Warning: Some screen savers were not eye candy, but spears for the eyes. When discussing old screensavers, use caution if you are photosensitive.
You know what? Sometimes it's nice to take a 400$ professional workstation you bought on a refurb and turn it into a digital lava lamp! (Sometimes literally.)

And screen savers, aside from visual appeal were also a way to bring personal identity to one's own machine. Razzle Dazzle, After Dark, Xlock, Xscreensaver, the various inbuilt OpenGL savers in Windows...

They've frankly gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Who knows, there might be a few still out there, but largely they're defunct.

I "miss" them, but I actually don't, since they're still functional* on the system I use. And while I know of an archive for these, I do wonder how many of them that many of yenz used to use and/or occasionally reminisce about.

I mean, why not? Some screensavers were games, after all!

*Wayland has complicated this manner.

There is one screen saver that's got a special place in my heart:

Johnny Castaway by Sierra/Dynamix

It failed its core mission -- to "save" the screen. But apart from that it was great fun and I could watch it for hours.

(Youtube) Johnny Castaway Christmas Special

I have indeed heard of Mr. Castaway before; I can see and hear many Sierraisms in it too; I can imagine someone trying to make a game of it, but they all realized it couldn't shape up so screensaver it was!

The limited playability didn't stop people who turned this screen saver into a simple clicker game for Android.

(GooglePlay) Johnny's Island Spoiler: It's not worth the price (free w/ ADs).

edit: Link removed, don't really want to promote this cr4p.

Ah, I remember it very fondly. I used to use Johnny Castaway as my screen saver a lot. Nice memories. Thanks for sharing!

Actually, now I'm reminded, a lot of games had demo mode screensavers, like Operation: Inner Space. I think even Mordor: The Depths of Dejnol had one, but frankly I think it was a monster gallery, and not an auto crawl.

No computer theme or setting will ever top the Matrix screen saver for me.

The floating text kind, the text console kind, or the digital rain kind?

Because I've got all 3!

No thread about screensavers would be complete without a link to:

Really Slick Screensavers

which has several cool OpenGL based beauties (Lattice is a good one for giving everyone nausea...) and is available for multiple OSes.

Arguably the best though are the 3D screensavers from 3Planesoft - and I'm speaking as a dissatisfied non-customer due to their payment processor (PayPro Global) rejecting my order, practically accusing me of fraud, and asking me to send a copy of my passport for verification to a GMail address!

Also worth pointing out that they are a Russian developer (sadly an issue of significance now) and that the screensavers are Windows only (yrros dnovraD!).

Some mad lad ported the RSS set to Xscreensaver/Linux, so I've definitely got those.

And speaking of things like the Matrix which are based in doing cool things with text: AsciiQuarium, because who needs procedurally animated fish from El-Fish?

Who needs El-Fish when they can get Marine Aquarium? Windows exclusive (yrros naiga!) and sadly no longer actively developed, it's a very realistic-looking fishtank with a wide choice of, well fish, and a customisable playlist for background music. Downsides - music is limited to MP3 only and only one tank.

Do androids dream of their own obsolescence? Possibly, and perhaps they dream of Electric Sheep as well!

Jwz has ported Xscreensaver itself to Apple and Android, so it should work on many CADT systems for years and years.

"X11: Warn when Wayland is in use, since it makes both screen saving and locking impossible." :-)

I do know of the electric sheep fractal generator, yes!

I liked screen savers too, even if.. I basically ended up seeing them rarely, since it's better to just turn off the screen completely after a while of idling.

I have an archive too, with RSS included ;)
(btw I recall that, in general, some 3d screen savers utilized the CPU a bit too much for my tastes, depending on settings)

Two useful ones (not sure if still working) were Screen Saver Commander, to launch random ss from a list, and one that allowed to run my player fullscreen (and at low volume) with random videos from a folder (alas it had to be manually closed afterwards).

Btw I remember that I even created a ss when I was little hehe.