Hall of Fame
One of the problems with trying to experience the history of gaming for yourself, by actually playing games, is that so many games are so very, very bad. I obviously can’t do much about that directly, but I can offer a roughly chronological list of the games that I’ve enjoyed most over the years I’ve been writing about these things — a list which will continue to slowly grow as we continue our journey through the history of interactive entertainment and digital culture. I should emphasize that what follows is very much a reflection of my personal tastes, which tend toward the literary, the narrative-oriented, and the cerebral rather than the action-oriented or the hyper-competitive. I make no claims to Absolute Truth, in other words. The list’s usefulness to you will inevitably depend on the degree to which our tastes overlap. The one somewhat objective promise I can make is that all of the games featured here treat their players with fairness and respect. You can feel pretty confident that any game on this list will, at the very least, not waste your precious time.
I do hope you find this list enlightening and/or useful, whether you’ve embarked on your own exploration of digital history or are just looking for something unusual and interesting with which to while away a few hours. (Click here to jump to the latest entries at the bottom of the list.)
Joseph Weizenbaum’s psychologist simulator is one of the most important computer programs ever written, prompting its players for the first time to suspend their disbelief and join with the computer in a shared interactive fiction.
Schoolteacher Don Rawitsch’s attempt to introduce his students to the rigors of the pioneer life lives on to this day, as important to the history of interactive narrative as it is to that of computers in education.
Gregory Yob’s “topological computer game” introduced to the world the representation of a consistent geography inside a game and the joys (?) of mapping the same.
The urtext of adventure gaming in all of the forms it’s taken in the decades since, Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Adventure combined Eliza‘s model of interaction as a conversation between player and program with The Oregon Trail‘s narrative elements and Hunt the Wumpus‘s representation of geographic space to become the game that changed everything.
Scott Adams’s 16 K miniature masterstroke brought adventure gaming to microcomputers.
Scott Adams’s only really successful attempt to break out of the mold of “treasures for points” was also his first, managing to introduce an element of time and dynamic plotting to a game that still ran in just 16 K.
Infocom’s first and most commercially successful game of all could be described as “just” Adventure with a better parser and a better world model, except that those two things made all the difference in the world.
The urtext of an entire school of CRPG design, the first Ultima also becomes the most enjoyable and playable of Richard Garriott’s early works by keeping the size reasonable and the player’s goals relatively clear.
A rare example of a game that’s better than its reputation, Chuck Benton’s evocation of singles life in the disco era is worth a play, even if the actual game is destined to be eternally overshadowed by that cover art.
The yin to Ultima‘s yang, Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg’s Wizardry did the tactical dungeon crawl so well that future games, including its own sequels, would struggle to really improve upon it for years to come.
11. Wizardry II: Knight of Diamonds (1982)
The first sequel to Wizardry is more like an expansion pack that introduces the joys of high-level dungeon crawling and completes the story of the intrepid party you created in the first game.
Penguin’s very first adventure game as well as one of the best examples of the “hi-res” school of illustrated text adventures that dominated on the Apple II during the early 1980s, Antonio Antiochia’s homage to the old Universal monster movies is a B-grade Gothic delight.
13. Zork III: The Dungeon Master (1982)
Zork II has some dodgy puzzles and is generally skippable, but Marc Blank’s haunting conclusion to the trilogy is not, showcasing as it does Infocom’s rapidly evolving sense of craft in writing and game design alike.
Dave Lebling’s first solely-authored game for Infocom had you exploring a huge alien spaceship that was one of the most coherent settings yet constructed for an adventure game.
Danielle Bunten Berry’s lighthearted multiplayer game of economic strategy is one of the best examples of pure design craft I’ve ever seen, and certainly the game that has provided me with more hours of fun per kilobyte than any other.
Marc Blank’s earlier Deadline would have been on this list if it was made purely with an eye to historical importance, but since it isn’t I include instead Infocom’s second mystery, this time by Stu Galley, which offers the same revolutionary new approach to adventure games as dynamic systems rather than static maps while also managing to be much more fair about the whole thing.
Steve Meretzky’s first game for Infocom introduced Floyd, lovable robot sidekick and the first character you could really care about inside an adventure game.
Originally conceived as Zork IV, Marc Blank and Dave Lebling’s latest fantasy romp for Infocom added a hugely entertaining and influential spellcasting system to the old equation.
The world’s first interactive tragedy, Mike Berlyn’s workmanlike game of adventurous Egyptology culminates in a very shocking and controversial ending that continues to spark debates on the very nature of adventure games.
It’s hard to convey today just how amazing Roberta Williams’s free-roaming cartoon adventure was in 1984, the year it saved Sierra On-Line from an early death.
Steve Meretzky’s sequel to Enchanter reflects his goofier style of humor, but the magic-based puzzles are no less entertaining for it.
The debut of a would-be new line of Infocom Interactive Fiction Junior for children, this gee-whiz undersea adventure was largely written by Jim Lawrence, whose pedigree as a ghostwriter for Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift made him the perfect man for the job.
Telarium’s line of illustrated adventure games based on popular books had its problems, but this is one of the best, perhaps because a coauthor of the book in question, Byron Preiss, was also the driving force behind Telarium itself.
The other really good Telarium game is this jungle adventure written by none other than Michael Crichton of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park fame.
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
This collaboration between Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky stands as one of the most self-aware, delightfully subversive text adventures ever written as well as the high point in Infocom’s commercial fortunes.
The third of Infocom’s original trilogy of hardcore mysteries, Dave Lebling’s Suspect is harder than The Witness but fairer than Deadline.
A universe in 32 K, an icon of British game development, and the urtext of a genre of space-combat simulations, the sheer scope of David Braben and Ian Bell’s game of combat, exploration, and trade can inspire awe even today.
While Sierra had gotten the ball rolling with King’s Quest, it was left to ICOM Simulations to fully embrace the computing paradigm of the new Apple Macintosh by dumping the parser completely from this entertaining two-fisted detective caper, inventing the genre of the point-and-click graphic adventure and numbering the days of the commercial text adventure.
This surreal psychological fantasy, the only of Synapse’s ambitious line of Electronic Novels to fully succeed artistically, was written by Robert Pinsky, future Poet Laureate of the United States and the most prestigious literary figure ever to turn his hand to the humble text adventure.
Infocom’s first attempt at an introductory game for adults was this artful mixture of foreboding and whimsy written by Brian Moriarty.
31. A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985)
Infocom’s first and only foray into almost entirely puzzleless interactive fiction, Steve Meretzky’s time-traveling mixture of hard science fiction and contemporary political commentary bites off at least three or four more Big Ideas than it can chew, but is nevertheless fascinating for what it attempts and for the considerable degree to which its ambitions are in fact realized.
Dave Lebling’s conclusion to Infocom’s Enchanter trilogy is something of an extended proof of the theorem that adventure games don’t need to be unfair to be really, really challenging.
33. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1985)
An icon of edutainment to rival The Oregon Trail, Brøderbund’s game puts you on the trail of a ring of international thieves, crisscrossing the globe with your trusty World Almanac and Book of Facts — or, these days, Wikipedia — at your side.
The best of Interplay’s early illustrated text adventures, Borrowed Time is a hard-boiled private-eye tale with a cutting sense of humor.
Particularly when played with others, Access’s minimalist masterpiece is far more compelling than a golf game in which the terrain consists solely of flat green land and equally featureless blue water really ought to be.
36. Oo-Topos (1986)
37. The Coveted Mirror (1986)
These two remakes of earlier adventures written using Penguin/Polarware’s new Comprehend engine represent the culmination of the “hi-res” tradition of illustrated text adventures.
A feat of high-wire software engineering that became the first popular MS-DOS-exclusive game, Binary Systems’s space opera took full advantage of those machines’ memory and processing power to offer an awe-inspiring persistent galaxy to explore and a compelling intergalactic mystery to unravel in one of the first games that amply justifies the adjective of “epic.”
Rob Swigart’s Computer Novel for Activision is a minor jewel of science-fiction worldbuilding and also our own world’s first notable example of serious literary hyperfiction, predating HyperCard, Storyspace, and the World Wide Web.
Artech’s delightful casual mystery game offers 21 snack-sized cases to solve and a palpable love for the history of the literary genre on which they’re based.
For me, Brian Moriarty’s mournful atomic-age tragedy is the Big One, Infocom’s greatest single achievement and a work of interactive poetry which moves me like no other.
42. Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986)
Steve Meretzky returns to his wheelhouse of science-fiction comedy, this time with the additional spice of sex that turned it into Infocom’s last genuine hit.
Magnetic Scrolls’s most archetypal game is this sprawling old-school treasure hunt full of gorgeous pictures, puzzles of many stripes, and a delicate seasoning of English whimsy.
The second Level 9 text adventure to use the KAOS system with its active non-player characters who can follow your instructions, Gnome Ranger has some of the most unique puzzles mechanics you’ll ever see, and is in my opinion Level 9’s most playable, most soluble, and all-around best game.
Peter Killworth’s educational “maths adventure” is one of the most-played text adventures in history, for years a fixture of British schools and today an accessible introduction to the otherwise intimidating Phoenix/Topologika tradition of hyper-intellectual adventuring.
The first original game by Distinctive Software was this charming interactive comic book with its almost 400 original panel illustrations and 8 action games.
The first addictive Sid Meier masterpiece is in my opinion simply the finest game ever born on the Commodore 64.
The best graphic adventure ever made for the Commodore 64 and the starting point of the LucasArts tradition of saner, fairer puzzling, this intricately nonlinear and endlessly likable multi-character caper deserves a spot here despite a few rough edges.
49. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987)
While its bullying personality isn’t always completely to my taste, the first Leisure Suit Larry is a very well-designed adventure game — the first Sierra game for which I can unabashedly make such a claim — and its hapless protagonist an icon of the genre.
It’s a shaggy, disjointed beast to be sure, but Infocom’s only interactive social satire is also both archly funny and a deliciously tempting nightmare come true for lovers of punishing but fair puzzles.
Steve Meretzky’s final all-text adventure game starts as another of his goofy science-fiction comedies and then slowly turns into… something else entirely.
Despite marking the first full-fledged work of Lovecraftian horror in computer gaming, Dave Lebling’s final all-text adventure game is almost more interesting and significant as a nostalgic look back to life at MIT, the place where Zork and Infocom were born.
Infocom’s only interactive romance lives up to the ideal of “waking up inside a story” better than any other game they ever released, being a rollicking ride through pirates, powder kegs, and pieces of eight sufficient to make the most stalwart romance hater’s bosom heave.
The real-time gimmick used in this interactive spy story is perhaps problematic, but the game itself transcends it, delivering three sustained cinematic action sequences that get the blood pumping in a way that no other entry in Infocom’s catalog can quite match.
Occasionally called the “greatest puzzle game ever made,” The Fool’s Errand is in its way even more compelling than that description would imply, an onion of unfathomed depths just waiting to be peeled back layer by delicious layer.
The most technically and formally innovative CRPG since Ultima and Wizardry laid down the ground rules, history’s first grid-based real-time dungeon crawler might also be its best, with level design to die for — and, trust me, die you will.
The first game in SSI’s Gold Box line of officially licensed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs is not without its irritations and frustrations, but they are far outweighed by one of the best tactical-combat systems ever made and a general design philosophy of sparing you most of the boring stuff so endemic to its contemporaries.
58. Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels (1988)
Infocom’s final all-text adventure game is as good a way to say farewell to the era as any, a sturdily constructed scavenger hunt set in the lovingly recreated gas-lit environs of Victorian London.
A riot of fishy puns and surrealistic humor, Fish! manages to be bizarre, challenging, and fair at the same time — no mean achievement — and is on the whole my favorite of Magnetic Scrolls’s games.
The first really good game of the AGT era and a fine addition to the long tradition of collegiate interactive fiction, Lane Barrow’s A Dudley Dilemma manages to do for life at Harvard what Infocom’s The Lurking Horror did for life at MIT.
Though it’s kind of a terrible adaptation of William Gibson’s novel of the same name, Neuromancer the game is great as a game, a thoroughly enjoyable, content-rich experience unlike any other of its era — or, for that matter, of any era since.
Mike McCauley’s AGT creation is both a love letter to plays, play-makers, and playgoers and a great, genial puzzler of a text adventure.
63. Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero (1989)
Later renamed Quest for Glory for legal reasons, the first game in Lori and Corey Cole’s delightful series of adventure/CRPG hybrids sets the generous standard for the series as a whole, allowing you to play it exactly how you want to.
64. Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989)
This sequel to Pool of Radiance mostly maintains the high design standard set by its predecessor, and lets you advance your characters from the previous game to a point just before leveling up in Dungeons & Dragons stops being much fun anyway.
65. Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (1990)
The second game in the series moves the character you created in Hero’s Quest into a setting drawn from the Arabian Nights.
Magnetic Scrolls’s swansong is this fine old-school Lewis Carroll pastiche.
67. Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls (1990)
Marking the debut of Legend Entertainment, the implicit heir to Infocom, Steve Meretzky’s fantasy farce mixes dumb humor with smart puzzles as only he could.
Brian Moriarty’s minimalist masterpiece of a graphic adventure doesn’t take that long to play, but you’ll never forget it after you finish it.
69. The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)
The archetypal LucasArts adventure game, Ron Gilbert’s comic tale showed that deaths and dead ends aren’t necessary to make a challenging graphic adventure, becoming in the process one of the most influential adventure games ever made.
Sid Meier’s second masterpiece was like nothing anyone had ever seen at the time of its release, and remains today one of the finest and most influential strategy games ever made.
Wing Commander combined a space-combat simulator with a cinematic narrative and wound up being not only more than the sum of its parts but a blueprint for a good chunk of gaming’s future.
72. Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire (1990)
Applying the Ultima VI engine to a setting drawn from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World rather than Renaissance Fair fantasy was one of the best ideas Warren Spector ever had.
Arguably the greatest single game ever born on the Amiga and certainly the most popular, Lemmings is an immaculate creation, a stunningly original concept nearly perfectly executed across its 120 intriguing, delightful, infuriating levels — and yes, it’s pretty darn cute to boot.
A perfect time capsule of online life circa 1991, Cosmoserve is also a great, challenging adventure game — and the most technically impressive thing ever done with the AGT programming language.
75. The Dungeon of Dunjin (1991)
If you’ve ever wished for a Zork that didn’t hate its player quite so much, Magnus Olsson’s game, a sprawling old-school treasure hunt without the worst old-school design sins, will fit the bill very nicely.
76. Castle of Dr. Brain (1991)
Don’t let the “educational” label scare you away; this collection of puzzles is great fun for adults as well as children, coming complete with all of designer Corey Cole’s usual charm, generosity, and horrid puns.
77. Worlds of Ultima II: Martian Dreams (1991)
The only thing better than an Ultima set in a lost valley full of dinosaurs is an Ultima set on the late nineteenth century’s idea of Mars, inhabited by some of the most fascinating historical personages of the period, from Sarah Bernhardt to H.G. Wells.
Sid Meier’s third masterpiece, a strategy game of insane ambition and scope, with a view of history that gives as much weight to dreamers and artists as it does to soldiers and statesmen — a game that really shouldn’t work but somehow does, and does so in about the most inspiring way imaginable.
79. The Island of Dr. Brain (1992)
The sequel to one of Sierra’ finest games of the early 1990s can stand up proudly alongside its predecessor even absent the involvement of Corey Cole, offering many more great puzzles to solve, covering an even wider range of subject matter.
80. The Incredible Machine (1992)
The urtext of countless casual physics puzzlers, The Incredible Machine can still hold its own among even the best of its more modern descendants thanks to its superb level design.
A study in moral ambiguity in life and politics that provides much food for thought but no fast answers, this unusual team-authored text adventure doesn’t forget, as do too many overtly “artsy” interactive works, to be a well-designed and engaging game as well.
I actually enjoy this roller coaster of a multimedia text adventure — the interactive equivalent of a great summer beach read — more than I do the Frederik Pohl novels that inspired it.
83. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992)
LucasArts’s point-and-click adaptation of their parent company’s second most beloved property starts by dropping Indiana Jones into a globetrotting caper worthy of any of the films, but finishes by forcing him to adapt to the adventure-game genre rather than the other way around.
84. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel (1992)
This graphic adventure with an unusually literary feel is not just one of the best games ever made featuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective but one of the best interactive mysteries, period — one of the few which gives you the feeling of actually solving a mystery rather than fiddling with arbitrary roadblock puzzles.
85. EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus (1992)
This game was marketed under Sierra’s Discovery imprint of educational software, and its message about the precious natural heritage that is our planet’s oceans and what we can do to preserve them is more timely than ever today — and yet it’s never preachy, functioning perfectly well as just an unusually funny, friendly, and fair Sierra adventure game.
A model for the intelligent adaptation of linear to interactive media, Cryo Interactive’s game of Frank Herbert’s novel and David Lynch’s film manages to capture all of the themes and atmosphere of its source materials while being enjoyable and thoroughly playable as an innovative adventure/strategy hybrid in its own right.
The first texture-mapped first-person 3D game in history boasts a painstakingly simulated world, bursting with emergent possibility and setting a high bar for all the 3D games that would follow it — and it’s also one of the greatest CRPG dungeon crawls in history, the seminal next step after the equally seminal Wizardry and Dungeon Master.
88. Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992)
The ultimate (sorry!) incarnation of the vision Richard Garriott had been pursuing since the late 1970s, Ultima VII is occasionally infuriating but more often delightful, thanks not least to some of the finest writing yet seen in a computer game this side of Infocom.
Bob Bates’s comic farce about the most inept knight ever is both great fun in its own right and a nostalgic treasure trove of early 1990s pop culture.
90. Gateway II: Homeworld (1993)
The last boxed parser-driven adventure game in history to find its way onto store shelves, this sequel is every bit as good as its predecessor, and is about as fine a commercial sendoff for its medium as one could ask for.
91. Star Trek: Judgment Rites (1993)
The second and best of Interplay’s two episodic Star Trek adventure games, Judgment Rites is a loving tribute to the original 1960s incarnation of the show — territory no game since has bothered to explore.
Taking place in an amusingly postmodern, corporate version of Hell, this sprawling puzzlefest is the Secret of Monkey Island of text adventures: an extended proof that making it impossible for the player to die or lock herself out of victory doesn’t prevent a text adventure from being intriguing, challenging, and fun.
93. Day of the Tentacle (1993)
Funny, clever, and polished to the finest of sheens in terms of both its audiovisual aesthetics and its design, this belated sequel to Maniac Mansion is, if not the best point-and-click adventure game ever made, at least a strong contender for the crown of best cartoon-comedy adventure game ever made.
94. Sam and Max Hit the Road (1993)
LucasArts’s other cartoon-comedy adventure game of 1993 is every bit as funny as Day of the Tentacle, but it has an edgier sensibility that feels appropriate for a game derived from an underground comic book.
So much more than “Civilization in space,” Steve Barcia’s 4X space opera is carefully calibrated to make rote strategies impossible, and is so infinitely rewarding in all its dynamic variation that I’ve been playing it on and off since 1993 without ever getting tired of it.
It might not quite live up to all the hype — what game possibly could? — but once you set aside the baggage that goes with being the best-selling adventure game of all time you find a set of thoughtfully constructed puzzles in an evocative, desolately beautiful environment.
97. Lemmings 2: The Tribes (1993)
A veritable Platonic ideal of a sequel, Lemmings 2 builds upon its predecessor in ways that are truly gratifying and rewarding for the veteran, if inevitably baffling for the newcomer.
98. Under a Killing Moon (1994)
A crazy quilt of disparate approaches that works way better than it ought to, this unusually innovative adventure game’s best quality of all is its earnest, goofy, throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks determination to show you a good time.
99. Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)
This solidly crafted cyberpunk graphic adventure is elevated into a must-play by the striking art direction of Dave Gibbons, the man who illustrated Watchmen.
100. Superhero League of Hoboken (1994)
Steve Meretzky’s last great narrative-oriented game was this unique but commercially ill-starred adventure/CRPG hybrid, which fires off wicked social satire in lieu of magic spells.
Legend Entertainment was weirdly good at making adventure games I enjoy out of books I couldn’t care less about; this lushly illustrated point-and-clicker, based on a series of fantasy novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, is a fine example.
Chris Sawyer’s slick freight- and people-hauling simulation is no marvel of balanced zero-sum game design, but it’s so much fun to build out your rails, roads, and vehicles and then watch them all in action that it almost doesn’t matter.
Although it’s a bit ramshackle in comparison to its finely honed predecessor Master of Orion, Steve Barcia’s take on the fantasy 4X game is so full of original ideas and so full of varied content that it winds up being no less fun and just as infinitely replayable.
104. Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994)
LucasArts’s second attempt at making a “simulation” of Star Wars space combat absolutely nailed it, allowing you to participate in a series of dynamic unfolding battles as just another fighter pilot trying to survive rather than the irreplaceable hero, and all from the unique perspective of the “evil” Empire rather than the plucky Rebels.
Although it might appear to be just another 3D shooter when you first glance at it, Looking Glass’s System Shock is in fact a many-layered immersive simulation of a game that combines emergent behavior with compelling storytelling to an extent seldom seen before or since, and all whilst scaring the bejesus out of you.
Gareth Rees’s textual “interactive conspiracy” set inside the ivy-covered walls of an Oxbridge college is one of the best cozy mysteries you’ll ever play.
The My Stupid Apartment sub-genre of interactive fiction is elevated to a weirdly sublime pitch in John’s Fire Witch, whose author John Baker must be rescued by his players in the course of solving the game.
108. Lethe Flow Phoenix (1995)
Dan Shiovitz’s surrealistic meditation on a troubled existence, with a helping of aliens from outer space on the side, pairs heart with craftsmanship to become much better than it has any right to be.
109. The Light: Shelby’s Addendum (1995)
Another text adventure that’s better than its ambiguously pretentious name, Colm McCarthy’s The Light is an eerie mystery in a setting somewhere between dream and reality.
Brendon Wyber’s “interactive night of horror” wisely makes its haunted old theater the star of the show, becoming a textbook – and very, very creepy! — example of environmental storytelling.
Graham Nelson’s time-travel epic Jigsaw takes it players on a text-based tour through the horrible, magnificent twentieth century, from the Wright brothers’ first flight to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
Corey and Lori Ann Cole’s adaption of Terry Brooks’s epic-fantasy novels to game form plays more like a visual novel or interactive storybook than a traditional adventure game, and is all the better for it.
A lumpy amalgamation of point-and-click adventure, Myst-style pre-rendered environments, full-motion video, and even a fully realized real-time strategy game, Mike Verdu’s Mission Critical manages to do it all thanks to its rigorous commitment to its premise and Legend Entertainment’s usual attention to the details of the player’s experience.
114. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1995)
Successful both as an art project and as a playable point-and-click adventure game, this adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s classic short story is actually deeper and wiser than its source material — thanks, no doubt, to the involvement of an older version of the author himself in the project from start to finish.
A complement to rather than a replacement for the Edgar Allan Poe stories on which it’s based, a piece of interactive art rather than a traditional adventure game, The Dark Eye is an oppressively atmospheric work of psychological horror, more unnerving than a thousand videogame zombies.
116. Heroes of Might and Magic (1995)
This winning, fast-playing fantasy strategy game with CRPG overtones is already so addictively playable as to threaten your life balance — and yet the series is just getting started.
117. The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (1995)
From its diegetic interface to the in-world programming you can watch on its in-world television, this time-travel story is unusually committed to its future history — and then it shows an equal commitment to “real” history when it sends you back to the Mayan Empire, Medieval France, and Renaissance Italy.
Gaming’s answer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Toonstruck is a witty, juicy, generous puzzlefest of a graphic adventure that will keep you amused and perplexed for a good few hours.
119. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (1996)
As tales of Knights Templar conspiracies go, Broken Sword is smarter than The Da Vinci Code, more accessible than Foucault’s Pendulum, and funnier than either one of them.
120. Discworld II: Missing Presumed…!? (1996)
While the first Discworld graphic adventure is an obvious labor of love that is unfortunately insoluble by ordinary mortals, this second iteration starts with all the good parts of the first and then adds SVGA graphics and puzzles that are actually pretty good.
121. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Rose Tattoo (1996)
The second and last game in this sadly short-lived series has all of the strengths of its predecessor, but is even more immersive, thanks to more period detail than ever and a sharper presentation in SVGA graphics.
122. The Pandora Directive (1996)
The sequel to Under a Killing Moon allows its ambitions to lead it down one or two more blind alleys than its predecessor, but its unique free-roaming 3D engine, solid puzzle design, and sheer likability are more than enough to save the day.
An adventure game made with a DOOM-style engine, starring a stoner dude on a quest to make the world safe for freaks like him… it’s weird and janky and low-rent as a 1980s indie record, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
This sequel is a masterclass in how to add interest and variety to a strategy game without adding tedium, doubling down on everything its predecessor did well and punching up its relatively few weaknesses.
125. Spycraft: The Great Game (1996)
This fast-paced, mini-game-based interactive movie boasts unusually high production values and entertainment value, while also having something important to say about the wages of spying in the real world.
Coming across this fast-paced, story-driven driving game — with guns! — during a tour of the 1990s game scene is like coming across an Althea and Donna single amidst your po-faced big brother’s Pearl Jam albums: a joyously funky breath of fresh air.
127. Magic: The Gathering (1997)
The last game Sid Meier worked on at MicroProse, this early digital implementation of the world-beating Wizards of the Coast card game might just be the best one ever, with a CRPG-like campaign game that leaves you wanting more only because what you already get is so good.
Simultaneously a work of living history worthy of Barbara Tuchman and a train-based thriller worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, The Last Express is thought-provoking and beautiful, a resounding yes to the question of whether games can be art.
129. Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror (1997)
Its central conspiracy, involving the ancient Mayans this time instead of the Knights Templar, isn’t as interesting as that of its predecessor, but The Smoking Mirror it still a fun adventure game with lovely production values and a trenchant, very British sense of humor.
130. Star Wars: Jedi Knight (1997)
This giddy romp of a first-person shooter, the first game in the latter genre that I’ve enjoyed enough to actually finish in the context of writing these histories, is truer to the innocent original spirit of Star Wars than just about anything that has come out since under the name.
131. The Curse of Monkey Island (1997)
Rob Gilbert may have had nothing to do with this third game in the beloved series, but its mixture of humor and sweetness is nevertheless pure Monkey Island, now augmented by luscious cel-animated graphics the likes of which he could hardly have dreamed when he started the franchise.
132. Zork: Grand Inquisitor (1997)
In a case of better late than never, Activision finally figured out how to make a good, properly Zorkian Zork game of the sort that Infocom might have been proud of — and then they stopped making Zork games before it could all go wrong again.
133. She’s Got a Thing for a Spring (1997)
Brent VanFossen’s lavishly sensual interactive day out in the woods is the next best thing to a walk in actual nature.
Yes, Ian Finley’s textual tale of horror set inside an isolated Arctic research complex owes a lot to John W. Campbell’s classic novella Who Goes There?, but the premise can bear repetition when it’s executed this creepily well.
135. The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime (1997)
136. The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (1998)
Respectively a remade prequel and a sequel to Buried in Time, neither of these games is quite as strong as the series’s centerpiece, but they remain fine adventure games in their own right.
137. Tex Murphy: Overseer (1998)
The third and final Tex Murphy interactive movie of the 1990s retains most of its predecessors’ strengths in the gameplay and storytelling departments, whilst adding to the special sauce some of the highest quality live-action video we got to see before this breed of game died off completely.
This well-executed traditionalist point-and-clicker has more on its mind and its heart than you might initially give it credit for.
Andrew Plotkin’s endlessly inventive exploration of the old fictional trope of the unreliable narrator culminates in what’s sometimes simply called The Puzzle — arguably the greatest text-adventure puzzle of all time.
To my mind, Michael Gentry’s sprawling text adventure Anchorhead is the best ludic H.P. Lovecraft homage of them all, a masterpiece of slow-building existential dread.
Michael Roberts’s text adventure The Plant makes a far better interactive X-Files episode than the big-budget interactive movie that won the license for the show, being a delicious stew of conspiratorial tropes from a time when we could still imagine that Wanting to Believe was basically harmless.
Marshal Tenner Winter
June 28, 2015 at 9:36 pm
Aww, Zork 2 didn’t make the cut? :(
Jimmy Maher
June 29, 2015 at 7:25 am
Too many dodgy puzzles.
Mike Taylor
October 10, 2017 at 1:36 pm
Your blog, of course, and your choices. But for me, Zork II is the pick of the trilogy. It has two awful, awful puzzles: the bank (which no-one understands even after having accidentally solved it) and the maze (which, as a starter, requires you to be American). But once you leave those aside, the rest of the game is just about perfect: a combination of puzzles mundane and wacky, and somehow a wild variety of terrain that nevertheless retains a coherent and consistent atmosphere of splendour remaining through quiet decay. It certainly has the other two Zorks beaten for immersion, and I think that counts for a lot. I want to visit the location of Zork II in a way that I don’t for I or III.
Jimmy Maher
October 10, 2017 at 3:40 pm
While I agree that Zork II has its strengths, this list is meant to contain games that one can confidently enjoy without caveats like “turn to a walkthrough for these two awful puzzles.” That’s really the sum total of why it’s missing…
Mike Taylor
October 11, 2017 at 8:07 am
Yep, that makes sense. It’s easy to forget exactly what this list is (“games that balances claims of historical importance against playability and fairness”) and think of it just as a Best Of. On your own clearly stated criteria, I have to admit that omitting Zork II does make sense.
TsuDhoNimh
June 29, 2015 at 3:28 am
I’m surprised that “Choplifter” didn’t make the cut as being the first (or one of the first) action games to put saving people as the priority of the game, not even awarding points for destroying the enemy.
It’s also one of the best-animated of the early Apple 2 games, before Apples had enough RAM to do double-hi-res graphics.
Jimmy Maher
June 29, 2015 at 7:29 am
Its absence speaks largely to my tendency to get bored quickly by that sort of pure action game.
Mike Taylor
October 10, 2017 at 1:39 pm
Defender has it beaten — though, to my surprise, only by a single year (1981 vs. 1982). Of course, Defender was ferociously difficult — so much so that, at 10p per game, most players probably lost all three lives before figuring out what they were trying to achieve.
Andy
June 29, 2015 at 11:05 am
This list reminds me of something I wondered at the time so will now ask: when you were working your way through the Telarium catalog, why didn’t you also take the time to give full critical attention to the Windham Classics/Dale Disharoon “Below the Root” and “Alice in Wonderland”? You mentioned their innovative engine only in passing as precedent to the inferior “The Scoop.”
In your initial bookware post you called “Below the Root” “a lovely, lyrical classic” and then in a comment said it was “a really, really wonderful little game. Well worth your time.” I thought maybe I’d see it here in the hall of fame despite the short shrift it got in your chronological survey proper. But no.
So I’m taking this opportunity to vouch for it and for “Alice in Wonderland,” which in my opinion is one of the great masterpieces of that era. If you haven’t played it you really must. In my opinion these games really and truly hold up 30 years later.
I would think that you would at least want to be able to refer to Alice as a reference point when the time comes to give some historical perspective to the advent of point-and-click, which in many ways it and Below The Root anticipated. Maybe you can make an excuse to get back to these games in in retrospect whenever Maniac Mansion shows up around here? (Imminently, I imagine.)
Jimmy Maher
June 29, 2015 at 11:26 am
I played Below the Root exactly 13 years ago. I know this because I played it during a week-long ride on the Trans-Siberian railroad, one of my last big backpacking adventures before I started to feel too old for that sort of thing. So, I do indeed have strong and affectionate memories of it that are, I’m afraid, also hopelessly bound up with the context in which I played it.
I just never found the right point to revisit it on the blog, and I must confess I’m a little reluctant to start backtracking. It’s omissions like this that make me stress that this list is hopefully a useful historical survey but not definitive. I suppose I could include it here, but I’d really like to restrict the list to games that get proper features on the blog.
Andy
June 29, 2015 at 12:04 pm
Fair enough. I agree, I wouldn’t want you to put stuff on this list that you haven’t actually featured on the blog. And if I were you I absolutely wouldn’t want to backtrack either.
Having some random commenter advocate for these games seems like plenty. Done!
(Though I do still encourage you to take a quick peek at Alice, just to have personally seen and sampled it, for future reference.)
Brian Bagnall
June 29, 2015 at 2:05 pm
I’m very happy to see Amazon, Deja Vu and Killed Until Dead on this list. Those three were fun games I could actually complete back then without hints!
TsuDhoNimh
June 29, 2015 at 5:37 pm
I’d finished the Below the Root game a long time ago in the late 80’s, but I never thought to read the Green Sky books until you mentioned the game in your blog. I enjoyed the game and the books immensely, so thanks for reminding me of that classic, even if you aren’t going to back track.
I mentioned Choplifter just because it came out at roughly the same time as Castle Wolfenstein, but on second thought, I can see why you would include Wolfenstein and not Choplifter. Choplifter spawned an arcade game and a later console revival a few years ago, but had nowhere near the influence of the Castle Wolfenstein series.
Another interesting omission is Ultima IV. Did you leave it out simply because it’s not that interesting to play for today’s gamers in comparison to Ultima V or Ultima VI? I would have thought that it would make the cut just because it tried to be different with the Virtue system.
Jimmy Maher
June 29, 2015 at 5:56 pm
That was one of the more painful omissions, but much as I admire it in so many ways it’s just not something I can really recommend as a fun game. The combat is tedious and endless, it’s too easy to miss important information, typing “Name Job Health” over and over and playing guess-the-noun with the parser is excruciating, mixing regents for magic spells is mind-numbing, and then there’s the whole nearly unsolvable guess-the-word puzzle at the end that’s there because old Richard literally simply forgot to implement a vital clue and Origin’s nonexistent test process didn’t catch it.
I think it’s a game that’s very important to know about, but I think you can learn pretty much everything you need to know just by reading about it rather than playing it. If, as Sean Barrett suggested on Twitter, I should ever make a list of my best/most important *articles*, the two on Ultima IV would almost certainly make the cut.
Scott M. Bruner
June 29, 2015 at 8:06 pm
While I agree that Ultima IV’s fun quotient will definitely vary depending on the gamer’s patience, I would argue that in addition to its basic RPG element innovations: the virtue system, the open world, the (imperfect) parser within an RPG what really sets it apart for me is the lengths that Garriott went to make the player feel like the game they are about to play is a truly immersive, living world. That playing Ultima is like entering an alternate world – even the act of “becoming an avatar” augments that concept.
It may not be a part of the game, but the manual, cloth map, and ankh are certainly a part of the experience. Even at my age now, when I play Ultima IV (and I’m in the middle of a full replay), the feelies and even the history (clearly retrofitted from Ultima 1-3’s truly bizarre storylines) make me believe in Brittannia as a real and compelling place.
I would argue for its inclusion, but all of these things are of course subjective, and Cheap Trick and Journey’s exclusions from Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are much larger crimes.
Scott M. Bruner
June 29, 2015 at 8:21 pm
…of course, finding a full retail version of Ultima IV with all the goodies/feelies isn’t that easy.
Jimmy Maher
June 30, 2015 at 5:36 am
Yeah, I don’t really disagree with this. It’s just that to make this list a game has to be one I would be willing to recommend to a friend today without a host of qualifiers and apologies. Ultima IV for me doesn’t quite qualify. Mileages obviously can and do vary, and hopefully your eloquent defense of the game here will serve as a counterargument against its omission when people peruse this list for years to come.
As for the Rock Hall of Fame: I’ve always maintained that it’s best ignored entirely.
ZUrlocker
December 28, 2016 at 10:02 pm
Late to the party on this thread and slightly off topic, but since you brought it up… While I disagree with many of the selections and omissions from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for anyone who has an interest, it is well worth the visit to Cleveland. Whatever your particular slice of rock music that gets your heart pumping, there are items there that will quicken your pulse, take your breath away or cause the hair on your neck to stand up. For me, it was seeing original hand-written lyrics from the Beatles, leather jackets from the Ramones and guitars and gear from The Clash.
Ok back to gaming…
Bernie
February 24, 2017 at 3:24 pm
A little late, but … could you believe that only after having read all of the articles and having followed the blog for a solid two years , I have read these comments just now ? Jimmy, your blog is really “deep” : if a reader keeps digging, he or she can keep finding something interesting.
Well , as for Ultima IV , I think this might help your argument :
I’m pretty sure everybody here knows about Ultima remakes on modern engines, with Ultima V Lazarus and the Ultima VI Project being the most prominent releases. There’s also the Exult engine to play “classic” Ultima VII on current OS’s.
I’ve always found it intriguing that these talented teams have “overlooked” Ultima IV for a remake, just like Jimmy has done in the Hall of Fame. Moreover, all I have been able to find are many “upgrades” to Ultima IV and 2 incomplete implementations created using the Neverwinter Nights package, but nothing on the scale of Lazarus or U6 Project.
There must be a very good reason that Quest of The Avatar wasn’t chosen along with Warriors and Prophet, if one takes into account the fact that these remakes were done by veteran game designers with “modern” experience. Maybe they thought Ultima IV was better “left in the past”.
Jason
June 5, 2017 at 6:29 am
xu4 is a remake of the ultima 4 engine.
Nathanael
August 22, 2017 at 3:54 pm
The Ultima IV engine actually still works under DosBox (for example). The remakes for the later games (V, VI, VI part 2) were made largely because they were literally unplayable for technical reasons (they did crazy stuff with the hardware at a very low level). This is largely the reason the Ultima IV engine remake was not considered a priority: you could still play it.
I would have no hesitation recommending Ultima IV immediately. Mixing reagants is a wonderful resource management game. The process of exploring the world to figure out the shrines, the runes, the mantras, etc. is a collector’s paradise and it’s not too repetitive or too diffiult. The combat is actually good enough to satisfy a Wizardry player.
Maybe there’s something about the combination of open-ended exploration, information collection, resource management, and tactical combat, which isn’t ever really reached again. Every subsequent RPG, including all the later Ultimas and the whole of Bioware’s work, feels railroaded by comparison. Resource management elements have practically been abolished from computer RPGs, which is sad.
And as for asking absolutely everyone about absolutely everything… well, there isn’t any other game where, for no particular reason, there is one, locally famous, talking horse. The world-buidling is exceptional, and again, modern games with their excessive railroading and cutscenes should learn from it.
The final missing clue should just be in the manual though. I thankfully had it spoiled in advance.
Andrew
July 3, 2015 at 3:42 pm
Great idea, and as an owner of a ZX Spectrum back in the ’80s I’m pleased to see a few things I recognise (Elite, Deus Ex and especially Killed Until Dead, which I loved and commented on when you wrote about it six months ago).
Still, a little surprised to see there’s no place for either The Hobbit or Lords of Midnight, given the way you assessed both when you wrote about them on this blog. Then again, I suppose these lists lose some of their meaning if everything gets on it, so perhaps there should be a few hard luck stories…;-)
Oh, and agree completely about the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. We don’t have anything like it here in the UK, which suits me just fine. Perhaps it is one of those cultural things that doesn’t cross the Atlantic, but I’ve never understood why the various musicians seem to take it all so seriously, or even what the point of it is. I mean, if you’re a band that’s sold millions or records, recorded a couple of widely acknowledged classic albums and maybe even provided the soundtrack to a generation who will never forget your best songs, why on earth would you crave a pat on the head, probably years past your prime, from a committee of middle-aged men in suits? What could it realistically mean to you alongside everything else you’ve achieved?
Jimmy Maher
July 3, 2015 at 8:35 pm
The Hobbit is fascinating on one level, but also kind of a mess to try to earnestly play and solve. It’s kind of a classic example of a game that’s more interesting for its programmers than its players; I just used it as an example of that phenomenon in my Pirates! review, in fact.
The omission of Lords of Midnight was a harder choice, but its interface is just too limited; it’s really hard to keep track of what’s actually happening in its world. It’s just not quite playable enough in 2015 to make the cut.
I’m aware that British games in general didn’t fare all that well on this list. That has a lot to do with the more limited hardware in Britain, which necessarily forced a lot of compromises. And then there’s also the fact that the sorts of action games that were particularly popular there just aren’t my personal cup of tea and/or specialty as a historian.
Hopefully Britain will start to fare a bit better as we move into the heyday of the Amiga.
David Boddie
July 3, 2015 at 10:55 pm
I think it’s generally recognised that having to serve the lowest common denominator didn’t help to push the boundaries of certain genres in Britain. Having said that, some of the more interesting games in the Acorn market, at least, transcended those limitations. Here, I’m thinking of Elite and Exile, but also Revs and The Sentinel.
Multi-load games also started to make an appearance in the mid-to-late 1980s, as on other platforms, which leads me to a question about some of the games you’ve covered recently. It’s often remarked that the use of disk drives made gaming more accessible and reliable, especially on PC clones and the Apple II, but were disk drives for the Commodore 64 in common use in the USA?
Jimmy Maher
July 4, 2015 at 6:31 am
Yes, that was the major difference between the United States and Europe. Commodore’s Datasette was I suppose nominally available, but was virtually unheard of in North America. I grew up with a Commodore 64 (later supplemented by an Amiga), had lots of friends with them, etc., and I’m still not sure I’ve ever seen an actual Datasette in my life. *Everyone* had disk drives. Almost of the Commodore 64 games included in this Hall of Fame depend on them.
David Boddie
July 4, 2015 at 10:43 am
It’s also interesting to note that there were quite a few games released on disk for the BBC Micro. It was fairly straightforward to add a drive to that machine, possibly because schools needed to be able to load software quickly and reliably. That requirement may have inadvertently created a market for games software on disk, for homes as well as in schools! The Electron, on the other hand, really struggled to get software on disk.
Given that there was a market with disk-enabled BBC Micros, it’s perhaps surprising that there are so few games that really rely on the extra storage to swap data in and out, especially since Elite did that early on. Maybe there’s a cultural reason why some genres, like RPGs, were underrepresented on that platform. Alternatively, it may just have been the case that publishers felt there had to be cassette versions of every game, so it went down to the lowest common denominator again.
Later games took advantage of extra memory (Exile, Stryker’s Run) to provide enhanced versions, and some even required an additional ROM (Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror).
G Grobbelaar
August 31, 2015 at 11:54 pm
Haven’t read your Ultima IV yet, but by the few comments it got I am will read it soon. I say this as when we bought our soundblaster for the 486 PC we got it along with Warcraft Orc/Human and 2 other games (still have it as we unearthed it when we moved at the end of May when the house we rent was sold from under us and we had 2 weeks to get a new place) But could not get it to load properly back then – all 4 games on 1 cd (what were they thinking!) Later we hacked it, as the B&W manual made it look interesting for us to play, on the P3, but no luck! The feelies as the one said, is maybe what was missing and even with a walktrough we gave up early on! Wish I had discovered this Blog earlier! Thanx
flowmotion
August 8, 2016 at 5:34 am
Just started going through this list, and have to note that your review of Infocom’s Infidel doesn’t have anything which would indicate it deserved your “hall of fame” honors.
You say very little positive about the game itself, just mentioning in passing that it “competently crafted”, and “not difficult”.
OK, it might also be “conceptually groundbreaking” and “very polarizing”, but your description is of a game where the manual tells you your avatar is an asshole and in the end your avatar dies because he is an asshole. Potentially afterwords, the player gains some enjoyment over contemplating how their tomb-raiding asshole died.
Anyway, this list promises not to screw you over, which one would assume to mean not wasting your time on old worthless crap. But it might be a good idea to distinguish between the game that were actually fun, and the stuff which feeds a masochistic desire for dead-end IF experiments. Because your review doesn’t make this game sound fun in the slightest.
Jimmy Maher
August 8, 2016 at 8:00 am
You’ll note that I also describe this list as balancing “claims to historical importance against playability and fairness.” Infidel is a competently crafted and perfectly soluble if not exceptional text adventure through 99 percent of its length. This is its claim to playability and fairness. Then we get to the ending, which is of immense importance in the evolution of interactive fiction. That’s its claim to historical importance. Although absent the tragic ending Infidel wouldn’t be here, the game that precedes the ending isn’t bad, just not terribly good by Infocom’s standards. It certainly never screws you over or wastes your time with unfair puzzles. I’m afraid that characterizations like “old worthless crap” and “dead-end IF experiment” are yours, not mine.
Robin
June 6, 2017 at 9:13 am
Great list but very disappointed to miss Populous, the first God game, Star Control, Command and Conquer and Master of Orion
Jimmy Maher
June 6, 2017 at 9:17 am
We’ve haven’t gotten to any but the first on your list in the blog’s chronology. ;)
Nathanael
August 22, 2017 at 3:57 pm
Although Populous is often referred to as “the first god game” thanks to its explicit use of gods, in modern terminology SimCity is a god game and it came out several months earlier.
David Ross
June 9, 2024 at 10:00 pm
Star Control is just SpaceWar: VGA Edition; if SpaceWar didn’t make it, neither should S.C. Its sequel on the other hand . . .
Orion is on the list I see today although maybe added over the past seven years. I’d further point to Remnants of the Precursors as the remake for our era: fixing exploits, improving graphics, and maintaining the gameplay (which was already excellent).
Frédéric Grosshans
August 22, 2017 at 1:05 pm
Given it’s importance, playability and your long (and fantastic) series of post about it, I’m surprised not to find Tetris here, even if it contrast a lot with the other entries.
Jimmy Maher
August 23, 2017 at 6:52 am
Tetris is indeed as important as any game ever made, is undoubtedly a work of genius… but it does little for me as a player. I like to include games here that feel like bracing experiences to me personally. As I got into a little bit in one of the articles in question, Tetris doesn’t really do that for me. I find the backstory much more entertaining than the game in this case. I get more excited about, say, the bold narrative choices in Infidel — to name another game whose inclusion rather than exclusion has been questioned — than I do about the elegant minimalism of Tetris.
And yes, I know this is list in general is very personal and idiosyncratic. If it was weighted more toward historical importance, Tetris would undoubtedly show up here. But as it is, I think of this list more as the games I personally would like to revisit one last time someday from a retirement home than I do as a definitive “you must play these in order to understand gaming history” list. Were it more weighted the latter approach, Tetris would of course be a shoo-in. But then, you can find plenty of pretty good lists of that ilk, while only this list reflects my own doubtless skewed take on the games that are truly worth playing. Whatever else you can say about it, I’m pretty sure nobody else in the world would make one quite like it. My hope is that someone browsing this list might see a game she’s never heard of, get interested, and go play it. With adventure games in particular, one is always reluctant to try out an unknown title because one is never sure if it will play fair; all of the games here do, eliminating that concern.
Tetris, on the other hand, doesn’t really need my patronage. ;)
Will
March 30, 2018 at 1:36 pm
I find the list quite good, and perhaps should include Defender, Choplifter and a few others as mentioned already, but that is debatable and in the end the bloggers opinion.
But I believe there are a few quite significant omissions: you are missing quite a few legends such as Master of Orion 1, Master of Orion 2, out of whom all 4X turn based strategy games are derived from.
Jimmy Maher
March 30, 2018 at 1:42 pm
Just haven’t gotten to them yet. ;)
Iluxan
April 21, 2018 at 5:27 am
One game stands out to me from the 80s: Prince of Persia.
Perhaps it didn’t have genre-defining power of Elite it was a supremely well-crafted and mostly novel game that influenced some follow-ups. And certainly notable for the graphics quality. Thoughts?
I am biased since I grew up in Russia but I’d say it was one of the 3 most widely played games in the later 80s.
Jimmy Maher
April 21, 2018 at 8:58 am
I did write about Prince of Persia fairly extensively here: https://www.filfre.net/2016/10/how-jordan-mechner-made-a-different-sort-of-interactive-movie-or-the-virtues-of-restraint/. It’s super-impressive formally, with an aesthetic deftness rarely seen in games of its era, and I would actually say that it does rival Elite in influence. And of course it was hugely popular, one of the most popular computer games ever made to that point.
This is my *personal* and happily idiosyncratic Hall of Fame, however, and I find it a little rote and frustrating to play today. If this list was based purely on historical importance, it would definitely be included.
F. Dum
May 5, 2018 at 9:47 pm
Great list! I like your selections. As everyone else here, I have a few own personal favourites that I would add to it:
* The original Rogue (1980) — one of the first widely played RPGs, the namesake of the whole “Roguelike” subgenre.
* Mindscape’s Alter Ego (1986) — never before and after has a game provided more psychological depth and a more realistic “life sim”.
* Hamurabi (~1968) — for being one of the many BASIC programs that just about everyone owning a home computer around 1980 typed into his computer.
F. Dum
May 5, 2018 at 9:49 pm
Ah, and I played the Hi-Res Adventures #0-4 a few years ago and remember quite enjoying “Ulysses and the Golden Fleece”, but maybe that’s my penchant for classical mythology…
Jim Gerrie
February 12, 2019 at 3:01 am
Jimmy,
I think you need to include “Star Traders” by Dave Kaufman. Not sure if there are any running version left anywhere on the net, except my reprogram (but could be wrong). It’s a classic.
https://jimgerrie.blogspot.com/2017/11/dave-kaufmans-star-trader.html
Goblin#3424
May 4, 2019 at 11:56 pm
I think it would be useful to limit this list to, say, 20 or 30. That would serve as an introduction to the site and to hook people into reading the rest of the blog. Cheers!
Mike Taylor
May 5, 2019 at 5:41 pm
That’s an interesting thought, actually. When this site was younger, and the Hall Of Fame smaller, it made more sense as a Hall of Fame. Now that it’s into triple digits, it’s something else.
But rather than pruning it, how about adding stars to (say) the top twenty — the best of the best? Then the rule would be that if you add another starred game, you have to take a star off one of the existing ones, so that at any given point the stars represent (what you think are) the 20 best, most important, games you’ve covered.
Fuck David Cage
October 5, 2019 at 10:12 pm
Some more suggestions:
Little King’s Story (2009) Complex and challenging mix of just about every genre, incredibly fun with a lot of subtle and complex themes that are explored in depth.
Metal Gear series (1986-2015 *fuck Survive*) A series of games with complex themes, great gameplay, an interesting meditation on war and human nature and wondrous psychedelic madness. It was the ur-example of the stealth genre, the last great game by Konami and only sold out after its creator was forced to abandon it.
Super Mario Brothers series (1985-) It saved us from the collapse in the early 1980s, ended the Atari era and showed that games could have endings instead of loops or kill screens. Dozens, if not hundreds of games followed and were often wildly varied, creative and challeging.
Missile Command (1980) Showed the horrors quite successfully despite the technical limitations while maintaining fun gameplay and an interesting style. It actually gave its creator nightmares.
Otocky (1987) I usually prefer substance to style and hate rhythm games–which is why I love ROMs–but I make an exception for this game. A beautiful and unique gem in which every action you take affects the music, creating a new experience each time you play. It also has fun gameplay.
Xenoblade Chronicles series (2010-2017) A great, imaginative series with complex plots, fun and challenging gameplay and large, distinct worlds with great characters.
Half Minute Hero 1 and 2 (2009-2014) Games that radically alter the nature of R.P.G.s with a simple, clever change: Each quest has a time limit of half a minute. You can refill time, but regardless you will always be in a mad rush and random encounter will be exciting.
Superhero League of Hoboken (1994) My favorite C.R.P.G, a challenging and unique game where you must micromanage the party of strange, hilarious superheroes to survive. It has the unique style and humor of Steve Meretsky.
Disgaea (2003) A complex strategy R.P.G. with unique features like the ability to lift and throw characters, geo panels that alter the battlefields and turn them into puzzles and a long, hilarious and interesting storyline. Go for the best ending, because it is perfect. I also beat 2, but its ending was disappointing and the story was not as good, though it was still a very fun and challenging game despite my lack of interest in strategy games.
Mother series (1989-2006) The most insane video game series, but still able to tell good stories and have fun gameplay.
Chris Billows
May 7, 2020 at 4:36 am
Lords of Midnight and its sequel Doomdarks Revenge were the first games to combine strategy and adventure elements in a narrative form. They did not need to have a tactical layer to resolve combat. Instead everything happened from the first person perspective which was technically ground breaking at the time.
What amazes me is how complete Mike Singleton made these two games. Narratively he explains why and how you can see through the eyes of each of the characters via power of the Moon Ring.
The games possessed so much elegant design that events were happening away from your presence and you could try and decipher what occurred at an overrun stronghold with its leaders cowering in the hills. The epic struggle was reinforced seeing things play out beyond my initial scope and using it as a signal to respond.
I’m pleased that you’ve covered these masterpieces and would ask you reconsider your opinion about them as far as including them in this Hall of Fame. Cheers!
Graham Burnett
November 11, 2020 at 4:36 pm
I agree, I think there should be reconsideration the Midnight games for this list. Remembering that they were created in 1983/84 on a 48k 8 bit computer. And yes the interface is not perfect and up to todays standard but what games are from 35 years ago. Is there any other game that is comparable that came before it? It is all about the Atmosphere that the Midnight games created
The other game I think needs to looked into is Turbo Esprit on Sinclair Spectrum. An open world car driving game. Often considered the template for Grand Theft Autopart.
Murray Lorden
June 13, 2020 at 8:10 am
1993, Betrayal at Krondor
Corbeau
July 23, 2020 at 3:49 pm
I don’t know how much time it has to pass for a blog reply to become unpolite, but here it is anyway. Someone mentioned Star Control, but that one is just a 2D action duel platform. Star Control II, however, is something I will never forget: a mix of Elite and probably a very good adventure game that I never played because I mostly don’t play adventure games, with a deep and complex storyline, witty and thoroughly designed characters, incredibly interesting world/universe… If I had the time, I’d play it again because it feels like reading a GOOD book and actually living through it. Alas, at the moment I don’t even have the time to read books, so…
TsuDhoNimh
February 7, 2021 at 2:29 am
Random feature request: (and excuse me if there is already a way to do this) it would be useful to have a link at the top of this page to the bottom of the Hall of Fame (or the top of the Comments section) so that one does not have to press Page Down over and over again to see if a new game got added after it got featured in a blog post.
Jimmy Maher
February 8, 2021 at 10:02 am
Done. But do be aware that the chronology sometimes jumps around a bit — for example, if I write about multiple games in one article, looking either backward or forward from our “current” year in the process. So, the last game on the list here isn’t always guaranteed to be the latest one added.
Lisa H.
February 24, 2021 at 8:23 pm
I know Infocom was influential, but they seem over-represented here. If I can count (22/117), you’ve included 63% of their catalog (22/35) and they compose almost 19% of the list all by themselves. For comparison, there are 9 entries from Sierra out of some 50+ they released through 1994 (not counting pure action games, SCI remakes, ought we to count Ultima?… it’s kind of tricky to count Sierra accurately vs. what you cover on this blog) and 6 from LucasArts, although granted their catalog is not that large.
Jimmy Maher
February 25, 2021 at 8:33 am
I’m more concerned with (what I consider to be) quality in the abstract than I am with equal representation; Infocom is “over-represented” simply because they tended to make better, more thoughtfully designed games than Sierra in my opinion. Fairness and solubility weigh heavily for me in passing judgment on adventure games. I’m of the opinion that one bad puzzle can ruin an otherwise great game because it destroys the precious bond of trust between the player and the game — and once that’s gone, you can never get it back. Sierra games often fail to do well by this standard because the company was never able to inculcate a thoroughgoing culture of good design along with a set of accompanying best practices. So, their design successes, while by no means nonexistent, appeared far more sporadically than Infocom’s and make up a smaller proportion of their total output.
Of course, others may not be so concerned about solving every puzzle themselves, may even not mind playing straight from a walkthrough in order to enjoy the story. Fair enough; there is no *wrong* way to play a game, as long as you’re having fun. I can only call ’em like I see ’em. These are simply the games I’ve written about on this site that *I* had the most fun with, and would wholeheartedly recommend to someone else.
Lisa H.
February 25, 2021 at 8:23 pm
I don’t mean to laud Sierra specifically, it was just a company I knew also had large output whose titles were easy for me to recognize in the list and therefore a quick comparison to throw together, rather than having to dig deeper to get the full statistics. (Although now I do wonder how many companies are represented here by one game only.)
The percentage of this list that is Infocom is one thing (and obviously will decrease as more items are added); it’s more that those titles represent such a large proportion of Infocom’s total production that is giving me pause. I am not 100% sure which games to count off of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LucasArts_games but if we take 10 adventure games through 1994, Infocom is even slightly beating LucasArts (62.something percent vs 60). There’s fewer overall from LucasArts so it comes out to something like “they didn’t produce a lot, but what they did was consistently quite good and/or groundbreaking”. With Infocom’s larger numbers I find myself kinda going “…really? all of those are equally as good or otherwise notable as all the others?”
Jimmy Maher
February 26, 2021 at 8:39 am
There’s no requirement that every title on this list be *equally* as good and/or notable. Just that they meet a certain threshold for goodness and/or notability. ;)
Indie
July 17, 2021 at 12:31 pm
A lesser known but worthy inclusion would be I-War 1 (EU) or Independence War (US) from Particle Systems. If you actually play it, it has a bug where there’s a timer in (atleast) one mission runs too fast on modern hardware and I had to edit the game script file to add more time in order to complete it. It’s a mission fairly early on in the game. This game also had a sequel.
Also as other sequels were included, the omission of Star Control II is puzzling. I did notice inclusion of Star Flight. I think Mass Effect 1 is worth a notice as well, personally I preferred the combat in 1 over that in it’s sequels. Also the delivery of the story felt better.
Sensible Software’s Mega Lo Mania is worth trying as well, one of my favorite Amiga games.
Jacob
November 10, 2021 at 5:45 pm
Hi, Jacob here.
Have you ever played the excellent danish game “Blackout”?
https://lparchive.org/Blackout/
You can also watch this guy play through most of it:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI6QYb2o4CqDRLRxCCXtOpT-Md6eawvtk
I live in Denmark/Aarhus you can borrow the original if you would like to.
Or what about “The path”:
http://tale-of-tales.com/ThePath/
Or “The dream machine”:
https://cockroach-inc.itch.io/the-dream-machine
I just thought these games would fit well into your collection.
Cheers,
Jacob
Roger Durrant
February 4, 2022 at 12:08 pm
My list would have included the existential angst story cum puzzlefest Sunset Over Savannah, The Curses! homage Mulldoon Legacy, the best one room game ever written namely Violet and that tear stained homage to the withered soul of a city Lost New York.
declain
February 14, 2022 at 10:56 am
All those games are still “in the future” so they may eventually be on the list.
Not a twelve year old
July 8, 2022 at 7:29 pm
Fortnite when?
Josh T.
August 15, 2022 at 8:37 pm
“in the course of the solving the game” <–extra 'the' there
I believe the Summer/Winter Games used to be on this list, as well as The Manhole (though I may be misremembering the latter). Any reason you decided to take them off the list?
Jimmy Maher
August 16, 2022 at 7:17 pm
Thanks!
I did go through the list some months back and pruned some entries. My core criterion has always been whether a work is something I would gladly re-experience at some point, just for fun and just on its own merits. I realized that the Epyx Games series was here mainly for reasons of nostalgia. Like many of my generation, I daresay, I have very fond memories of gathering around a Commodore 64 with friends back in the day, talking trash and breaking joysticks. But those games were pretty fiddly and simplistic, if we’re being honest, and really don’t have much to offer beyond nostalgia today. And I’m pretty ruthless about not letting the “good old days” syndrome affect my judgment.
As far as The Manhole: I just faced the reality that goal-less, state-less explorations really aren’t my jam. It’s not you, Manhole, it’s me.
Ben
October 28, 2022 at 8:07 pm
cover art -> cover art.
be be much -> be much
Leather Goddess of Phobos -> Leather Goddesses of Phobos
62 Son -> 62. Son
soldiers and statesman -> soldiers and statesmen
Dan Shivotz -> Dan Shiovitz
The Case of the Rose Tattoo -> The Case of the Rose Tattoo (1996)
Jimmy Maher
October 31, 2022 at 11:04 am
Thanks!
Playstation Nation
December 15, 2022 at 8:13 pm
Opinions on Gabriel Knight and any other Jane Jensen projects?
Also, point-and-click games are making a resurgence again, thanks to Indies, Microids, Daedelic Entertainment, HerInteractive, TellTale Games, etc.
Alena
May 12, 2023 at 4:48 pm
Will there be a Console Antiquarian?
Jimmy Maher
May 12, 2023 at 8:02 pm
Sounds like a niche waiting to be filled. ;)
james
July 24, 2023 at 5:47 pm
one of the most complex interactive fiction game i played, has to be curses by graham nelson. it is honestly extremely frustrating, even the walkthrough did not help much at all, i was not able to pass surtain parts, even with it.
ATHE
March 5, 2024 at 10:43 pm
very good list…greetings from greece!!!
David Ross
June 10, 2024 at 11:03 pm
For those looking for Dark Forces: It is reviewed in Jedi Knight. Our host appreciates DF’s improvements over Doom, but faults DF’s level-design and inability to save games. So it doesn’t make the cut.
Joe Vincent
October 23, 2024 at 11:48 am
DOOM?!?
Jimmy Maher
October 23, 2024 at 1:08 pm
It’s not a personal favorite of mine. Which doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be a favorite of yours, of course. ;)