I can't believe minesweeper and solitaire aren't there.
This is actually probably a good point. How many people started gaming because of these two games?
I can't believe minesweeper and solitaire aren't there.
The Spelunky one is weird
there have been literally hundreds of other and arguably better roguelikes before it, I never understood the appeal of Spelunky and I can't imagine it had a major impact on the video game industry but I could be wrong. Can anybody explain, please?
Answer: it's seriously one of the best designed videogames ever made, and has exerted a huge influence on its genre in particular and game developers in general over the past half decade.
I think if people are saying Crysis should be on it, I'd say Far Cry should. It was what Crysis came from.
This is actually probably a good point. How many people started gaming because of these two games?
Broken Age included to stir controversy, and I like Tim Schafer.
Otherwise that's a pretty astute list.
I think if people are saying Crysis should be on it, I'd say Far Cry should. It was what Crysis came from.
I think Telltale ought to have one place there, but I'm not sure exactly which one to pick. But their episodic model have influenced many other games, and revitalized the adventure genre, even if it became more like old FMV adventures in terms of gameplay.
Well, the difference is that it isn't actuallya roguelike, but a game that mixed influences from roguelikes in a new genre, in a game that was noticed and impacted many others.
Wheere is free space 2
Spacewar! (1962)
The Oregon Trail (1971)
Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)
"Or Operation Flashpoint. That started the whole "games for the army" thing."
No, that would be Delta Force.
How can you have dota and world of warcraft but not warcraft 3? Warcraft 3 is easily the most influencial game of the 2000s. League of legends, world of warcraft, dota, and even elements of starcraft 2 only existed because warcraft 3 existed.
Same day. All versions released November 14 1996 in the US, though the Saturn version hit a couple weeks early in the UK.Did tomb raider release on oc the same day as on saturn/ps1? Or was it a late port?
Also having been recently playing this game, I really agree on the quiet exploration. I still LOVE something like Tomb Raider 2 where it can get pretty busy with human enemies, but the isolation in TR1 is just godly when it just about Lara vs Environment sans a couple human enemies as you explore the levels to uncover their lost secrets.
Hey all,
This was my baby for the past seven months or so. It's been a long time coming. If you're at all interested in the history of PC gaming I hope you read the actual article, because I think who we got to write entries about these games, and what they had to say, is the real treat. Anyone can make a list of 50 games. But I really wanted us to have something to say about them, and for some real heavyweights to have their voices included.
Getting Paul Neurath (Ultima Underworld, System Shock), Chris Avellone (Planescape Torment, KOTOR 2), Sid Meier (Sid Meier's), Jane Jensen (King's Quest V, Gabriel Knight), Jeff Green (CGW, once our main competitor!) and some other amazing people from the games industry to write about why these games matter was, well, pretty cool.
dota takes its place
warcraft 3, the RTS game, was not important
i think if both warcraft 3 & dota were important, it would be there like half life & counterstrike are both there
those lists are pretty 90s heavy. I get that this was the age of games journalism(particularly for PC Gamer), but there were some really good games between SpaceWar and Quake that the PC Gamer camp never seemed to be aware of but the Computer and Gaming World folks were always on top of.
damned shame the lesser publication won.
Jeff Green knows about those guys.
<3The list is great, and it's just the nature of the beast that you can't include everything in a finite list in something with as rich a history and diversity as video games, even if only a section of it.
Thanks for putting it together, and thanks for acknowledging Counter-Strike and DotA as 'games' even if they're mods. It's the experience and not the development model or monetization that matters and Lord knows those games were enjoyed by millions before becoming retail games.
I don't think you can draw much correlation between the games each magazine covered in the 90s and what we cover today or in this list. Completely different staff, PCG US and UK were wholly separate entities at the time, and it makes sense that historically CGW would've covered older games: the magazine started almost 10 years earlier!
When I started doing research for this list, I did actually look back at two or three different CGW lists of the best games of all time. There were a lot of great games on them! But there have also been a ton of important and influential PC games in the late 90s and 2000s that we're really seeing the effects of today.
I've got no dog in a PCG vs. CGW of old fight, though. Jeff Green was the first person I thought of that I wanted to get to contribute writing to this list.
<3
Same day. All versions released November 14 1996 in the US, though the Saturn version hit a couple weeks early in the UK.
Totally agree. I've been playing this game for the first time, and it feels super awful to play a third person game in 3D without any kind of analog control at this point, but the game holds up.
Actually hearing that there are more human enemies in Tomb Raider 2 makes me want to play it less.
Tower defense and moba maps existed in Starcraft first (dota was based on aeon of strife)A game that happens to be the most popular RTS in history, whose diverse mod scene gives birth to two of the most popular genre today (MOBA and TD), is not important? Fine.
Indeed. Sad that we're coming up on two decades without an entry in the series.Solid list
I wish I lived in a world where the X-Wing series had greater influence :'(
How is dark souls on the honorable mentions list LOL
It's a port, and not to mention a dog shit one at that