3D Pinball: Space Cadet
The space-themed pinball table hidden in the Windows Games folder that ate untold hours in the computer lab. Rack up ranks from Cadet to Fleet Admiral, one launched ball at a time.
#Pc Games
12 items
Army Men
The green plastic soldiers from the toy bin, given a voice, a war and a portal into the "real world" of kitchen counters and backyards. 3DO's Army Men started as a 1998 PC strategy game and became a franchise that ran to more than two dozen titles in a decade, most of them shipped by 3DO in its last five years.
Barbie Fashion Designer
Design an outfit on screen, print it onto a fabric sheet on the family inkjet, and dress a real Barbie in it. Mattel Media's 1996 CD-ROM sold more than a million copies within a year and became the proof that a game aimed squarely at girls could sell big.
Bejeweled
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.
Diablo II
The dark, click-to-loot dungeon crawler whose endless hunt for better gear defined turn-of-the-millennium PC gaming. You clicked, monsters died, loot rained, and Battle.net kept you up until dawn.
Mario Teaches Typing
The 1992 typing tutor that put Mario in the computer lab: type the letter on the block to smash it, type the word to outswim the fish, type the sentence to outrun the Thwomps. Interplay built it to be the kids' Mavis Beacon, it sold more than 800,000 copies, and its 1993 CD-ROM version was the first time Charles Martinet's Mario voice appeared in a game, on a giant floating head that scared half its students.
Minesweeper
The grid of gray squares you clicked to uncover numbers — and the flags you planted over the mines you hoped weren't there. Bundled with Windows for years, it was equal parts logic puzzle and nerve test.
SkiFree
You picked a mode, pointed your pixel skier downhill, and raced a Windows 3.0 mountain — until the moment at 2,000 meters when something terrible crested the hill behind you. The Abominable Snow Monster of SkiFree ate a generation of office workers, and most of them never learned about the F key.
Snood
Launch goofy grimacing faces up the board, match three, and watch the ceiling ratchet down — while your AIM away message covered for you. Snood was the shareware puzzler installed on every dorm and computer-lab machine at the turn of the millennium, and it was written by a geology professor as a gift for his wife.
Treasure Mountain!
An educational adventure game where kids climbed a mountain solving reading, math, and logic puzzles to catch the Master of Mischief's elves and collect treasure. A classroom-and-home edutainment staple of the early 1990s, published by The Learning Company for DOS, Windows, and Mac.
Windows Solitaire
The Klondike card game that shipped with virtually every Windows PC — and quietly taught a generation how to use a mouse. The real reward was winning: the whole deck cascading off the stacks and bouncing across the screen.
Zoombinis
Guide troops of little blue creatures across a series of logic puzzles, choosing each one's hair, eyes, nose, and feet to sneak them past the obstacles. You were secretly learning to think — and it was a computer-lab favorite.