59 items
Sierra's Dynamix studio broke the rules of pinball with 3-D Ultra Pinball in 1995—animated spaceships, UFOs, and mining drones appeared on the table as temporary targets, multiple themed tables connected at once, and the whole thing was colorful, chaotic, and absurdly entertaining. It sold over 250,000 copies in its first year, becoming a staple of family PC gaming in the shovelware era. Except it was actually *good*.
An add-in card that did one thing perfectly: accelerate 3D. It didn't touch 2D — you kept your old video card and daisy-chained the Voodoo between it and your monitor. Installing one was a portal moment: suddenly your home PC rendered smooth, filtered, high-resolution 3D. For about three years, the name "Voodoo" was PC gaming.
Age of Empires II was the medieval real-time strategy game that defined the genre for a generation. Released in 1999, it put 13 civilizations at your command across historical campaigns spanning Joan of Arc to Genghis Khan. The Conquerors expansion (2000) became the definitive version, adding five new civilizations and cementing the game's legacy. Nearly three decades later, HD remasters and competitive esports tournaments prove this masterpiece never went out of style.
The cult favorite of the first big three MMORPGs — never EverQuest's equal in numbers, but beloved for what it dared. Asheron's Call ran through Microsoft's gaming service, its classless characters and famous monthly story updates drip-feeding new life into one seamless world that stayed open for over seventeen years.
The kid-league sports game where you could draft a nine-year-old Ken Griffey Jr. — and still take Pablo Sanchez first overall. Humongous Entertainment's sandlot sim owned elementary-school computer labs, and its legend has only grown.
BioWare's 1998 Dungeons & Dragons epic: a hero of your own making, a party of companions across the Sword Coast, and Minsc the ranger shouting "Go for the eyes!" on behalf of Boo, his miniature giant space hamster. Interplay's British office forecast zero sales; it did a million in a year and brought the computer RPG back from the dead.
A plane crash, a lighthouse, and a descent into Rapture — a ruined Art Deco utopia at the bottom of the sea. Ken Levine's 2007 shooter gave players plasmids, Big Daddies, one devastating twist, and the era's best argument that video games could be art. Would you kindly?
Lead a tribe from one settler through several thousand years of history, one turn at a time, in the 1991 MicroProse game that Computer Gaming World called "more addictive than crack" and then named the best game ever made. Civilization II (1996) is the version most people lost their nights to.
Westwood's 1995 real-time strategy war between the UN's GDI and Kane's Brotherhood of Nod, told in live-action cutscenes shot in spare rooms with Westwood's own staff. The 1996 prequel Red Alert added the Soviets and Frank Klepacki's "Hell March." Three million copies, and a name that became shorthand for the whole genre.
![Video thumbnail — Commander Keen 1 (1991, MS-DOS) - Marooned on Mars (Full Longplay)[720p60]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YUyQSfKRU1w/maxresdefault.jpg)
Billy Blaze, age eight, in a football helmet and red sneakers, pogo-sticking across Mars in the 1990 shareware platformer that gave the PC the smooth, console-style scrolling it had never managed. The team that made it at night on borrowed Softdisk computers used the royalty checks to found id Software.
The free Half-Life mod that conquered every LAN party and cybercafé of the 2000s. Terrorists versus counter-terrorists, five on five, one life per round, buy your weapons and don't miss — for a whole generation, Counter-Strike means version 1.6.
A fantasy MMORPG that replaced chaotic open-world ganking with Realm vs. Realm warfare—three mythologically themed nations (Albion, Midgard, Hibernia) fighting over contested keeps and relics in structured, large-scale PvP.
Racing, but with machine guns. DeathTrack put you on a futuristic circuit where winning meant crossing the line first — or being the only car left that could. Prize money went straight into bigger weapons, and the next city's grid found out.
![Video thumbnail — DEUS EX: GOTY Edition [Opening Cinematic] [Intro] [Full HD] [1080p]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ICC0520zzA/maxresdefault.jpg)
The cyberpunk immersive sim that let you play your way — stealth, hacking, or firepower. As cybernetically enhanced agent JC Denton, you untangled plagues and conspiracies beneath a ruined Statue of Liberty. It feels like the ultimate '90s PC game, but it actually shipped in June 2000 — and it has ranked among the greatest games ever since.
The shooter that defined the genre, released by id Software as shareware in 1993 and instantly crashing the network when thousands tried to download it at once. Fast, brutal, moddable to the extreme, and the game that turned "fragging" into a verb — by late 1995 it was estimated to be on more computers than Windows 95.
"Hail to the king, baby." PC gaming's most gleefully crude action hero started as a 1991 shareware platformer and exploded with 1996's Duke Nukem 3D — 3.5 million copies of one-liners, aliens, strippers, and moral panic. Then came Duke Nukem Forever, the most legendary vaporware in gaming history.
The first massively successful 3D MMORPG, a game that proved millions would live together in a virtual world. The world of Norrath, corpse runs, the brutal grind, and "EverCrack" addiction became the template for everything that followed.
Humongous Entertainment's other Junior Adventures, the ones beside Putt-Putt on the family PC: a yellow fish detective and her friend Luther chasing Grandma Grouper's stolen kelp seeds from 1994, and a boy in a red cape who marches into his closet in 1996 to capture Darkness in his lunchbox. Point-and-click CD-ROMs on the LucasArts SCUMM engine, stuffed with click-anywhere gags.
Race against Morty Maxwell to build faster vehicles by solving science puzzles and outsmarting Cyber Chimps. This Learning Company edutainment staple disguised lessons about simple machines and magnetism as competitive car-building challenges.
The game that made Steam essential. Silent physicist Gordon Freeman, armed with a gravity gun that weaponized the environment — sawblades, radiators, physics itself — fought an alien occupation in the Eastern European City 17. Five years in development, a $40 million budget, 39 Game of the Year awards — and it required Steam activation, becoming the Trojan horse that made the world install the platform.
The top-down, sprite-based online combat game where large teams fought across sprawling battlefields with infantry, vehicles, and aircraft. Born from the makers of SubSpace, it became a Sony Online Entertainment fixture on Station.com and outlived its era through a fan-run revival.
You hauled your full tower, CRT monitor, keyboard, and mouse to a friend's basement, plugged into the network, and played until sunrise. Counter-Strike, StarCraft, Unreal Tournament — the trash talk was live, the pizza was cold, and nobody believed online gaming could ever replace the room.
A cute 2D side-scrolling MMORPG where you leveled for hours grinding snails and mushrooms instead of slaying dragons in 3D. Free-to-play, but the Cash Shop meant everyone knew who was spending real money on their outfit. After-school hangout, guild headquarters, and grinding treadmill all at once — the game your parents thought was a cartoon and you knew was a second life.
The space shooter your parents wanted you to play: math problems zip across the screen, you fire the cannon at the correct answer, and somehow you're drilling fractions without noticing. Every 90s school computer lab had it, and every kid who touched it felt like an arcade ace instead of a student.
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.
The Windows chat client that turned Internet Relay Chat from a text-only Unix curiosity into the place where fandoms, warez traders, Quake clans and lonely teenagers typed at each other all night. Written by one student in London in 1995, it was downloaded more than 40 million times, and its scripts, DCC file transfers and channel wars defined online life before the social networks.
An island with no instructions, no timer, no way to die — just a series of machines to solve, each more surreal than the last. Myst proved a computer game could be a slow, atmospheric mystery with no combat and endless patience.
The computer-lab game that taught westward expansion through dysentery and desperation. Every 90s kid named their wagon party after friends, overhunted buffalo, gambled on river crossings, and died of unexpected causes while technically learning American history.
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.
Sony Online Entertainment's wildly ambitious 2003 MMOFPS — a persistent online war where three factions fought over huge, seamless continents with hundreds of players in a single battle. Too big and demanding to be a mainstream hit, but unforgettable for the players who lived in it.
A portal gun, a passive-aggressive AI, and a promise of cake. Portal shipped in 2007 as the little extra in Valve's Orange Box — built by fewer than ten people — and walked away with the whole bundle's spotlight, a Game of the Year trophy, and half the internet's vocabulary.
A cheerful purple convertible car who was born as a bedtime story and became a staple of 90s family PCs. Putt-Putt's point-and-click adventures were forgiving, consequence-free, and brimming with clickable animations — nothing to lose, everything to discover.
A fireworks-factory accident blasts the little purple car to the Moon, where he's stranded, scared — and then befriended by Rover, a lonely lunar rover left behind by astronauts. Kids remember the arc viscerally: lost far from home, then puttering back with a new best friend.
The game that turned thousands of toddlers into gamers without them noticing: a cheerful purple convertible earns his way into Cartown's pet parade in a world where everything you click sings, dances, or talks back. Humongous Entertainment's very first game — and for countless kids, theirs too.
![Video thumbnail — Gorillas (a.k.a. QBasic Gorillas or GORILLAS.BAS) (Microsoft) (MS-DOS) [1991] [PC Longplay]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lyBD0X81tjk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Two gorillas on a city skyline, hurling explosive bananas at each other. You typed an angle, a velocity, and prayed you'd read the wind right. It came free with MS-DOS — hidden in plain sight on millions of PCs — and it turned a programming demo into a playground legend.
![Video thumbnail — Quake Trailer 1996 [Original]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DV2vhmtGBqM/maxresdefault.jpg)
id Software followed Doom by throwing out the second dimension entirely: Quake was true real-time 3D, drenched in a Nine Inch Nails soundscape, and built to be torn apart by its players — who invented rocket jumps and whole art forms inside it, and turned internet deathmatch into a culture.
You designed roller coasters and managed an amusement park in this beloved strategy sim. Created almost single-handedly by Chris Sawyer and released in 1999, RollerCoaster Tycoon became a sandbox classic — famous for coaster design and infamous for the player habit of trapping guests. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 followed in 2002.
A deadpan dog detective in a suit and his "hyperkinetic rabbity thing" partner road-trip across America's tackiest tourist traps chasing an escaped carnival bigfoot. LucasArts' 1993 point-and-click classic was sharp, absurd, and voiced by the actual voice of Disney's Goofy.
"The Mother of All Games"—a turn-based artillery tank battler where physics, wind, and an absurd weapon shop turned a single shared keyboard into hours of hot-seat chaos and sudden laughter.
The city-building game that made zoning feel like destiny. SimCity 2000 traded the original's flat grid for a gorgeous isometric view with terrain elevation, underground layers, and a tech tree capped by arcologies — massive self-contained future cities that could blast into space. For a generation of 90s kids on the family PC, it was equal parts urban-planner simulator and disaster-unleashing sandbox.
An elevator game disguised as a skyscraper builder: stack offices, condos, and hotels a hundred floors high, then obsess over elevator schedules while tiny tenants flash red with rage. One of the weirdest, most hypnotic PC sims of the 90s.
An online multiplayer paintball game — teams, squads, and ranked stats — played over dial-up through America Online's games area in the late 1990s, back when premium online games billed by the hour and the meter was always ticking.
Will Wright's evolution sim promised everything from primordial cell to galactic empire — and its Creature Creator was an all-timer. Then the game itself arrived: shallow where the hype was deep, and wrapped in DRM so hated it drew class-action lawsuits and an Amazon review-bombing for the ages.
This MMORPG wasn't about saving the galaxy—it was about living in it. Crafters built everything from blasters to starships, player cities elected mayors, and Jedi were so rare and risky (permanent death, at first) that seeing one felt like a legend sighting. Then the NGE overhaul flattened it all, and players never quite forgave it.
Blizzard's genre-defining real-time strategy game — a three-way war between the human Terrans, the insectoid Zerg, and the psionic Protoss. Beloved for its finely balanced factions and bottomless multiplayer, it consumed LAN parties and Battle.net, and in South Korea it became a televised national sport.
The 1993 haunted-mansion puzzle game that came on two CD-ROMs when most PCs had no CD drive, and sold the drives anyway. Ghostly actors in a pre-rendered house, 19th-century brainteasers, a toymaker named Stauf (an anagram of Faust), and Bill Gates calling it "the new standard in interactive entertainment."
Lucasfilm Games' 1990 pirate comedy: Guybrush Threepwood, a kid who wants to be a pirate, the ghost pirate LeChuck, and sword fights settled by insults ("You fight like a dairy farmer." "How appropriate. You fight like a cow."). Ron Gilbert built it so you almost couldn't die, which made it the adventure game people finished instead of quitting.
Will Wright's dollhouse simulator where you controlled virtual lives, sent them to work, made them fall in love, and then deleted the pool ladder and watched them drown. Launched in February 2000 by Maxis and EA, The Sims became the best-selling PC game of its era—a mania that never ended, spawning sequels that kept the franchise dominant for decades.
Your Sims could finally grow up, grow old and die, and their kids had their noses. Maxis's September 2004 sequel added aging, genetics, aspirations with wants and fears, a full 3D camera, and alien abductions that could leave a man pregnant. It sold a million copies in ten days, a record at the time, and kept selling expansions through 2008.
The backyard treehouse where two opossum buddies invited you to click everything just to see what it did. Brøderbund's 1991 edutainment hit dressed up music-making, mazes, and a money game in cozy backyard charm — and yes, they were opossums, no matter what your memory insists.
The MMO pioneer that proved persistent online worlds at scale were possible. Ultima Online's unrestricted player-versus-player combat, player housing, and emergent economies made it the first true virtual society — and the blueprint for every MMO that followed.
The haunted house where every click was a gag. Gahan Wilson's The Ultimate Haunted House turned the New Yorker cartoonist's macabre humor into a 1994 CD-ROM maze of 13 rooms, 13 hidden keys, and monster-building against a clock striking 13 — less horror game, more interactive cartoon funhouse.
Blizzard's 1995 orcs-versus-humans strategy game: fog of war, a mini-map, and the network game that ate dorm LANs and dial-up evenings over Kali. More than 3 million sold, the design StarCraft grew from, and Blizzard's half of the rivalry with Westwood that made real-time strategy the PC genre of the late '90s.
Blizzard's fantasy strategy epic gave the world Arthas, hero units, and four armies worth arguing about — then its map editor quietly gave the world an entire new genre: DotA, the custom map that paved the way for the MOBA era, was built inside it.
Strap into a cockpit on the carrier Tiger's Claw and fly against the Kilrathi — cat-faced aliens in a war the game dared to let you lose. Wing Commander was World War II in space on a 1990 PC, and it made every other game on the shelf suddenly look cheap.
![Video thumbnail — Wolfenstein 3D - Episode 1: Escape From Castle Wolfenstein - Floor 1 (E01L01) [MS-DOS]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jND1EBIe-aQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
May 1992: Apogee uploads id Software's free first episode to the bulletin boards and the PC learns to run and gun in first person. Escape Castle Wolfenstein as B.J. Blazkowicz, shoot everything in a uniform, find the hidden Pac-Man level, order the rest by mail. The "grandfather of 3D shooters" and the game that proved shareware was a business.
Team17's 1995 artillery game: teams of cartoon worms with bazookas, exploding sheep and the Banana Bomb, lobbing shots across a crumbling landscape while you wait on the wind. Invented by a computer-shop employee on a graphing calculator, it sold around five million copies across every platform of the decade.
The little black friends list that knew what game everyone was playing, let you message them from inside a full-screen match and join their server with a click. It launched in January 2004, hit 7 million users by 2007, was sold to MTV for $102 million and shut down in 2015, the same year Discord appeared to do the same job.
Build the exhibits, hire the keepers, keep the guests happy — and then, inevitably, delete the lion fence just to see what happens. Zoo Tycoon was the zoo-management sim on every family PC and school computer lab in the early 2000s, and everyone who played it broke it on purpose at least once.