With these types of questions, I think of massive game series that push the technology envelope and expand across long stretches of time and see which was the first one that had a certain requirement. Both the Ultima series and Wizardry series started as floppy games. The first ones that seemed to require a HDD for installation were:
Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990)
Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990)

On closer inspection, I found pictures of original boxes for these games with the wording "hdd recommended" or a requirement of "dual floppies OR HDD". But we're getting close. So chances are, this first game that required a hard drive to play was published around 1990 or 1991 (surely there were others before 1992's Ultima VII: The Black Gate). It probably was from a company that was known for pushing the tech envelope (like Origin Systems) and was probably a role playing game or graphic adventure (these typically require more data than other genres).

With all that, Origin's 1991 Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi appears to be that publisher's first game that lists HDD as a requirement on their game box:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/wing-comma … CoverId,166416/
(the first Wing Commander had the "dual floppies or HDD" requirement)

Can't say for sure, but this would be my best guess. 😀

"Links: The Challenge of Golf" and "Crime Wave", both released in 1990 by (what it was then known as) Access Software, required a hard drive to run the game (at least, according to the front cover of the box).

What’s funny is that most games from that era (through early 90’s) came with 2 sets of dd discs 360k and 720k
A few smaller cheaper games came on a single 720k disk with a few even in the infamous 360k printed jackets as shareware.

Monkey Island came in a boxed set of EGA (360kb) and VGA (1.2mb) disks all in one box,
despite having a 486 with dual floppies he could only run the ega version.
I had my friend transfer all the 1.2mb disks to 1.44 disks as I had a floppy only system with no 5.25
And voila my base Tandy 1000rlx could run the enhanced vga monkey island with better sound.

By the time a game would have come on 1.44mb you didn’t have disk swapping.

Jill of the Jungle for example came in a can be run directly off a 3.5 floppy version and another that made you have an HD and but you could move the files to a 1.44mb disk.

Having no hd made these titles a pain as I had to visit a friend to install then we would make the game fit, sometimes blanking out later level data and help files to make it work.

rmay635703 wrote:

Having no hd made these titles a pain as I had to visit a friend to install then we would make the game fit, sometimes blanking out later level data and help files to make it work.

That was some serious improvising, man. 🤣 I bet you also installed one of those TSRs in MS-DOS that allowed you to format those disks with 82 tracks and 21 sectors per track, so you could cram 1.68MB on those disks, didn't you? 😉 I remember doing that with 720KB diskettes on my Dad's PC/XT clone back in the day. Formatting those at 82 tracks and 10 sectors per track (as opposed to the standard 9 sectors per track for those disks), which allowed them to fit 800KB of data. Good times. 😀

Interesting how you actually had to install games on an actual hard drive before you could transfer them to a single 1.44MB disk. You had a dual disk drive on that computer, right? Couldn't you have fooled at least some of those installers into installing on the B: drive by using the MS-DOS assign command to assign the drive letter C: to the B: drive?

EDIT: Oh wait, it was your friend who had dual disk drives. But according to Wikipedia, you could have installed a second floppy drive in your Tandy 1000 RLX. It would probably have been a lot cheaper than installing a hard drive in that thing. But then again, even floppy drives where expensive back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#1000_RLX

Osprey wrote:

I, too, don't remember any games that allowed for installing only a little bit and reading the rest off of the floppies, but it seems like a natural hybrid that some developer might've at least tried at some point. I remember that the worst part of disk swapping was the frequent need for Disk 1/A. You always needed it to run the game and often needed it again during play, even after you've moved onto the content on later disks. It would've made a lot of sense to install just the data from that disk to the hard drive, so that you'd never have to insert it again and would need only to insert the later disks as you got further into the game. I'd be surprised if no game ever had that option.

Somewhat related:

I remember when I got Zork I -- a text adventure -- for the TRS-80 Model I. It ran off floppy. Every command went to floppy.

bristlehog wrote:

Some games work with file cache and thus won't run without a hard drive. For example, Magic Carpet II: Netherworlds creates C:\NETHERW folder with some temporary files, and its location is not changeable AFAIK. Thus I think it won't run without a HDD.

There is the SUBST command.

I purchased a very expensive second-hand 20MB MFM (RLL) hardrive for a friend to be able to play Crime Wave on my Amstrad PC2086. That thing wasn't even faster than a floppy drive but capacity was enough for ms-dos.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

I purchased a very expensive second-hand 20MB MFM (RLL) hardrive for a friend to be able to play Crime Wave on my Amstrad PC2086. That thing wasn't even faster than a floppy drive but capacity was enough for ms-dos.

I know MFM and RLL drives weren't particularly snappy in performance compared to later IDE and SCSI drives, but surely that hard drive must have been faster than the floppy drive?

Maybe it was MFM. I don't recall now. But I assure you it wasn't that much faster than a 1.44MB floppy. 🤣

Probably a flight simulator.