The Unsung Heroes of PC Gaming History

An anonymous reader writes "The history of PC gaming is littered with many well-known and highly regarded titles, but what about the titles you mightn't have heard of? This list of the top games in the history of the PC includes the usual suspects, such as Half-Life and Doom, but also some often overlooked PC games including such classics as Elite, the space trading RPG developed in 1984 by two college friends from Cambridge for the Acorn and BB Micro systems. The game used a truly elegant programming hack to create over 200 different worlds to explore while using 32kb of memory, all with 3D wireframes. Also in the list is Robot War, which required players to actually code the participants, and one of the first online multiplayer RPGs, Neverwinter Nights, which introduced many of the developer and user behaviors, such as custom guilds, that have made modern RPGs so popular." What's your favorite classic game that always gets overlooked in these kinds of lists? My vote goes for Star Control 2.

Comments

Quake, Ultima Online, RTS games?

[acid06]

I think this list tried to sound like: "Hey, look how cool we are for showing off this old-ass games instead of newer ones"

However, they missed the whole RTS genre and some classics. Say whatever you will, but whenever you come up with a top games of all time list, you must include these titles:

FPS: Doom, Quake, Half-Life
MMORPG: Ultima Online, World of Warcraft
RTS: Starcraft
RPG: Diablo, your favorite Ultima, NetHack

Specifically, I find it unforgivable to miss Quake and Starcraft. Quake basically defined the initial 3D FPS genre, made the concept of game mods much more relevant and was generally responsible for kickstarting multiplayer over the internet in FPS games. Hell, a lot of titles still have a console where you can type "bind x action" and stick to the +attack, -attack, etc, syntax.