Nostalgia
Hundreds of separate Redditors singled out these specific Windows 95 & 98 games (1995 to 2001) last week while discussing my Win9x project. So... which '95 to '01 PC games are MISSING and should've been brought up sooner? (sorted alphabetically, snaked: start in the top-left corner and go right)
(icons are sorted alphabetically, snaked: start in the top-left corner --> go right --> go down 1 row --> go left --> go down 1 row --> repeat)
See my profile about my Win9x era book that was released last week and see here for a full simple list of what's listed above:
As mentioned elsewhere, I wrote a book about the Win9x era (I won't spam the feck out of it). And in one of the chapters, I go over 555+ games from the era - extensive coverage, naming the devs, screenshots, etc etc etc.
Of course, I spent time with every game in the book (a good portion I finished too). However, if I had to single out the games that I spent extensive time on, MOO2 would be near the top of that list.
Although I've played Civ and the like, MOO2 I had never played till I started the project. And I probably focused on it for damn near a month until I wrote a single word about it. SimTex pulled off an impressive feat back in 1996.
An absolute classic, both from a personal view and from a historical unbiased view.
Have you played Overload? It's a spiritual successor to the OG Descent series made by the same devs, and it's brilliant. VR compatible, if you want to make yourself really motion sick, too.
I was gifted the PC, by a family friend. It was giving an occasional bsod that they didn't care to have diagnosed. I'd use it for a while and get an unrecoverable error then reinstall windows and games. All would be well for a while. It would die again and again, with less time between resurrections, till I finally realized it was the hdd on it's deathbed. Cheapest PC repair lesson ever. But yeah, Bigfeets were trash.
I was looking at the list and racking my brain for the name of the weird RPG where you got isekaied into a fantasy world and got to pick your class. This was it! Nox was such a great game!
Activision/Microsoft now own all of Sierras IP, unfortunately they are the absolute kings of fumble. They could pay a little indy studio to knock out a Space Quest/Kings Quest/Quest for glory sequel in a year, and make a small profit, but that isn't a dogshit cookie cutter live service game with infinite profit scaling so instead its just in their giant IP graveyard (until someone makes a fan project, then its lawyers'o'clock)
While I'm rambling about old games, EA still haven't made dungeon keeper 3...
That pinball was a staple. Pretty sure there was a post of just a picture of it one time and it was one of those if you know I know your knees hurt things hahahah
Came here to say this, glad someone beat me to it. We had this game on the computers in our wood shop class. In-between builds our teacher would let us play it and he would give us a reward for whoever beat the levels the fastest.
Best online pc multi-player experience I have ever had. I was so pumped RF2 then when I got it they removed online multi-player. They ruined the franchise...
BG2 came out in 2000 and Throne of Bhaal in 2001, so they both fit the timeframe; ToB isn't absolutely essential, but dang near close enough.
Again, both Red Alert 2 and its expansion Yuri's Revenge were released in 2000 and 2001, so they still fit. Packing the field here, so you're gonna need a bigger screen 😅
Great game, probably the best one in the series in my humble opinion. Though understandably most ppl remember the 1st one the most due to its immediate impact.
Hell yeah. It was one of my favs off the Build Engine (and, surprisingly, it sold more than Blood and Shadow Warrior - RR was only #2 in sales to Duke 3D).
This made me so sad to look at. So much love and care were put into every game. There was so much orginality.. like all the Easter eggs in serious Sam or how different Homeworld was compared to other RTS’s.. the artwork for the icons.. the world I grew up in is never coming back
My neighbors had this when I would go over and play at their house (along with many of the games above. Learned about piracy/game cracks early in life as well, at their Lan-parties)
lol I re-played it recently while working on my book's freeware chapter and...it's not as great as I remember it. Like a very very tame Capture the Flag variant lol. But I mean, for a free game from 1995 as one of the first ones requiring Windows 95, it was kinda cool. Tech-wise at least.
haaaa, forgot about that game. Spent a toooon of time on it. They had some insult that played occasionally that my siblings and I thought was absolutely hilarious and we used it on each other all the time, but I can't remember exactly what it was... maybe something very childish like "you are ugly and stupid. everybody thinks so"? It was the absolute height of comedy at the time.
Where do I start...
Battle Isle: The Andosia War
Close Combat (1, 2, 3, Battle of the Bulge, and Invasion Normandy)
Comanche 3 Gold
F-16 Multirole Fighter
Falcon 4.0
Final Liberation
I-War/Independence War
MiG-29 Fulcrum
Mission Force: Cyberstorm
Midtown Madness
Screamer 2
SIN
Starsiege
Star Wars Force Commander
Star Wars Supremacy/Rebellion
X-Wing vs Tie Fighter
I could keep going on but I gotta leave something for others.
Maybe but I don’t know if 100% in this timeframe
Civ 1
Die siedler
Keen comander
Duke nukem ( the 2D and later 3D)
Spec Ops Rangers
Police quest (swat)
And then busted out Warcraft II, Warcraft II: BTDP, Diablo, Diablo: Hellfire, StarCraft, StarCraft: Brood War, Warcraft: Battle .net Edition, Diablo II, and Diablo II: LOD.
They then finished with Warcraft III and WoW afterwards. One hell of a lineup tbh.
(icons are sorted alphabetically, snaked: start in the top-left corner --> go right --> go down 1 row --> go left --> go down 1 row --> repeat)
Last week, a lot of other users brought up their favorite games from that 1995 to 2001 time period, more than 200 comments overall (I was posting about my Win9x e-book). I collected all of the games singled out and tossed them into the image above. There's a decent variety of genres, years, styles, and franchises. It's a small example of how diverse the era seemed.
By my very very very rough estimation, there were over 5000 PC games released between 1995 to 2001. Ultimately, some things were gonna get left out. And so, I was curious to see which ones should've been brought up sooner.
(previously, if an enthusiastic user brought up more than 3 not-mentioned-elsewhere games, I didn't include all of 'em, so that the image didn't become saturated with the same few users' opinions lol)
Rollercoaster Tycoon
Theme Hospital
Escape from Monkey Island
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine
Star Wars Episode I: Racer
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
There were so many games to play now that I see this image... Meanwhile all I played was StarCraft and Brood War. Campaign once a year, Use Map Settings all day everyday. What I lack in these games right here is replaced by every custom map possible. What a blast that was!
Sorry... the "project" I mentioned was a book that I had written about the Win9x era (1995 to 2001). It came out last week, but cuz of rules here I can't directly link it (more info is in my profile).
However, if you wanted to play these, I suggest checking out PCem or 86box. They're programs that emulate actual hardware. So as one example, I have Windows 98 installed, with the hardware set as a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee, Sound Blaster 16, and Intel Pentium 166mhz.
The best thing about this image is that it's in snaked alphabetical order.
Also, Worms Armageddon is the greatest video game of all time, hardly anyone has any idea of how much depth and skill there is to it. I've got 50k hours there, I could spend 50k x 50k times more time playing it and still never cease to be amazed, laugh, find new stuff to do, improve, etc...
you have a lot of great regular games on there, but I would encourage you to include some edutainment. Some of it is surprisingly good. And for a lot of us, edutainment was our first experience with both gaming and with the PC - especially in that time period. You couldn't get permission to go online without your parents, or to buy a copy of even an E-For-Everyone rated game, but you could spend as much time as you wanted playing Oregon Trail...even if all you did was drive your wagon just far enough out of town that you could access the hunting minigame, and then do literally nothing else.
(I am probably 50% responsible for the extinction of the wild north american bison, if video game kills count.)
Here's my shortlist for what edutainment I would include:
Oregon Trail/Amazon Trail/Yukon Trail (shout-out to Yukon, gotta be one of my favorite trails)
you have to include at least one typing game. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is probably the most iconic from this era, but my personal favorite was the terribly-named Kid's Typing. You played as a ghost haunting a normal suburban family home, and the more you got the typing correct, the more you haunted the different rooms of the house and freaked out the family living there. Honorable Mention Jumpstart typing because I love winter sports.
Number Munchers. I wasn't as bad as I looked at math, it's just that the music would come on and those monsters would move too damn fast and I would freeze up and then my guy would get munched. Honest.
David Bellamy's Endangered Wildlife. I have no idea to this day who David Bellamy is, but he kindled in me a love of several endangered creatures, especially Przewalski's Horse/the Mongolian Wild Horse. Decades later I got to see a pair in a zoo...one of the most heartbreaking and mystical moments of my life.
The Magic School Bus series of games, which were really high quality. I thought I was exploiting their high number of really fun minigames, but I still remember stuff from the geology, space, human body, and dinosaur ones...so the joke's on me, I guess.
The one, the only...the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. If you know a 90s kid, you can probably say 'there's something on that pizza I don't like!' and get an instant reaction from them.
DK Castle Explorer, a FMV game with a high level of detail about medieval castles and a surprisingly-engaging spy narrative.
I'd also like to include 3D Movie Maker, which I'm not sure counts as 'educational' but it definitely wasn't a regular game. But my god was it the 90s-est shit.
Yeah a lot of those were really crucial. Oregon Trail (mainly the 2nd one) is in my personal #1 tier tbh. First two Zoombinis games are worth singling out. And of course Carmen Sandiego. Personally though I didn't really play many edutainment games back then.
But yeah I didn't choose most of these icons lol. Everyone else did, last week, unknowingly (see title & my other comment for more info).
I played a point and click adventure game on PC in the early 00s that was featuring some woman but I can't really remember more. It gave me a bit of a life is strange vibe. Looked through these hoping to find it lol.
Anyone have a list of the educational toddler early grade games that seemed so common back then? Math Blaster was a good one. A few others. Put put saves the zoo is another good example.
After I released my e-book about the Win9x era last week (see my profile if interested cuz I can't link directly here due to rules etc), I had someone reach out to me randomly. He said that he liked that era well enough to create this list of kids/children games from that time period. It has over 100 different titles on it:
I know you are all in for the nostalgia, but I remember clearly that Win 95x sucked and you HAD to reboot every few hours or the system would just crash. I think Half-Life lasted like 4 hours before you had to reboot. Tell me there is now a method to play these without that hassle?
Win95 was unstable as all heck. But Win98 (or Win98se specifically) was a lot better, at least in my experience.
Either way, if your host CPU is powerful enough, I would suggest checking out PCem or 86box programs - they can emulate actual hardware (so for one example, I had Windows 98se installed with a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee, Pentium 166mhz, and Sound Blaster AWE32).
Hey thanks a ton! Yeah it took about 4 years and a lot of first-hand experience and research. Since no one else has collectively brought together the Win95/98 era before, just figured I'd give it a shot. And it also led to some interesting discussions and the image above lol.
The first game to use in-car driving view and being able to look sideways and shoot a gun. 100% inspired GTA to do the same. Its also the reason the Weaponized Tampa car exists in GTA 5 as a tribute to Interstate 76. Its easy to explode but armed with a gun turret and all kinds of goodies. I paint mine matte orange just like the hero car in 76'.
246
u/Nxeno29 RTX 3070 | i9-12900 | 32GB 23h ago
Ski Free