After Dark and Johnny Castaway
About the famous After Dark screensavers (and Johnny Castaway too)...
Flying Toasters. Fish. Bad Dog. You Bet Your Head. Do these ring a bell?
After Dark is a series of screensavers released by Berkeley Systems in 1989 for Mac and 1991 for Windows. It is sort of well-known but not many people use screensavers nowadays. (I'm one of them, for screensavers use up energy and it's better to standby/suspend or turn off your computer when not using it; I just like to 'watch' them sometimes ;) ). There were many After Dark 'spinoffs' in its heyday (some produced by other companies, like No Longer Dark) featuring famous cartoons, TV shows, movies, and more screensavers (The Simpsons, Looney Tunes, Star Trek, Disney, to name a few), even fanmade ones! :D The most famous modules were Flying Toasters, Fish, and Starry Night (the default). There were also After Dark Games.
My favorite ones are Bad Dog, Flying Toasters (duh! ;) also because of The Brave Little Toaster ;) ), Fish, and You Bet Your Head (an interactive trivia game show). They are hard to get nowadays since they're rare, so much so that even I had trouble finding 'em! Finally I found them here (Mediafire link). Click there and download 'em all!
Alternate/other links are here (Archive.org, After Dark Complete Collection Unorganized), here (Archive.org 2, After Dark Archive), here (Archive.org 3, After Dark 4.0), here (Archive.org 4, After Dark Games), here (Archive.org 5, The Simpsons) and here (WinWorldPC, all After Dark versions up to 4.0). (After Dark Games is also available at MyAbandonware and RetroZone[?].)
Note: There's no guarantee these'll work on Vista and above. To be safe, dig out that old XP or 2000 computer! ;) (or use a virtual machine, XP/2000/9x recommended; link to premade virtual machines of them which work with VirtualBox, which is what I use, at least for XP [for 9x, I recommend Virtual PC 2004; note, all 95 OSR editions work with it].)
If you really want to see Flying Toasters and Fish "saving" your screen, ;) click on the links below to download two individual screen savers for both of those for Windows XP (I think) and above (7 in 32-bit works; for 10 you'll need to follow the guide here). They don't require installing the After Dark program itself.
Need more links? Here you go:
The Complete After Dark Collection (Winboards)
After Dark 4.0 review, Simpsons review, and Totally Twisted review by YesterYear's MacGames (highly recommended!)
Review of the Simpsons Screensavers :)
The Daily Ping (ended): Whatever happened to Berkeley Systems?
Download of the After Dark Looney Tunes Collection (Archive.org)
Another review of After Dark from the Retroist
Thread on Vogons about After Dark (contains more links if you're the Link Monster ;) )
Video review of After Dark Games by LGR (from 2018)
Another fondly remembered (for good reason!) screensaver is Johnny Castaway, the first screensaver to tell a story. Random events would happen every time you had the screensaver on.
More info here: Fansite
Download the XP and above version here: ScreensaversPlanet
(You can also download it (original version?) at that Mediafire link above.) You can't run the original as a screensaver after XP (more info here). For the XP and above version, in 7, of course, you need to install it as admin (but you don't have to run it as admin :D ). There are many full videos of Johnny.
Dec 10, 2017: Fixed a link (WinWorldPC) and added a new link (Winboards).
June 5, 2018: Added more links and edited the Johnny section and the After Dark section.
Nov 6, 2018: Added LGR AD Games video review and a few other edits.
Aug 4, 2019: Fixed and removed some links, and misc. edits.
Thu, Mar 25, 2021: Fixed the Retroist link, added another Archive.org link, and removed this link:
TWF download of Simpsons for After Dark 3.0 (no sound though)
Fri, Nov 11, 2022: Added links to YesterYear's MacGames's After Dark videos, and removed this link:
Video of the Simpsons Screensavers
Sun, Aug 27, 2023: Added Win10 test results.