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Nintendo's gentle life-simulation game that reached the US on the GameCube in 2002. You move to a village of animal neighbors, pay off a mortgage to raccoon shopkeeper Tom Nook, and fish, catch bugs, decorate your house, and run errands—all on a real-time clock synced to the console, so the game's day and night and seasons matched real life. No winning, no losing—just a cozy daily routine.
Swap two gems, line up three, watch them vanish and the rest cascade down. PopCap's match-three puzzle turned a simple web game into one of the most-copied ideas in casual gaming.
Chop the vegetables, crack the eggs, flip the pan at exactly the right second — or watch Mama's eyes literally catch fire. The DS stylus-cooking game that made "Don't worry, Mama will fix it!" a generational catchphrase.
The Facebook farming game that took over the late-2000s: plow, plant, harvest, repeat — and pester your friends to be your neighbors. At its height tens of millions of people logged in daily to water virtual crops.
Four boxes of tiny Windows games — JezzBall, Rodent's Revenge, Chip's Challenge, SkiFree, Tetris — sold to office workers under the slogan "No more boring coffee breaks." Minesweeper and FreeCell started here before Windows itself swallowed them, and a sampler disk came free in packs of blank floppies.
Aim a ball at a field of pegs, pray for the bounce, and when the last orange peg falls the game slows down, zooms in, shouts "EXTREME FEVER" and plays Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" at you. PopCap's February 2007 pachinko-with-unicorns sold slowly until Valve tucked a free version into The Orange Box, and then it passed 50 million downloads.