Even the annotatable automatic map snapped to the window's right is like having the kind of DM who just uncovers the dungeon on the table as you explore. Where the original games were strict interpretations of the rules as written, having the Companion is like playing D&D with a Dungeon Master who skips the boring stuff and ignores the more unfair rules, which actually brings it closer to the real experience of playing D&D. The work of Joonas Hirvonen, who also created the All Seeing Eye companion apps for the Eye of the Beholder series, the Gold Box Companion snaps a menu to the top of the game window that shows summaries of your characters, complete with HP and XP bars, and gives access to a suite of options that include leveling up away from the training hall (while also ignoring race-based level caps), storing the spells you've currently got memorized then restoring them with one click, automatically identifying magic items, restoring lost levels to characters who've been drained, and so on. Thanks to the Gold Box Companion, modern players don't. When we played these games in the late '80s and early '90s, we had to put up with that stuff. SNEG also rereleased Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse and Stronghold, which use the same launcher, but didn't include them in the bundle.
The bundle of Gold Box Classics SNEG released on Steam doesn't include the 1991 online game for obvious reasons, or Spelljammer or the two Buck Rogers games made in the engine but not published with gold boxes, yet does include the Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Eye of the Beholder series, as well as Menzoberranzan and Dungeon Hack, none of which were given gold boxes or made with the engine.
Confusingly, not every game made with the Gold Box engine was released in a gold box, and which games should be counted depends who you ask. The name Gold Box refers both to the boxes some of SSI's games were released in, and the name of the engine they were made in. It's the same reason they had harsh level caps for non-human characters, constant resting to memorize spells, having to pay a trainer every time you wanted to level up-all authentic elements of AD&D back in the day, all a total drag. Those spells were included because the early Gold Box games were as true to the then-current Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition rules as they could be. The Knock spell let you open locked doors, which any fighter could do with a bash, Protection From Good was pointless because most of the enemies were evil, Detect Invisibility and Reduce were so situational that memorizing them was a waste of time, and Burning Hands only did one point of damage per level and had a range of "basically fucking". The other reason they were essential was that so many of the other spells were useless. Bunched up, they became perfect targets for big spells, as well as the fighter's sweep attacks, and maybe a cheeky backstab from your multiclassed fighter-thief.
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With a party of six player-characters, plus one or two NPCs, it was easy to block corridors and force kobolds to come to you. The first was that these games had turn-based tactical combat with enough depth that penning in enemies was a naturally occurring tactic. There were two reasons Stinking Cloud-and the other low-level area-of-effect spell Sleep-were mainstays of the classic Gold Box games. Though the monsters were a little smarter in Pool's 1989 sequel Curse of the Azure Bonds, and would risk charging through a Stinking Cloud rather than let your party stand on the other side shooting arrows +1 all day long, the spell was still likely to leave them nauseated and helpless, able to be slain "with one cruel blow" as the memorable description put it, by anyone who walked over to stab them. In 1988's Pool of Radiance, the first game SSI published in an iconic golden package, enemies wouldn't walk into a Stinking Cloud, making it a powerful tool for area-denial available to your otherwise kind of useless level 2 magic-user-so long as you didn't accidentally catch the front-row fighters in it. When you're sitting around a table pretending to be an impressive wizard, summoning a sphere of what is basically toxic fart gas isn't your usual go-to. The Stinking Cloud spell sees a lot more use in the Gold Box games than it ever does in a typical Dungeons & Dragons session.
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