Distributed as shareware and installed on more machines than Windows, it defined the first-person shooter, popularised deathmatch, and created modding culture by shipping its own tools.
2
Half-Life (1998)
Told its story entirely in first person without a single cutscene, beginning with a tram ride and never taking the camera away. It redefined what narrative in a shooter could be.
3
StarCraft (1998)
Three genuinely asymmetric factions balanced with obsessive care produced the most enduring competitive strategy game ever made — and, in South Korea, professional esports itself.
4
Quake (1996)
True real-time 3D with a fully polygonal world, and the game that took multiplayer online. QuakeWorld and the mod scene that followed shaped PC gaming for a decade.
5
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000)
The Infinity Engine at its peak: a vast, companion-driven Dungeons & Dragons epic whose real-time-with-pause combat became the template for the modern CRPG.
6
Deus Ex (2000)
The immersive sim perfected — a conspiracy thriller in which almost every problem could be solved by stealth, combat, hacking, or conversation, and the game respected all of them.
7
Myst (1993)
The best-selling PC game in the world for eight years. A quiet, beautiful puzzle island that showed millions of non-gamers what a CD-ROM drive was actually for.
8
Civilization II (1996)
The definitive "one more turn" game. Sid Meier's refinement of his own design produced a strategy game of astonishing depth and near-infinite replayability.
9
The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)
LucasArts' comic masterpiece — you could not die, you could not get stuck, and the writing was genuinely funny. It set the standard for the point-and-click adventure.
10
Diablo (1996)
Randomised dungeons, a hypnotic loot loop, and Battle.net multiplayer. It invented the action-RPG as we know it and made online play a mainstream expectation.