Do you ever feel like games just aren’t the same anymore?
You’re not having a crisis, you’re having a correct thought. Before developers could try and woo you with path-traced puddles and photo-realistic follicles of facial hair, they had to make games that were, ya know, actually worth playing. Games with ideas in them. Games that assumed you had a brain and were prepared to use it. I know, because I was there.
They were games so unique and trailblazing that, if they were released today, they would sell ten million copies, generate hundreds of useful and pornographic mods in equal measure, and enrage comment sections at IGN for giving them 6/10 for reasons only known to San Francisco journo-activists.
The 1990s was, by any honest assessment, the greatest decade in PC gaming history. What follows is the definitive list of the games you should have experienced. If you haven’t, fix that. Most of them cost less than a pint and run on a potato. There’s no excuse.
1. Half-Life (1998)
Before Half-Life, first-person shooters were corridors and keys. After Half-Life, they were worlds. Valve’s debut game deleted the template and wrote a new one. No cutscenes. No interruptions. Just Gordon Freeman, a crowbar, and a research facility going extremely wrong around you in real time. The headcrabs still make people involuntarily audible. The marines still flank you. The alien dimension at the end still feels like someone ran out of money in the best possible way.
Half-Life 2 is the game everyone remembers. The original is the one that made it possible. It’s stranger, harder, and more atmospheric than your nostalgia will have prepared you for.
Play it today: Half-Life on Steam for £6.99. Or better: play Black Mesa, the fan remake that spent fourteen years being made by people who loved the original more than was probably healthy. It’s in most ways superior and well worth the money.
2. Doom (1993)
There are games before Doom and games after Doom. That’s not an exaggeration. id Software’s masterpiece invented the modern first-person shooter, created the concept of shareware distribution, introduced the modding community, and accidentally caused a moral panic in American Congress, which is the greatest endorsement any video game has ever received.
The original game is still playable and still effective. The atmosphere in the later levels, the marble, the lava, the sense that something has gone very wrong with the spatial logic of hell, holds up in a way that straightforward technical improvements cannot explain. It was designed by people who understood tension, and tension doesn’t date.
Play it today: The original is on Steam for £3.99. For the full modern treatment with online play and thousands of user-made WADs (the community’s word for level packs, not a typo), download the free source port GZDoom and lose several months of your life.
3. Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994)
The best Star Wars game ever made. Better than any of the recent ones. Better, arguably, than most of the films. TIE Fighter put you in the cockpit of the Empire’s forces, gave you forty missions of escalating complexity and beauty, and made you feel genuinely, uncomplicatedly loyal to a galactic dictatorship, which is a remarkable creative achievement by any measure.
The flight model was sophisticated without being impenetrable. The mission design was inventive. The story had genuine political intrigue. And flying a TIE Interceptor through an asteroid field while the John Williams-adjacent score swelled was, for its time, simply the most cinematic thing a computer had ever done.
Play it today: The Special Edition is on GOG for around £8. It runs on modern systems without configuration nightmares. A HOTAS flight stick makes it considerably better; a keyboard and mouse makes it considerably more historically authentic.
4. SimCity 2000 (1993)
SimCity 2000 is directly responsible for thousands of adults who became professional urban planners, architects, or people who just spend a lot of time thinking about zoning regulations at parties. Maxis’s city builder was the game that made infrastructure interesting. Not through narrative or action. Through the quiet satisfaction of watching a well-designed city function.
The isometric view, the underground water pipes, the power networks, the advisors who were never satisfied. All of it combined into something that could absorb an entire afternoon without you noticing. Games have since made city builders more sophisticated in every measurable way. None of them have been more compelling.
Play it today: GOG carries it for a few pounds and it runs without issue. Alternatively, OpenSC2K is a fan-made open-source remake in progress if you want to investigate what twenty-first century SimCity enthusiasm looks like.
5. Sid Meier’s Pirates! (1987 / 2004 remake)
The original Pirates! was ahead of its time by approximately fifteen years. An open-world game in 1987, it let you sail the Caribbean, sword-fight governors’ daughters, divide plunder among a crew whose loyalty you had to maintain, dig for buried treasure, and dance badly at formal balls. It was extraordinary. It still is.
The 2004 remake by Firaxis is the version most people played and is the version that holds up best today. Polished, charming, and still one of the few games where you can be simultaneously a merchant, a pirate, a spy, and a dancing enthusiast.
Play it today: The 2004 remake is on Steam for £6.99 and runs beautifully on modern hardware. If you want the original for the authentic 1987 experience and the right to feel smug about it, GOG occasionally stocks it.
6. Syndicate (1993)
Bullfrog’s isometric action-strategy game cast you as a corporation deploying cyborg agents through a rain-slicked cyberpunk city in pursuit of objectives that grew steadily darker as the game progressed. The aesthetic, derived from equal parts Blade Runner and corporate anxiety, was visionary. The gameplay loop of equipping agents, upgrading them, sending them into the field and watching the chaos unfold was genuinely addictive.
Syndicate was one of the first games to make you feel genuinely uncomfortable about what you were doing, which is a harder achievement than it sounds and one that many subsequent games have tried and failed to replicate.
Play it today: GOG stocks the original and its expansion for a few pounds. It requires some patience with the dated interface but rewards that patience considerably. The 2012 FPS remake by Starbreeze: do not play the 2012 FPS remake by Starbreeze.
7. Day of the Tentacle (1993)
LucasArts at its absolute peak. A time-travel comedy puzzle game in which three characters occupy three different centuries simultaneously and solve puzzles by passing objects back and forth through time, Day of the Tentacle was the moment point-and-click adventure games became genuinely cinematic. If you want to understand the full scope of what LucasArts achieved in this period, our LucasArts retrospective covers the whole golden era.
The writing is slick and genuinely witty, while the playable characters, a daft combination of caricatured college misfits, remain highly memorable. As for the villain? A purple tentacle who grows arms as a result of an ill-advised slurp of toxic sludge and is now hellbent on taking over the world. It was funny then and it’s funny now.
The animation set a new standard, bringing high-concept Looney Tunes expressionism to the PC and turning every frame into a playable cartoon. The puzzles have a brilliant temporal logic that sidesteps the usual inventory-hunt frustration entirely. Solutions arrive as punchlines rather than conclusions — retrieving a fake barf from the ceiling in the present day to deliberately disqualify a mummy in a “best dressed human” contest in the future is just one such example. Trust me, it all makes sense.
Play it today: Day of the Tentacle Remastered is on Steam for £10.99, with the option to toggle between remastered and original graphics at will. Play in remastered until a puzzle stumps you, then toggle to original to feel as your ancestors felt.
8. Duke Nukem 3D (1996)
Let’s not be coy about what Duke Nukem 3D is. It’s a game in which a wisecracking, steroid-abusing action hero shoots pig-faced police officers, interacts with strippers, and delivers one-liners borrowed from every American action film ever made, all while navigating some of the most inventive level design in first-person shooter history. The crassness is not incidental. It is the point. It is approximately half the reason people still talk about this game thirty years later, and we love it.
What 3D Realms understood, and what their imitators consistently failed to grasp, is that Duke’s absurdist machismo worked because the game was in on the joke. The strip clubs, the cinema marquees showing fictional films, the bathroom mirrors Duke preens in before delivering a line directly to camera – all of it was a knowing send-up of the genre’s own testosterone poisoning, executed with enough craft and affection that it became the thing it was parodying and nobody minded. The level design was genuinely brilliant: real-world environments rendered in a game engine for the first time, interactive and reactive in ways that contemporaries weren’t even attempting. If you want to understand what made this era of PC gaming so special, it’s all part of the same story.
It is crass, it is loud, it is completely unreconstructed, and it remains one of the most purely enjoyable shooters ever made. If that offends you, Duke has a specific suggestion and we’re not going to print it here.
Play it today: Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour is on Steam for £12.99, with a new episode and restored audio commentary from the original developers, who are candid in ways you might not expect. Alternatively, the free source port EDuke32 gives you the full game on modern hardware with high-resolution support, mouselook, and access to decades of community-made content — provided you own a copy of the original data files.
9. Heroes of Might and Magic III (1999)
The definitive entry in the series that made turn-based strategy games feel like an indulgence rather than a discipline. Heroes III asked you to build castles, recruit fantastical armies, explore hex-based maps of enormous scope, and conquer territories on a timetable entirely of your own devising. It had no clock. It had no pressure. It had only the quiet satisfaction of accumulating power and deploying it thoughtfully.
The multiplayer was, and remains, genuinely ruinous to friendships and productivity alike. We mean this as a compliment.
Play it today: GOG stocks it for a few pounds with the Complete Edition including both expansions. Install the HD Mod from the community to make it playable at modern resolutions without sacrificing anything that made it essential.
10. Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000)
The greatest RPG ever made and a game that was so good it caused arguments about games as art twenty years before that was a fashionable conversation to have. BioWare’s epic took the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset and wrapped it in a story of genuine emotional complexity, featuring companions with actual personalities, a villain whose motivation you might quietly understand, and a scope of world-building that has rarely been equalled.
The sequel improved on the original in virtually every department while retaining everything that made it extraordinary. The writing, the atmosphere, the sense that choices carried weight. If you have never played it, the Enhanced Edition is the version to start with and you should clear a significant portion of your calendar.
Play it today: Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition is on Steam for £17.99, with widescreen support, additional companions, and quality-of-life improvements that don’t compromise the original experience.
11. The Operative: No One Lives Forever (2000)
The spy genre’s finest video game hour and a title that has spent twenty years being unavailable for purchase due to a legal dispute between publishers that’s too tedious to summarise but too important to not mention. Monolith’s action game cast you as Cate Archer, a 1960s UNITY operative dealing with an international criminal organisation called H.A.R.M., and delivered something genuinely rare: a comedy game that was actually funny.
The writing was exceptional. The level design was inventive. The gadgets were brilliant. It deserves to be on this list precisely because it currently cannot be purchased legally anywhere, which makes its quality even more remarkable in retrospect.
Play it today: This is complicated. No One Lives Forever isn’t currently available on any digital platform due to unresolved rights issues between Activision, Fox, and Monolith. Physical copies can be found. Emulation exists. This is a situation the games preservation community is correctly frustrated about, and if it’s ever resolved, buy it immediately.
12. Dungeon Keeper (1997)
Bullfrog’s darkest and most gleeful game put you in charge of a dungeon rather than the heroes raiding it, which was in 1997 a genuinely fresh inversion of the genre’s logic. You dug tunnels, attracted imps, demons, vampires, and warlocks to your growing underground empire, trapped heroes who blundered into your domain, and generally managed evil as a logistics problem.
The humour was pitch-black. The narrator was magnificent. Peter Molyneux’s name was on it, which means it promised more than it delivered. What it did deliver was still remarkable.
Play it today: GOG has Dungeon Keeper Gold for £1.29, which includes the expansion and represents frankly extraordinary value for what is still a distinctly inventive game. Don’t, under any circumstances, play the 2014 mobile version. Pretend it does not exist.
13. Myst (1993)
Myst was the best-selling PC game of all time from 1993 to 2002 and remains one of the most divisive games ever made. You will either find its slow, gorgeous, logic-driven island exploration profoundly atmospheric and uniquely immersive, or you will wander around for six hours clicking on things without progress and conclude that it was designed by someone with a profound disrespect for the player’s time. Both reactions are documented, both are valid.
For those in the first camp: Myst is an experience unlike almost anything else in gaming. The world feels genuinely ancient. The puzzles have internal logic. The silence is used as a design tool. It’s extraordinary.
Play it today: Myst (2021 remake) is on Steam for £26.99, with full 3D graphics and VR support. The original is also on Steam if you prefer your atmosphere at 256 colours.
14. Quake (1996)
Where Doom was colourful and arcadey, Quake was brown and genuinely unsettling, a game that felt like it had been designed inside a nightmare about gothic architecture. id Software’s follow-up moved to true 3D, introduced mouselook, popularised online multiplayer deathmatch, and produced a soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails that is still the most appropriate piece of music ever attached to a video game.
The single-player is atmospheric and strange. The multiplayer invented the competitive FPS genre. The community has been making maps, mods, and total conversions for thirty years without showing any sign of stopping.
Play it today: Quake (Enhanced Edition) is on Steam for £7.99, with remastered graphics, controller support, and new episodes by MachineGames that respect the original completely. It’s a definitive version.
15. Thief: The Dark Project (1998)
Looking Glass Studios made Thief in 1998 and in doing so invented the stealth game as a serious genre. You played Garrett, a thief in a gaslit medieval-industrial city, and the game’s fundamental question was not “can you kill everyone” but “can you get through without anyone knowing you were there.” Light and shadow were tools. Sound was a resource. Patience was a mechanic.
Thief was, and remains, one of the most atmospherically sustained games ever made. The haunted mansion level, Robbing the Cradle, is among the finest single levels in gaming history and still produces genuine dread on repeated play.
Play it today: Thief Gold is on Steam and GOG for a few pounds. Install the Thief Enhancement Pack from the community for widescreen support and modern resolution compatibility. Don’t play Thief (2014). We cannot stress this enough.
16. Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996)
Westwood Studios released the original Command & Conquer in 1995 and invented the modern real-time strategy game. Then they released Red Alert in 1996 and perfected it. The premise is the most gloriously deranged starting point for a strategy game ever committed to a design document: Einstein travels back in time to eliminate Hitler, accidentally erases the Nazi party from history, and inadvertently allows the Soviet Union to conquer Europe unopposed. Westwood leaned into it with full conviction. The live-action cutscenes feature actors delivering lines about nuclear warheads and Allied tank divisions with the kind of straight-faced commitment that tips directly into camp genius.
The gameplay underneath the madness was, and remains, exceptional. Two asymmetric factions with genuinely different units, tactics, and personalities. Base-building that rewarded planning. Resource management that punished complacency. Multiplayer skirmishes that could consume entire evenings without anyone at the table noticing. The formula Westwood established here is still being iterated on by developers today, thirty years later, which is the clearest possible measure of how precisely they got it right.
Red Alert also arrived at exactly the right cultural moment, the mid-nineties peak of Cold War paranoia nostalgia, and understood its audience completely. It’s strategic, absurd, brilliantly designed, and has a Kane cameo so inexplicable it became one of gaming’s great mysteries. The fact that Westwood no longer exists and EA has done very little useful with the IP since acquiring them is one of the genuine tragedies of the games industry.
Play it today: Command & Conquer Remastered Collection is on Steam for £17.99, covering both the original C&C and Red Alert with overhauled graphics, remastered music, and the full mission packs. Crucially, EA open-sourced the remaster’s code, meaning the modding community has been extremely busy. It is the definitive way to play both games and one of the better remasters the industry has produced.
17. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991)
The sequel that surpassed the original, which was itself a masterpiece, which makes LeChuck’s Revenge either a miracle or an argument that LucasArts in 1991 had simply figured something out that everyone else was still guessing at. Guybrush Threepwood’s pursuit of the legendary treasure of Big Whoop, across four islands and through a series of puzzles that are genuinely clever rather than deliberately obtuse, remains the high-water mark of the point-and-click adventure game. For the full story on LucasArts and the era that produced it, our retrospective covers the golden age in full.
The writing is still funny. The art holds up. The ending remains divisive and the subject of conversation among people who played it as children and are still working out how they feel.
Play it today: Monkey Island 2 Special Edition is on Steam for £6.99, with the same toggle between remastered and original graphics as Day of the Tentacle. Also consider Return to Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert’s return to the series in 2022 and a genuine continuation worth your time.
18. Resident Evil (1996)
The PC port of Capcom’s PlayStation survival horror classic arrived with tank controls, fixed camera angles, and a script so magnificently bad that “master of unlocking” and “sandwich” have entered gaming mythology. These things are features. Resident Evil invented the survival horror genre’s grammar: limited resources, backtracking, save ribbons, doors that load incredibly slowly because something might be on the other side. All of it delivered through Spencer Mansion, which remains one of gaming’s finest environments.
It’s difficult to play now without at least partial awareness of its limitations, but played in the right spirit, on a dark evening, it still produces genuine tension.
Play it today: The original PC port exists in various forms but Resident Evil HD Remaster is on Steam for £15.99, a faithful remaster of the 2002 GameCube remake that addressed every technical limitation without compromising the atmosphere. This is the definitive version.
19. Diablo (1996)
Blizzard’s dungeon crawler invented an entire genre of games that are still being made thirty years later, which is a level of influence that very few creative works of any medium can claim. The procedurally generated dungeons of Tristram, the click-to-kill combat loop, the loot system that made finding a rare item feel like a genuine event. All of it was new in 1996. All of it spawned an industry.
The original is cruder than its successors and better for it. There’s a grimness to the atmosphere, a genuine sense of dread in the cathedral levels, that the sequels’ higher production values somewhat dissipated.
Play it today: Diablo + Hellfire is available on GOG for £8.99, and the fan project DevilutionX has reverse-engineered the original engine to run natively on modern systems, including Linux and even mobile devices. For the best modern Diablo experience, Diablo IV has returned the series to its darker roots.
20. System Shock (1994)
And here is the one you may not have played, which means this is the most important entry on the list. Looking Glass Studios’ System Shock predated Half-Life’s narrative-first approach by four years, created the template that BioShock and Deus Ex later built empires on, and introduced SHODAN, gaming’s finest villain, an AI who has become contemptuous of the humans who created her and expresses this contempt with magnificent articulacy.
The original game is demanding by modern standards. Its interface is a product of its era and requires patience, but what it contains is extraordinary. The 2023 remake by Nightdive Studios rebuilt it from the ground up while preserving everything essential, and is the version we’d recommend unreservedly to anyone who hasn’t played it.
Play it today: System Shock Remake (2023) is on Steam for £29.99 and is one of the most faithful and well-executed remakes in gaming history. The original 1994 Enhanced Edition is also on Steam for £6.99 if you want the authentic experience and the bragging rights that come with it.
There you have it. Twenty games from the decade that PC gaming proved what it was capable of, and a generation of developers discovered that an unlimited budget wasn’t required to make something genuinely extraordinary. Most of the above cost less than a latte. All of them will outlast whatever you played last weekend.
The disc may be gathering dust somewhere in your parents’ loft. The digital versions are waiting for you right now. There’s really no excuse.
See also: The 25 Best PC Games of All Time — the definitive all-eras list, for when you’ve finished these and want more. And if the itch for PC advocacy is fully scratched, here’s why PC gaming is still the best way to play.
