared with everything around it. The rest of the game was vague. The pumpkin was specific.
I tried to find it over the years, not constantly, but often enough that the search became familiar. I used phrases like “old PC pumpkin game,” “isometric apocalypse strategy game,” “90s CD-ROM pumpkin resource,” and “post-apocalyptic RTS food pumpkin.” The searches were crude because the memory was crude. I was trying to recover an entire game through a vegetable. The useful terms were missing, and without those terms the object remained just outside reach.
That is one of the problems with retrieving childhood media. You can remember the emotional signature of something very clearly while lacking the one practical detail that would identify it. I knew the approximate era. I knew the viewpoint. I knew the atmosphere. I knew there was an orange food resource. But I did not know the name. Without the name, the memory remained private: specific enough to feel real, but too incomplete to verify.
Eventually, the title surfaced: Rising Lands. It was a 1997 PC strategy game developed by Microïds, set in a post-apocalyptic world where civilisation has collapsed after a major natural catastrophe. Human groups survive in clans and rebuild through agriculture, warfare, diplomacy, technology, ecology, and eventually stranger systems involving religion and magic. It is exactly the kind of hybrid late-1990s PC game that resists a clean description: partly strategy game, partly world simulation, partly fantasy, partly science fiction, and very much a product of that experimental CD-ROM period.
The confirmation came when I saw the disc. Printed on it, against a black background above the Microïds logo, was the orange food object I had remembered. It was not an invented image, not a distorted memory from an obscure screenshot, and not a symbol I had exaggerated over time. It was there on the physical media itself. The thing my mind had kept was not random. It had been one of the game’s own visual anchors.
That discovery gave the memory a different status. The point was not merely that I had found an old game. It was that the most unlikely surviving detail had been correct. My mind had discarded the title, the premise, the developer, and the genre, but it had retained the right image. The pumpkin was real, or close enough to real that the childhood label had preserved the path back to the game.
Once the title returned, the rest of the material began to organise itself. The screenshots made sense. The tone made sense. The setting made sense. The orange food patches were not just scenery; they belonged to the survival logic of the game. In Rising Lands, agriculture is not decorative. Food is foundational. Before armies, inventions, diplomacy, expansion, or ideology, people have to eat. A ruined world can only become a society again if the ground is still capable of giving something back.
That may be why the image stayed with me. It compressed the premise of the game into one small object. Rising Lands is about rebuilding after collapse, and the orange crop is the simplest possible emblem of that process. It is not glamorous or heroic. It does not have the grandeur of a weapon, a machine, or a fortress. But in a damaged world, food is the first condition of recovery. The pumpkin represented survival before it represented anything else.
Then I saw the bear, and another piece of memory came loose. On the cover art, in the foreground, there is a large bear-like creature fitted with straps and carrying an armoured rider. Behind it are warriors, machines, explosions, scaffolding, laser fire, and a hot-air balloon. The image is an improbable mixture of elements: medieval riders, mounted animals, post-apocalyptic terrain, industrial remnants, and futuristic weapons occupying the same world. When I saw it again, I recognised it. Not perfectly, but clearly enough. The pumpkin had been the survival image. The bear was the wonder image.
That combination explains both why the game was difficult to locate and why it remained so memorable. Rising Lands is not easily summarised. It is not simply medieval, futuristic, post-apocalyptic, fantasy, or science fiction. It imagines a future so damaged that civilisation has fallen back into tribal structures while fragments of technology remain available. The result is a strange fusion of agriculture, lasers, clan warfare, machines, ecology, magic, hot-air balloons, and mounted animals. It belongs to a period of PC game design when ambitious, peculiar premises could still arrive with very little concern for neat market categories.
Games from that period were often uneven by modern standards, but they had a density of premise that made them difficult to forget. They could be mechanically awkward and visually strange, yet still feel like complete invented worlds. Rising Lands could put an orange food resource on the CD and a strapped bear on the cover and trust the player to accept the logic of its setting. As a child, I accepted it immediately. I simply failed to keep the name.
What remained was the evidence of having encountered it. That is what this kind of rediscovery feels like when it works. It is closer to excavation than nostalgia. Nostalgia often smooths the past into a general feeling, but this was more specific. A buried object had been recovered from under years of imprecise memory. The memory had been incomplete, but it had not been false. It had retained enough of the original material to lead back to the source.
For nearly thirty years, “the pumpkin game” was enough to keep the door open. It was a childish label, but it preserved the correct association. It kept the fragment active until preservation sites, old scans, databases, image searches, and better indexing could finally meet it halfway. The phrase had always sounded too vague to be useful, but it contained the thing that mattered most: the image the game itself had chosen to print on the disc.
There is something fitting about the recovered game being a work about reconstruction. Rising Lands imagines humanity after catastrophe, gathering resources, rebuilding settlements, forming clans, rediscovering technologies, and assembling a new world out of remnants. My memory of the game followed a similar pattern. It began as wreckage: an orange crop, an isometric angle, a damaged landscape, a mood. Then one fragment connected to another. The crop led to the title. The title led to the disc. The disc led to the box. The box led to the bear. The bear led back to the world.
Now I can see the game properly: the orange food patches, the post-apocalyptic clans, the medieval-future setting, the mounted bear, the laser fire, the hot-air balloon, and the strange mixture of elements that lodged in childhood memory before I had any framework for understanding it. The title had disappeared, but the visual logic had survived. I held onto the pumpkin, then saw the bear, and the rest of the world returned with it.
