RetroGaming

Total Annihilation. It was released in 1997 and brought inspiration to games like Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation.

Also, mother fuckin' Cap'N Crunch's Crunchling Adventure. I don't have to explain that one.

I spent hours playing Transport Tycoon.

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

Pc games I really loved masters of orion 2

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?

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? ^^'

Bubble Bobble

Transport Tycoon

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.

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)

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.

Quake, Doom, Half-Life, One Must Fall 2097, Microsoft Encarta's Mind Maze

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

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

Blood (1997) Pretty much the best OG build engine game IMO.

StarCraft Diablo1 MechWarrior 2 Need for speed 2

Homeworld

Gex

Mario Teaches Typing

All of the ‘Blaster Learning System’ games like Math Blasters: In Search of Spot

I was pretty young still so those educational ones were hella fun and my parents would let me play as much as I wanted

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.

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

My mom got us this “Kids Cube” game collection in CompUSA when I was a kid and there were some gems in there. I’ve been looking for years to try and find the list of games but it’s one of those cheap dollar bin software collections. Anywho, some of the games I loved from that included:

Battle Bugs Jetpack Mice Movers Loader Larry

Non Kids Cube games: Doom (duh) Hero’s of might and Magic 3 Kings Quest VI Return to Zork Raptor: Call of the Shadows Battle Chess Jazz Jackrabbit Prince of Persia (the classic DOS 2D) Duke Nukem 2D

Did a quick search and thank you Archive! Found the Kids Cube! There’s a lot of weird stuff on there but I would spend hours just trying stuff out. https://archive.org/details/aztech_kids_cube

Die Hard Trilogy

Jagged Alliance 1 and 2

Little Fighter 2

Starquest v

Oregon trail II

Widget workshop

That drawing program with the programmable turtle

The descent games someone else already mentioned were fantastic. Starcraft was outstanding. Also, it just barely made the cut but I even still play it, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is phenomenal.

Blue Byte's "Albion" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion_(video_game)

My family’s first PC was hand-me-down Amiga 2000; so these games helped shape me growing up:

Dune 2: Battle for Arrakis T-Rex Warrior* Cannon Fodder Sensible Soccer** The Settlers After the War

• Funny anecdote, if memory serves - it took my child brain over a year to figure out that holding down both mouse buttons made you move forward..

** Namely, the demo disk version which was set in 1945 and replaced the ball with a bomb that would periodically explode, killing nearby players and removing them from the match.