RetroGaming

• MECHWARRIOR 2
• QUAKE 2
• Broken Sword 1
• Half-Life 1
• Jedi knight dark Forces 2
• Police Quest 1
• Aliens vs predator
• System shock 2
• Unreal tournament
• Star Trek Starfleet Academy
• Zork 1 and 2
• Heavy Gear 2
• Jazz Jackrabbit 2
• Pandemonium
• Total annihilation

Baldur's Gate
Lords of the Realm 2
Descent (1, 2, and 3)
Sim City 2000

Half Life. While I am too young to have played it when it released, it still was an astounding game for its time.

Obligatory shout-out for any Bullfrog games of that era, especially Dungeon Keeper 1 & 2. Lionhead's Black & White is 1 year out of your window, but such a good game.

Also:
Syndicate Wars
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Grim Fandango
Rollercoaster Tycoon
Descent
Grand Theft Auto

• FFVII (and VIII)
• Homeworld
• Shadowrun (Sega Genesis version)
• Parasite Eve
• Wing Commander Series
• Colony Wars: Vengeance
• Gran Turismo 2
• Freespace (can't believe I forgot about that one)

...I'm in my late forties, so pre-2000 was my peak gaming time. As a result the list could go on and on and on....

• Quake II
• The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
• Power Dolls
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert
• StarCraft with the Brood War expansion
• Fallout
• Star Wars: Dark Forces
• The Oregon Trail (obviously)
• Syndicate
• Star Wars: TIE Fighter (X Wing was good too, but TIE Fighter was better)
• Dune II: Battle for Arrakis
• Ultima Underworld: Stygian Abyss
• SimCity (1989)
• X-COM: UFO Defense

Total Annihilation
Starcraft

Duke Nukem 3d

Some of my favorites in a variety of genre:

• TIE Fighter and/or Freespace
• Planescape: Torment
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
• Pharaoh

Also one of Sierra's adventure games. A popular one is King's Quest VI.

Civilization II

Settlers

X-COM: UFO defence

Monkey Island

Out of This World - 1991

Ultima VII - 1992

Doom - 1993

Magic Carpet - 1994

Myth: The Fallen Lords - 1997

Ultima Online - 1997

Die by the Sword - 1998

Quake 3 Arena - 1999 and Quake 3 Weapons Factory Arena

Everquest - 1999

My top of the pops are:

• Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (With Tim Curry)
• Dungeon Keeper

Honorable mentions:

• Starflight
• Pirates! Gold Plus.
• Loom (Which is sadly ignored despite it's fantastic gameplay mechanic).
• Ultima VII
• Sam & Max Hit the Road
• Lands of Lore
• Cannon Fodder
• Caesar II (Plebs are needed!)
• Broken Sword
• Theme Hospital
• Turok
• System Shock 2 (I think it is playable in Win98? Probably in Win95 but it is a stretch.)

The dig. The game is inspired by an idea originally created for Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories series.

Definitely go and find Marathon and it's sequels, preferably in their original form on the Mac. But you don't need to go through all that trouble necessarily, Bungie released all the source some time ago and it is all freely available for new hardware now.

Command and Conquer: Tiberium Sun

Tomb Raider

Mortal Kombat 3

Streets of Rage

Metal Gear Solid

Duke Nukem 3D

Metal Slug

Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy. I still own this series on steam and play it when I get nostalgic.

Tie-fighter was a good one.

And StarCraft like someone mentioned and Warcraft.

Maniac Mansion. I never got far, but it's a silly little point and click game.

Anything by Blizzard

Anything by id

Most things by Maxis

Half Life

Deus Ex bends the rule a bit, being 2000, but I can't not mention it

The fact that nobody has said Warcraft II yet saddens me.

I spent hours playing Transport Tycoon.

Quake 1, UT99

ZZT is number one for sure

Sierra's Quest for Glory series

Heroes of Might and Magic

Warcraft 2 slapped. Was WC3 also in the 90's?

When I was. Small child in the early 90s, my dad was a network engineer and he setup our family computer with DOS and lots of games. I don't remember all of them but I do remember the following:

• Various arcade games that began running too fast to play after he upgraded the processor
• Commander Keen
• After Dark, which wasn't really a game so much as a cool and highly adjustable screen saver. But for some reason me and my siblings spent many hours playing this "game".

Anyway, I guess Commander Keen is my only real suggestion here and I do believe it's a great game. Just wish I could remember some other games he had installed on the DOS system for us that weren't baby games like Mickey's ABCs and 123s.

Jazz Jackrabbit Epic Pinball Elder Scrolls Daggerfall Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 Heretic and Hexen

What I spent ages on:

• It came from the desert
• Moria
• Nethack
• Sierra games, PQ and KQ and Manhunter in particular
• Rainbow Islands
• Hillsfar
• Motor Massacre
• Monkey Island, first 3
• Populous
• IK+
• North and South (multiplayer)
• Nuclear War (multiplayer)

Kings Quest 5, 6, & 7

Jill of the Jungle trilogy (free on GOG!)

Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth

Torin's Passage

... Can you tell my dad was a Sierra Online fan? ^^'

Transport Tycoon

Bubble Bobble

Most of my 80s/90s gaming was console games, but here's a bunch of computer games that I liked back then :

Lemmings 1 and 2 (the tribes). You can try 3 if you're curious, it's kind of its own thing, different scale and some think it's kind of not the same game anymore. 3D is interesting, but not easy on the eyes.

Lands of Lore. Very good real time maze dungeon-crawler with many obscure secrets, and full voice acting (that blew my mind back then. And there's Patrick Stewart in the cast).

Lands of Lore 2 is a very ambitious sequel in 3D, with FMV incorporated directly into the 3D world. It's quite hard and weird, very creepy at times, moreso if you're the kind who stray off the path.

Creatures. Life simulation with a bunch of furry things you can make hatch and take care of. You teach them to speak, make them breed, watch them interact with the world, reinforce their behaviour with friendly scratches or slaps, and hopefully make them smarter (or miserable, it's your choice). The game simulates their neural system, internal chemistry, immune system, DNA, it's kind of crazy. Requires typing to speak. 3 is the most complete version but requires a bit of tinkering for it to work.

There are tons. The game that I considered my first "proper" game was World of Xeen. It's phenomenal. And it's actually two games. Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen and Might and Magic V: Darkside of Xeen. When you combined them you could travel between the two sides of the flat world and had more quests to solve and an ultimate end.

It was always hard to make space for them even though we had a gigantic 250 MB hard drive. Each game took up 20-30 MB.

Edit: Other must haves: Jazz Jackrabbit, Commander Keen, Doom, Quake, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

StarCraft Diablo1 MechWarrior 2 Need for speed 2

Starcraft!

Oh what a wonderful chance to share.

Princess Maker 2. Great life sim game where you raise a girl and try to make her into a princess. (Includes optional final fantasy combat and exploration)

SimCity. If you don't know what that is you need to experience it.

Tank Wars, great turn based shooter.

You might wanna consider getting qbasic going on it. There's a large collection of homebrew games for it. http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/topten/topten.shtml

Terranigma. Still my favorite RPG to this day and one of my favorite games to this day, but it's hard to gush about this game without any spoilers and its written in a way that requires a bit of attention from the player. You do need to either have an EU / PAL SNES or emulate it though, because it never released in the Americas due to publisher drama.

Secret of Mana is great too, or if you already played that, Seiken Densetsu 3, which is the sequel title that never got released in the West, but got fan translated roms out there. Seiken Densetsu 2 being SoM, and the original Seiken Densetsu 1 was released as Final Fantasy Adventures and sort of a side story to the Final Fantasy franchise, which got dropped and became its own franchise with the second game. SD3 (or "Secret of Mana 2") is a significant step up to the first game in many aspects and even has multiple characters & branching endings based on your character selections.

On the PC definitely the Command & Conquer's Tiberian series, starting with the first game and a GDI campaign run, followed by a NOD campaign run. It got those cheesy but amazingly entertaining little clips between the missions that actually get you immersed into the story and it has a killer soundtrack too. It's one of the many great franchises ruined by EA, but I heard the remastered version is actually decent (I still won't buy because I still boycott them). The already suggested Red Alert is a spin-off series with some references to the Tiberian series, so I would not start with that one until you played the Tiberian one.