Knights of the Old Republic

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic arrived on Xbox on July 16, 2003, developed by BioWare and published by LucasArts, with a Windows version following on November 19. The game was set roughly 4,000 years before the films, in a Jedi-and-Sith era of BioWare's own invention. Under the hood, the rules came from Wizards of the Coast's Star Wars Roleplaying Game — a d20 system derived from Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition — so there were dice rolls hiding beneath every lightsaber swing. Your choices pulled you toward the light side or the dark side, and your party included HK-47, a homicidal protocol droid who referred to organic beings as "meatbags" and became one of gaming's most beloved characters through sheer disdain.

The game became famous for a late-game identity twist that players in 2003 never saw coming — the kind of revelation that changed how they thought about the character they had been playing all along. It is still ranked among the greatest twists in video games, and still guarded against spoilers decades later. KOTOR won Game of the Year at the Game Developers Choice Awards, best Xbox game at the BAFTA Games Awards, and IGN's overall Game of the Year for 2003, and sold over a million copies on Xbox. A sequel, The Sith Lords, developed by Obsidian Entertainment, arrived in December 2004 — darker, stranger, and beloved in its own right.