Classic Games

Capcom's vertically scrolling shoot 'em up of December 1984, designed by Yoshiki Okamoto: one twin-boomed fighter against 32 stages of Japanese aircraft over the Pacific, with a loop-the-loop to escape trouble three times a life. Elite's 1986–87 home conversions for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad drew mostly poor reviews, but the arcade game started a series that ran from 1943 to 1942: Joint Strike in 2008.

Intelligent Systems' turn-based war game for the Game Boy Advance, released in North America in September 2001, was the first of Nintendo's Wars series to be sold outside Japan. Bright, rounded tanks, a long tutorial and commanding officers with charged-up CO Powers made a forbidding genre approachable. Europe waited until 2002 because of the 11 September attacks, and Japan until 2004.

Warren Robinett's Adventure for the Atari 2600 turned the rooms, objects and puzzles of the text game Colossal Cave Adventure into pictures: a square hero carrying one object at a time through 30 screens of castles, mazes and dark catacombs, chased by three dragons and robbed by a bat. It fitted in 4K of ROM, sold about a million copies, and hid a room reading "Created by Warren Robinett", the best-known early video game Easter egg, though not the first.

Hudson Soft's 1986 Famicom game Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima was the arcade Wonder Boy with a new hero: Hudson's own celebrity gamer, Takahashi Meijin. It sold over a million copies in Japan, reached America in 1988 as Hudson's Adventure Island with the hero renamed Master Higgins, and grew into a series of its own on the NES, Game Boy, PC Engine and Super NES.

Yu Suzuki's 1987 arcade game for Sega put the player behind an F-14 Tomcat, locking missiles on to waves of enemy jets. Its deluxe cabinets were enclosed cockpits that rolled with the plane. Activision's home computer versions of 1988, all based on the updated After Burner II, earned 86% from CRASH on the Spectrum, while ACE thought the game dull without the moving seat.

Ensemble Studios' first game, published by Microsoft in October 1997, put real-time strategy into ancient history: twelve civilisations, four ages from Stone to Iron, villagers who hunted, farmed and fished, and victory by conquest, by holding sacred sites or by keeping a Wonder standing. Bruce Shelley, co-designer of Civilization, designed it with Rick Goodman. It was close to a million sales within nine months and began a series that carried on into the 2020s.

Ensemble Studios' 2002 real-time strategy game, published by Microsoft, swapped the history of Age of Empires for Greek, Egyptian and Norse myth. Players chose a god at each age, spent a new resource, favour, on minotaurs, giants and one-shot god powers, and followed the Atlantean hero Arkantos through a single story campaign. The Titans (2003) added the Atlanteans as a fourth culture, and the game returned as an Extended Edition in 2014 and as Age of Mythology: Retold in 2024.

Virgin Games' 1993 Mega Drive platformer, published by Sega, was animated with the help of Disney's own artists, and Virgin built a process to fit their drawings onto a 16-megabit cartridge. David Perry led the programming. Virgin's Stephen Clarke-Willson later put its sales at four million, and Virgin's boss said it earned the company more than $100 million.

Alex Kidd, the big-eared, rock-punching prince of Kotaro Hayashida's Alex Kidd in Miracle World (1986), was Sega's mascot through the Master System years. Miracle World mixed platform jumping with shops, vehicles and boss fights decided by rock-paper-scissors, and was built into later Master Systems in Europe, North America and Brazil. Five more games followed on the Master System and Mega Drive before Sonic the Hedgehog took his place in 1991; a remake, Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX, came out in 2021.

Team17's second game, released for the Amiga at the end of 1991: a one- or two-player overhead shooter set on an alien-infested space station, which borrowed its look from the film Aliens and its structure from Gauntlet. It entered the charts at number 2, and started a series that ran through two first-person sequels in 1995 and 1996 to a 2009 remake.

Creative Assembly, a British studio known for strategy games, spent five years making a survival horror game from Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. Amanda Ripley hides from a single creature that cannot be killed and keeps changing its behaviour, aboard a space station built from the film's own design archive. Sega released it in October 2014; it won the BAFTA for audio, sold 2.1 million copies in its first six months and got a sequel announced for its tenth anniversary.

James Cameron's 1986 film Aliens became two different computer games. Electric Dreams, Activision's British label, published Mark Eyles's game, in which the player directs Ripley and five others through the colony by video link; CRASH gave it 84%. Activision's American game, a sequence of six scenes from the film, reached the Spectrum in late 1987 as Aliens (US Version) and scored 45%.

Sega's 1988 arcade game raised a dead hero to rescue Zeus's daughter and let him collect spirit balls until he turned into a werewolf, a dragon, a bear or a tiger. Its talking title screen and transformations made it a showpiece, and Sega put it in the box with the Mega Drive in America and Britain, where millions of players met it. The home computer conversions were poorly received.

Frictional Games' 2010 first-person horror game left its hero with no weapons, a lantern and a sanity that drained in the dark and in the presence of monsters. Made by a small Swedish studio for $360,000, it sold well over a million copies with bundles, spread through YouTube videos and mods, and taught later games such as Outlast to make the player hide. Its code was released under the GPL in 2020.

Éric Chahi spent two years on the Amiga building Another World almost alone: a wordless science-fiction escape drawn entirely in flat polygons, animated from video of real movement and driven by a tiny scripting language of his own. Delphine Software released it in November 1991, US Gold sold it in Britain, and Interplay renamed it Out of This World for America. It has been ported ever since, from the Super Nintendo and 3DO to a 20th anniversary edition in 2011.

Written by the Edinburgh sculptor Sandy White with Angela Sutherland and published by Quicksilva for the 48K Spectrum at Christmas 1983, Ant Attack let the player walk, run and climb through a walled city drawn in isometric 3D, and switch between four camera angles. CRASH gave it 85% in its first issue, it sold 50,000 copies in a year, and the player could choose to be a boy rescuing a girl or a girl rescuing a boy.

Troika Games' first role-playing game (Sierra, 2001) put steam engines, railways and guns into a world of elves, dwarves and wizards, and made magic and machinery work against each other. Made by three of Fallout's creators, it was praised for its setting, its writing and the depth of its character building, and criticised for its interface, its fights and its bugs.

Taito's 1986 arcade game took Atari's Breakout, a decade old, and added falling power-up capsules, drifting aliens, 33 rounds and a final boss, Doh, all controlled with a free-turning knob. Ocean published the British home versions under its Imagine label in 1987, with Martin Galway's Commodore 64 music; the NES version came with a knob controller of its own. Revenge of Doh followed in 1987, and new Arkanoid games were still appearing in the 2020s.

SNK's 1992 Neo Geo fighting game, created by Hiroshi Matsumoto, zoomed in on its huge fighters when they closed in and out when they parted, rationed special moves with a spirit gauge, and bruised faces as a fight went on. It divided players and reviewers, but its heroes, Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia, went on through two sequels and into The King of Fighters.

Ubisoft Montreal's 2007 game began as a Prince of Persia sequel and turned into something else: an assassin, Altaïr, climbing and killing his way through Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem in 1191, relived by a modern man through a machine called the Animus. Reviewers found its missions repetitive, but it sold more than ten million copies and started Ubisoft's biggest series.

Ed Logg's 1979 coin-op for Atari put a triangular ship in a field of drifting rocks and drew it all in sharp white lines on a vector monitor. More than 70,000 machines made it Atari's best-selling arcade game, and players found a way, called lurking, to play for days on one coin.

Ultimate's first big 48K Spectrum game, released at the end of 1983 for £5.50, trapped a knight, a wizard or a serf in a five-floor castle with a key in three pieces and a roast chicken for an energy bar. CRASH gave it 92% and later said it pointed the way to the arcade adventure.

Jeff Minter's first full Commodore 64 game, written early in 1983: a scrolling shooter in which a small fighter wears down 90-foot, neutronium-shielded, laser-spitting camels, borrowed from Parker Brothers' The Empire Strikes Back. Llamasoft sold it in Britain, an Atari 8-bit version followed in 1984, and in America HesWare used the name for a different Minter game, the Gridrunner sequel Matrix.

Data East's 1988 arcade beat-'em-up, DragonNinja in Japan and Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja in America, sent two street fighters through seven stages of ninjas to rescue a kidnapped American president, with Karnov as the first boss and the DragonNinja himself fought on a flying helicopter. Its opening line, 'Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie?', outlived the game. Ocean's Imagine label converted it as Dragon Ninja for British computers, Data East published it for American PCs, and an NES version followed in 1989.

Baldur's Gate (1998) was the first game BioWare, a studio in Edmonton founded by two doctors, made for Interplay's Black Isle label: a five-CD Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game set on the Forgotten Realms' Sword Coast, with a party of up to six and real-time fights that could be paused. It sold more than a million copies, helped bring the computer role-playing game back from the late-1990s slump, and its Infinity Engine ran a run of games from Planescape: Torment to Baldur's Gate II.

Nintendo's 1984 arcade game and 1985 Famicom cartridge put two balloons on a small man's back and set him to pop other fliers' balloons, in a game that Shigeru Miyamoto and period reviewers alike compared to Williams' Joust. Yoshio Sakamoto worked on it at Nintendo R&D1; the Famicom version was programmed by Satoru Iwata at HAL Laboratory and added the endless Balloon Trip.

Rare's Nintendo 64 platform game of 1998 began as a Super Nintendo adventure called Project Dream, whose hero was a boy named Edison. It became a bear, Banjo, with a sarcastic breegull, Kazooie, riding in his backpack, nine themed worlds to scour for jigsaw pieces and musical notes, and a Grant Kirkhope score that changed its instruments as the player moved. Reviewers put it just behind Super Mario 64.

Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond's Batman, published by Ocean in spring 1986, sent a portly Caped Crusader through more than 150 rooms of the Batcave to rebuild his Batcraft and rescue a kidnapped Robin. CRASH gave it 93% and Your Sinclair made it a Megagame. Its engine, developed further, became Head Over Heels.

Ocean's 1989 game of Tim Burton's Batman followed the film through five sections: a platform chase through the Axis chemical works, a Batmobile run, a poison puzzle in the Batcave, the Batwing over the Joker's parade and a climb to the top of Gotham's cathedral. CRASH gave it 93%, ZZAP! 96% on the C64 and 97% on the Amiga, Commodore bundled it with the Amiga 500, and Gallup made it the Christmas number one.

Rare's 1991 NES game for Tradewest sent two toads, Rash and Zitz, across twelve levels to rescue their friend Pimple and Princess Angelica from the Dark Queen. It began as a beat-'em-up and kept turning into something else: a cable descent, a speeder-bike tunnel, surfing, snake-climbing. Nintendo Power gave it 36 pages; players remember the Turbo Tunnel. Sequels, a crossover with Double Dragon, an arcade game and a 2020 revival followed.

Ed Rotberg's 1980 coin-op for Atari put the player inside a tank on a wireframe battlefield drawn on a vector display, with a 3D world the player could drive around in. Early cabinets had a periscope viewer. About 15,000 machines were made, the US Army's interest led to a prototype trainer for the Bradley fighting vehicle, and the program's source files were published in 2021.

Konami's 1997 arcade game gave players five keys and a record turntable and asked them to play along with club tracks in time with notes falling down the screen. It became a craze in Japan, gave Konami's music games their name, Bemani, and led to Dance Dance Revolution and the seven-key Beatmania IIDX, which is still being updated in Japanese arcades.

Revolution Software's 1994 science-fiction adventure, drawn by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, set in a future Australian city where industry fills the tops of the towers and the rich live at the bottom. It filled 15 Amiga disks, scored in the 90s across the Amiga press, and in 2003 Revolution let the ScummVM project give it away free.

Alan McNeil's 1980 arcade game for Stern Electronics, in which a stick man shoots his way through electrified maze rooms full of robots that taunt him in synthesised speech. Stay too long and Evil Otto, an unkillable bouncing smiley face, comes for you. Atari converted it for the 2600 and, with the voices, the 5200; there was a Vectrex version too.

Michel Ancel's 2003 action-adventure for Ubisoft cast Jade, a young photojournalist on the planet Hillys, as the hero who exposes the regime's part in an alien invasion. Its stealth, fighting, hovercraft racing and wildlife photography won warm reviews, but it was lost in the Christmas 2003 rush and sold poorly. Its reputation grew afterwards: Ubisoft reissued it in HD in 2011 and as a 20th Anniversary Edition in 2024, and a prequel, Beyond Good and Evil 2, has been in development since 2017.

Capcom's 1987 coin-op gave its soldier a telescopic grappling arm instead of a jump, an idea Tokuro Fujiwara had first tried at Konami. GO! and Software Creations turned it into a run of British conversions that CRASH and ZZAP!64 rated above 90% in 1988, and a very different 1988 NES version, sold in Japan under a title naming Hitler and cleaned of Nazi references in the West, became the version most people remember and the one Capcom remade in 2008.

BioShock (2007), made by Irrational Games' studios in Boston and Canberra as 2K Boston and 2K Australia, set a first-person shooter in Rapture, a ruined undersea city founded on Ayn Rand's ideas. Its Little Sisters asked players to save or harvest them, its late twist turned the phrase 'would you kindly' against the player, and it sold more than four million copies. Its PC version's SecuROM activation limits angered buyers at launch.

Lionhead's first game, published by Electronic Arts for the PC in spring 2001, made the player a god on the island of Eden whose power came from villagers' worship. A giant creature, chosen from an ape, a cow and a tiger, learned from being stroked and slapped, and miracles were cast by drawing shapes with the mouse. It took more than three years, scored 9/10 in Edge and 95% in PC Zone, and sold more than two million copies.

Sunsoft's 1988 NES game sent a boy after his radioactive pet frog in an armoured vehicle that could jump, and later hover, dive and climb walls. Side-on driving stages linked by doors to overhead sections on foot made one large underground world, with routes that opened only once the right upgrade had been won. In Japan the same game was a science-fiction war story called Metafight.

FromSoftware's 2015 action role-playing game for the PlayStation 4, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and published by Sony. It took the Souls games into the plague-ridden gothic city of Yharnam and rewarded attack over defence. It has never been released on PC, and in 2022 a fan's demake in the style of a 1990s PlayStation game was downloaded more than 100,000 times within hours.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019) is the game Koji Igarashi made after leaving Konami: a gothic castle explored room by room in the manner of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Its Kickstarter campaign raised $5,545,991 in 2015, the most any video game had raised there at the time. ArtPlay developed it with Shutaro Iida as director, 505 Games published it in June 2019, and it had sold more than two million copies by 2023.

Tehkan's 1984 arcade game sent a caped hero leaping and gliding round five landmark screens to gather 24 bombs, scoring most for taking the lit ones in order. Elite Systems' 1986 home versions reached the top of the British charts: CRASH gave the Spectrum game 92% and Amstrad Action made the CPC version a Rave, but ZZAP!64 thought the Commodore 64 conversion a disappointment.

Hudson Soft's Bomberman began as a small one-player maze game for Japanese home computers in 1983, sold in Britain as Eric and the Floaters. Its 1985 Famicom version added power-ups that made the bombs bigger, and the PC Engine's five-player multitap turned it into a party game. Hudson pushed the player count to ten in the 1990s; Konami, which absorbed Hudson in 2012, kept the series going.

Hudson Soft's 1989 PC Engine platform game, made by Red Company, starred a bald caveman who fights with his head and climbs cliffs with his teeth. Called PC Genjin in Japan, PC Kid in Britain and Bonk in America, he became NEC's answer to Mario and Sonic and starred in sequels on the PC Engine, the NES, the Game Boy and the Super NES.

Peter Liepa's first game, written for the Atari 400/800 from an idea by Chris Gray and published by First Star Software in 1984. Rockford digs through sixteen caves of rocks, jewels, fireflies and butterflies whose simple rules produce landslides and chain reactions. It was converted to most home computers, went into the arcades within months, was reviewed as Game of the Month in Britain, and has been sold in new versions ever since, up to a 40th-anniversary edition in 2025.

Atari's 1976 arcade game turned Pong into a one-player game against a wall of bricks. Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow are credited with the idea, and Steve Wozniak built the prototype in four days for his friend Steve Jobs, though the people involved have told the story of its chip count and its fee in different ways ever since. The game was built from logic chips with no processor. Wozniak later wrote it again in BASIC on his Apple II, and it went on to inspire Space Invaders and Arkanoid.

Revolution Software's 1996 point-and-click adventure sent an American tourist, George Stobbart, and a French journalist, Nico Collard, after the secret of the Knights Templar. It cost about £1 million, was drawn by animators from the film and television trade, and was published by Virgin on the PC and by Sony on the PlayStation. It began a series that Revolution was still making thirty years later.

Fukio Mitsuji's 1986 arcade game for Taito sent two bubble-blowing dinosaurs, Bub and Bob, through 100 single screens, and hid its true ending from anyone who played alone. Software Creations converted it for Firebird in 1987, earning 90% from CRASH on the Spectrum and 97% from ZZAP!64 on the Commodore 64, and Mitsuji followed it with Rainbow Islands.

Criterion Games' Burnout (2001) was a PlayStation 2 racer that filled a boost meter for driving dangerously through traffic and replayed its crashes in detail. The sequels added a Crash mode built around causing pile-ups, then Takedowns, which rewarded wrecking rival cars. The series ran to the open-world Burnout Paradise in 2008.

Capcom's 1993 arcade beat-'em-up of Mark Schultz's comic Xenozoic Tales. Up to three players fight poachers and a mad scientist in the 26th century, with dinosaurs that attack whoever wakes them and a Cadillac to drive across the desert. It ran on the CP System Dash board with QSound audio, and it has never had an official home version.

Epyx's 1987 multi-event game swapped Olympic sports for surfing, half-pipe skateboarding, BMX, roller skating, the foot bag and the flying disk, with sponsors' logos on the players. ZZAP!64 gave the Commodore 64 original a Gold Medal; CRASH gave the Spectrum version 36%. In 1989 it came in the box with the Atari Lynx.

Cannon Fodder was Sensible Software's mouse-controlled war game for the Amiga, published by Virgin at the end of 1993. The player leads a squad of tiny soldiers through 72 levels, and every one who dies gets a grave on the hill beside the recruiting queue. Before release a poppy on its packaging and loading screen drew protests from the Royal British Legion and the Daily Star, and Virgin removed it. AMIGA POWER gave the game 94%, and Sensible followed it with Cannon Fodder 2 in 1994.

Captain Commando started in the 1980s as a name on Capcom USA's adverts and NES game line. In 1991 Capcom gave him a CP System arcade beat-'em-up of his own, set in a future Metro City, in which up to four players fought as the Captain, the alien Mack the Knife, Ginzu the Ninja and Baby Head, a genius infant in a robot, and could climb into walking mechs. British reviewers found it competent but uninspiring. A two-player Super Famicom version followed in 1995 and a Japanese PlayStation version in 1998, and the Captain fought on in Marvel vs. Capcom.

Konami's Akumajō Dracula came out on the Famicom Disk System in September 1986 and reached the West on the NES as Castlevania. Its director wanted it to feel like a classic horror film; Simon Belmont's whip, stiff jumps and limited sub-weapons made it hard, and British reviewers found the colours muddy but the game compelling.

Konami's Tokyo studio released Akumajō Dracula X: Gekka no Yasōkyoku on the PlayStation in Japan in March 1997, and it reached the West that autumn as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Directed by Toru Hagihara, with Koji Igarashi as assistant director and music by Michiru Yamane, it swapped stages for one explorable castle and added experience points. It sold well in Japan and America and poorly in Europe, got a Japan-only Saturn version in 1998, and later gave the Metroidvania genre half its name.

Daisuke 'Pixel' Amaya's Doukutsu Monogatari, a free Windows action-adventure released in 2004 after about five years of spare-time work by one person. A fan translation carried it abroad, and from 2010 the American publisher Nicalis rereleased it on WiiWare, DSiWare, Steam, the 3DS and the Switch.

Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry's 2018 platform game began as a four-day PICO-8 game jam entry and grew into a precision platformer about Madeline, who climbs a mountain while fighting her own anxiety. Its tightly tuned controls, its assist mode and its story won it Best Independent Game and Games for Impact at The Game Awards 2018, and its developers later published part of its source code.

Dona Bailey and Ed Logg's coin-op for Atari sent a segmented centipede down through a field of mushrooms that the player's own shots kept reshaping. Its program is dated 1980 but it reached the arcades in 1981, on a new cue-ball-sized trackball, and it became Atari's second best-selling coin-op and a favourite of the women who were then crowding into arcades.

Taito's 1988 arcade game turned the OutRun-style road race into a police chase: two detectives in a black Porsche hunt down five criminals and ram them off the road before time runs out. Ocean's 1989 Spectrum conversion by John O'Brien and Bill Harbison scored 95% in CRASH and 97% in C&VG and topped the Christmas charts, while the Commodore 64 version was a flop. Taito followed it with Special Criminal Investigation in 1989.

Capcom's 1990 NES game of Disney's cartoon, in which one or two players guide the chipmunks Chip and Dale through a city map to rescue Gadget from Fat Cat. Almost everything in it is a weapon once picked up: crates, steel boxes, balls and the other player. It sold 1.2 million copies by Capcom's count, reached Britain at the end of 1991, had a sequel in 1993 and returned in The Disney Afternoon Collection in 2017.

Dan Gorlin wrote Choplifter on his grandfather's Apple II over the winter of 1981–82, and Brøderbund published it in May 1982. The player flies a helicopter over the border to free 64 hostages from the Bungeling Empire, and the only score is how many get home. Reviewers praised its animation and linked it to the Iran hostage crisis, which Gorlin says was never a direct model. It was converted to most computers and consoles of the 1980s, and Sega remade it as an arcade game in 1985.

Square's 1995 Super Famicom role-playing game brought together Final Fantasy's Hironobu Sakaguchi with Dragon Quest's designer Yuji Horii and artist Akira Toriyama. A boy called Crono and his friends travel between eras from 65 million BC to AD 2300 to stop a creature called Lavos from ruining the world in 1999. Its battles happen on the map rather than on a separate screen, its ending depends on when you choose to face Lavos, and a finished game can be started again with the same party. Yasunori Mitsuda wrote most of the music. It sold two million copies in Japan in two months and more than five million across all versions by 2025.

A&F Software's 1983 platform game, begun by the teenage Nigel Alderton on the Spectrum as 'Eggy Kong' and written for the BBC Micro by A&F's Doug Anderson at the same time. Hen-House Harry collects eggs across eight screens that loop with faster birds and a flying duck. It reached the Spectrum and BBC charts in 1984 and stayed in print on almost every home computer of the decade.

Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley's Civilization, published by MicroProse for the PC in late 1991 and then for the Amiga, Atari ST and Macintosh, asked the player to lead a people from 4000 BC to a colony ship bound for Alpha Centauri. It shared its name with a British board game, which led to a legal fight settled in 1998, and it began a series that Firaxis and 2K were still continuing in 2025.

Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith's Spectrum game of the Sylvester Stallone film, published by Ocean at the end of 1986. CRASH gave it 93% and a Smash; ZZAP!64 gave the Commodore 64 game of the same name 13%. CRASH's readers voted it into their Hotline chart at 13 in February 1987 and held it at number 2 for three months.

Will Crowther, a programmer at BBN and a caver, wrote Adventure in FORTRAN for the PDP-10 in 1975–76, basing its cave on the Colossal Cave section of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave system. Don Woods expanded it at Stanford in 1977 into the 350-point game that spread from one mainframe to the next and inspired Zork, Scott Adams and Sierra. Crowther's own source was recovered in 2005, and the last Crowther and Woods version has been free software since 2017.

Columns drops sticks of three coloured jewels into a well; the player cycles their order as they fall and clears lines of three or more of a colour across, down or diagonally. Jay Geertsen wrote it while working at Hewlett-Packard, and Sega bought the rights in 1990, released it in the arcades and on the Mega Drive, Master System and Game Gear, and packed it with the Game Gear in America.

Sega Technical Institute's 1995 Mega Drive game trapped cartoonist Sketch Turner inside his own comic. Its panels became rooms, its paper concealed items, and its villain drew enemies onto the page.

Westwood Studios' Command & Conquer (1995) took the harvest-build-fight design of its own Dune II, moved it to a near-future Earth where the Global Defense Initiative and the Brotherhood of Nod fight over an alien mineral called Tiberium, and wrapped it in filmed briefings on two CDs. Reviewers called it Dune II with a new coat of paint and still could not stop playing it; it sold well over a million copies in its first year, went to the Saturn, PlayStation and Nintendo 64, set off a flood of imitators and started a series that ran until 2010. EA released its source code in 2020 and 2025.

Red Alert (1996) was Westwood Studios' prequel to Command & Conquer: Albert Einstein travels back to 1924 to remove Hitler from history, and the Allies fight Stalin's Soviet Union for Europe instead. It added SVGA graphics under Windows 95, ships and submarines, Tesla coils and attack dogs, and multiplayer for up to eight over a network or the Internet. Computer Gaming World called it 'a Mozart symphony to all the Salieri clones'. It came to the PlayStation in 1997, became freeware in 2008, was remastered in 2020, and EA published its source code in 2025.

Commander Keen helped establish id Software and Apogee’s episodic shareware model. Its early adventures combine a world map, scrolling platform stages and the extra reach of a pogo stick.

Capcom's 1985 arcade game, directed by Tokuro Fujiwara, sent the soldier Super Joe up a vertically scrolling battlefield alone. In Britain Elite paid £65,000 for the home rights; its conversions were the number one game of Christmas 1985, CRASH gave the Spectrum version 94%, and the Commodore 64 version carried a Rob Hubbard score finished overnight, at the cost of one of the game's levels.

Relic Entertainment's 2006 real-time strategy game, published by THQ, set American and German forces against each other in Normandy. Its infantry took cover on their own, its buildings fell apart under fire, and players fought over territory for manpower, munitions and fuel instead of harvesting resources. Edge gave it nine out of ten. Two stand-alone expansions followed, then sequels in 2013 and 2023.

Konami's 1987 arcade game sent two commandos against an alien base in side-on and into-the-screen stages. Europe knew it as Gryzor, which Ocean converted to the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC, and later as Probotector, a NES version with robots in place of the soldiers. The NES Contra made the Konami Code famous in America.

Counter-Strike was a team game of terrorists against counter-terrorists, made by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe with the Half-Life development kit and released free in June 1999. Valve bought it in 2000, Sierra sold it in shops from late that year while it stayed a free download, and its successors, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Counter-Strike 2, carried the series and its tournaments on to the present.

Naughty Dog's 1996 PlayStation platformer sent its cartoon bandicoot running into the screen down narrow 3D paths, as well as across it in the old side-on way. Sony insisted at first that Crash was not its mascot, but he became the face of the console anyway, and the series sold more than five million copies in two years.

Sega AM3's 1999 arcade game for the NAOMI board gave players a taxi, a hilly city modelled on San Francisco and a running clock, and paid them for reckless driving. Its director, Kenji Kanno, chose The Offspring and Bad Religion for the soundtrack. The Dreamcast version of early 2000 added a second city and the Crazy Box challenges, and the game has since been converted to most formats.

SNK's 1990 action role-playing game for the Famicom and NES wakes its hero from a hundred years of cryogenic sleep into a world rebuilt on magic after a war that began on 1 October 1997. Four elemental swords, charged shots and a battery save made it one of Nintendo Power's favourites of 1990. Nintendo remade it for the Game Boy Color in 2000, with a rewritten story and new music.

Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine (Hewson, 1988) is a flip-screen shoot-'em-up by Raffaele Cecco, written for the Spectrum and converted to the Amstrad, Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST. CRASH gave the Spectrum game 96% in April 1988. It is famously hard, and the C64 version carried a new theme by Jeroen Tel.

Konami's 1998 arcade game in which players step on four arrow panels in time with the music. It was the hit of Japan's JAMMA show, reached British arcades as Dancing Stage in 1999, came home to the PlayStation with its own dance mat, and by 2004 had sold 6.5 million copies, Konami said. Its promise as exercise was tested in American schools and a paediatric study.

Taito's horizontal shoot-'em-up spread its playfield across three monitors set side by side, sat one or two players in a cockpit with a vibrating seat, and sent them through a branching map of 26 zones lettered A to Z, each ending in a giant mechanical fish. Shown in London in January 1987 and released in Japan the following month, it was a hit at home but rarely seen in British arcades. The Edge converted it to home computers as Darius+, and the series ran on through Darius II, Darius Twin, Darius Gaiden and Dariusburst.

Hidetaka Miyazaki's follow-up to Demon's Souls came out for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2011, published by FromSoftware in Japan and Namco Bandai elsewhere. It joined its areas into one continuous world, let players help, warn, trick and invade each other without ever speaking, and was, in Miyazaki's words, meant to be as difficult as possible while still fair. A PC edition followed in 2012 and a remaster in 2018, and by 2020 the series had sold more than 27 million copies.

Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman's 1993 sequel to Maniac Mansion sent three friends through time in portable-toilet time machines to stop Purple Tentacle conquering the world, with objects flushed between the 18th century, the present and a future ruled by tentacles. It ran on SCUMM, looked like a Chuck Jones cartoon, could not be lost, and in its CD-ROM version spoke every line. The whole of Maniac Mansion was hidden inside it. Double Fine remastered it in 2016.

Sega AM2's 1994 arcade stock-car racer, directed by Toshihiro Nagoshi, was the first game on Sega's texture-mapped Model 2 board. Up to eight linked cabinets raced together to Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's sung soundtrack, and it held first place in Edge's chart of dedicated arcade machines from August 1994 to January 1995. The 1995 Saturn version was criticised for scenery that appeared late and a jerky frame rate, and Sega remade the game for the Saturn, the Dreamcast and, in 2011, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Motion Twin's Dead Cells combines side-scrolling combat, changing level layouts and permanent unlocks. Its full release followed Early Access in 2017. Motion Twin and Evil Empire continued adding content through 2024, while later patches maintained the game.

Tecmo's Dead or Alive (1996) ran on Sega's Model 2 arcade board and replaced the usual guard button with a Hold button that caught an incoming attack and turned it into a counter. Tomonobu Itagaki's Team Ninja carried the series through Dreamcast, Xbox and later consoles to Dead or Alive 6 in 2019, while its exaggerated, sexualised women fighters and the Xtreme beach spin-offs drew criticism of their own.

Eugene Jarvis's first video game for Williams, finished on the night before its trade-show debut and in the arcades in 1981. A ship flying left and right over a scrolling planet, a scanner showing the whole world, humanoids to rescue from abducting Landers, and a joystick with five buttons. Joystik called it the biggest success of 1981, and its Atari VCS cartridge was one of the best-selling of 1982.

Cinemaware's first game, released for the Amiga at the end of 1986, set a simple Risk-like conquest of England among jousts, sieges, raids and a rescued Saxon lady, all drawn by Jim Sachs's team in Deluxe Paint. Rushed to market for Christmas and rewritten by R.J. Mical with months to go, it sold 20,000 copies in six weeks and became one of the programs people bought to show what the Amiga could do. It went on to the Commodore 64, Atari ST, PC, NES and many later formats.

Demon's Souls was a dark fantasy action role-playing game made by FromSoftware for the PlayStation 3, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and produced for Sony by Takeshi Kajii. It came out in Japan in February 2009 after a disastrous show demo and slow first sales, then spread by word of mouth to America and Europe. Its strangers' messages, bloodstains and invasions, its hub of separate worlds and its demand that players learn from dying led directly to Dark Souls. Bluepoint Games remade it for the PlayStation 5 in 2020.

Warren Spector's team at Ion Storm Austin built Deus Ex on the Unreal engine, and Eidos published it in 2000. It mixed first-person shooting, role-playing, stealth and hacking in a near-future world of conspiracies, and let the player solve most problems in several ways. Edge called it 'the anti-Daikatana'; it topped the British charts that summer and won BAFTA's PC game award.

Diablo was designed by Condor, a small San Francisco Bay Area studio founded by David Brevik and Max and Erich Schaefer, and published by Blizzard, which bought Condor during development and renamed it Blizzard North. It began as a turn-based game in the Rogue tradition and switched to real time at Blizzard's suggestion. It reached shops at the turn of 1997 with Blizzard's free Battle.net service, divided the reviewers, and sold, by Blizzard's count, nearly two million copies by September 1998.

Namco's 1982 arcade game sent a little digger in a white suit underground to clear out Pookas and Fygars by pumping them up until they burst or by dropping rocks on them. It was the first coin-op Atari licensed from another company, scored more for deeper kills and bigger rock drops, and went on to the Atari 2600, home computers, the Famicom and the Game Boy. The digger was later named Taizo Hori and made the father of Mr. Driller's hero.

Arkane Studios' first-person stealth game (Bethesda Softworks, 2012) cast the player as Corvo, a bodyguard framed for murdering the empress he served, with supernatural powers and a city, Dunwall, that kept count of how much he killed. Co-directed by Raphaël Colantonio and Harvey Smith, it brought the immersive-sim tradition of Thief and Deus Ex back to a big-budget release and was followed by two more games.

Philip and Andrew Oliver's Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure came out for £1.99 on Code Masters in 1987. The egg-shaped hero starred in a run of puzzle adventures and arcade spin-offs, reached the NES through Camerica as The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, and returned in a 2011 remake and a rediscovered NES game in 2015.

Nintendo's 1981 arcade game was Shigeru Miyamoto's first video game, written so that Nintendo of America could turn two thousand unsold Radar Scope machines into something it could sell. Its carpenter hero became Mario, Coleco packed its home version with the ColecoVision, and Universal's claim that it copied King Kong failed in a New York court.

Rare modelled Donkey Kong Country's apes, jungles and mines in 3D on Silicon Graphics workstations, then turned the renders into ordinary Super Nintendo sprites and tiles. Unveiled at the 1994 Summer CES, where the audience took it for a next-generation game, it went on sale that November and sold more than seven million copies in its first six months.

id Software's 1993 first-person shooter gave away its first episode as shareware, let four players hunt each other across an office network in a mode Romero named DeathMatch, and kept its levels in WAD files anyone could replace. Its source code was released in 1997 and relicensed under the GNU GPL in 1999.

Mike Singleton's sequel to The Lords of Midnight sent Luxor north into the Icemark to rescue his son from Shareth the Heartstealer. It used the same landscaping routines on a bigger map, with 128 characters who each followed their own interests. It took ten out of ten in CRASH, went straight to number 1 in CRASH's Adventure chart, and was still in the magazine's readers' charts in 1988.

Technos Japan's 1987 arcade game sent Billy and Jimmy Lee through a city to rescue Marian from the Black Warriors, with weapons they could take from their enemies and a final fight against each other. Its designer, Yoshihisa Kishimoto, built it from an abandoned Renegade sequel. Taito distributed it outside Japan; Melbourne House published the British home computer versions, converted by Binary Design, and Tradewest the NES version in America. It spawned sequels, a cartoon, a 1994 film and new games into the 2020s.

Nintendo's 1990 falling-block puzzle game for the NES and Game Boy, made by Gunpei Yokoi's R&D1 with music by Hirokazu Tanaka. Mario throws two-coloured capsules into a medicine bottle, and four of a colour in a row, capsules or viruses, disappear. The goal is to clear a fixed set of viruses rather than to survive, and in the two-player game a double or triple clear drops extra capsule halves into the other player's bottle. Nintendo has remade it on most of its machines since.

Announced at E3 2004 and released by Electronic Arts in November 2009, BioWare's dark fantasy role-playing game set a party of four against the darkspawn in the kingdom of Ferelden, with combat that could be paused to give orders and six origin stories that each began the game differently. Critics averaged about nine out of ten; Edge gave it five. It began a series that reached Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024.

Enix's 1986 Famicom role-playing game, designed and written by Yuji Horii, drawn by Akira Toriyama, scored by Koichi Sugiyama and developed by Koichi Nakamura's Chunsoft. It turned the dungeons and statistics of American computer RPGs into a simple loop of fights, gold and levels, and began the series that set the pattern for the Japanese RPG. It reached America in 1989 as Dragon Warrior, and Nintendo Power promoted it heavily.

Incentive's 1987 exploration game, written by its in-house team Major Developments, was the first built on the Freescape solid-3D system. CRASH gave it 97% and its readers voted it best game of the year; it came to the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga and PC, and to America as Space Station Oblivion.

Nintendo's 1984 light-gun game for the Famicom, sold in the West from 1985 with the NES Zapper and later packed into the NES Action Set on one cartridge with Super Mario Bros. The player shoots ducks and clay pigeons with three shots a target, and a hunting dog laughs at every miss. It took its name from a 1976 Nintendo toy that projected a duck on the wall.

Capcom's 1989 NES game of Disney's cartoon series sends Scrooge McDuck after five treasures in the Amazon, Transylvania, the African Mines, the Himalayas and on the Moon, bouncing on his cane like a pogo stick. Made by the team behind Mega Man and produced by Tokuro Fujiwara, it let players choose their route, scored 90% in Britain's Mean Machines, was converted to the Game Boy in 1990 and was remade by WayForward in 2013.

3D Realms' first-person shooter of 1996 gave Apogee's platform hero a voice, a sense of humour and a city to wreck. Built on Ken Silverman's Build engine, its levels were full of things to use and break, from light switches and toilets to whole walls. It was released as shareware in January 1996, ported to the Saturn, PlayStation and Nintendo 64, and its source code was published under the GPL in 2003.

Gargoyle Games' 1985 prequel to Tir Na Nog sent Cuchulainn into a walled city to rescue his charioteer, and made trading, banking, gambling and theft the way to do it. CRASH gave it 97%, the highest score it gave any Gargoyle game, and its readers put it at number 1 in their Adventure chart two months after the review.

Westwood Studios' Dune II (Virgin Games, 1992) set three houses mining spice on Arrakis in real time: build a base on the rock, send harvesters to the sand, turn spice into credits and credits into an army, while the enemy does the same. It was not the first real-time strategy game, but it put harvesting, base building and unit production together in the form Warcraft and Command & Conquer followed.

Dungeon Keeper (1997) was Bullfrog's PC strategy game in which the player is the evil keeper of a dungeon: imps dig out the rooms, the rooms attract monsters, and the monsters fight off the heroes who come to steal the gold. It took about three years, was Peter Molyneux's last game at Bullfrog, and Edge gave it nine out of ten. Dungeon Keeper 2 followed in 1999 without him, a third game was cancelled, and a free-to-play mobile version in 2014 was ruled to have been misleadingly advertised as free.

FTL Games' 1987 Atari ST role-playing game put a party of four in a first-person dungeon where monsters moved, torches burned down and food ran out in real time, all controlled with the mouse. Doug Bell and Dennis Walker wrote most of the code and Andy Jaros drew it. Mirrorsoft sold it in Britain, reviewers called it a game that changed how they thought about games, and it was converted to the Amiga, the PC, the Super Nintendo and several Japanese computers.

Howard Scott Warshaw wrote Atari's 2600 game of Spielberg's film in about five weeks for Christmas 1982. Reviewers disliked its endless falling into pits, and it became the best-known symbol of the 1983 crash, though the famous story of millions of buried cartridges is far larger than the evidence.

Shigesato Itoi's Mother 2, made by Ape with HAL Laboratory and released for the Super Famicom in 1994 and in America as EarthBound in 1995, swapped swords and dungeons for baseball bats, pizza deliveries, telephone calls home and a boy named Ness. It topped Japan's sales chart, was sold in America with a scratch-and-sniff player's guide, never had a European release at the time, and has been re-released for later Nintendo machines.

Taito's 1983 arcade game sent Agent 17, code-named Otto, down through a thirty-floor building from the roof, riding lifts and escalators, collecting secret documents from behind red doors and shooting or kicking the agents who came out of the others, before escaping by car from the basement. Quicksilva's conversions reached the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad in 1987, and Taito published versions for the Famicom, NES and Game Boy.

Ian Bell and David Braben's space trading and combat game, launched by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro in September 1984: eight galaxies of 256 star systems generated from a handful of numbers, 3D wireframe ships, and no score, only a rank to earn.

Elite Dangerous is Frontier Developments' return to Elite, thirty years after the original. Funded on Kickstarter in 2012 with £1,578,315 from 25,681 backers, it came out on PC in December 2014, then on Mac, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Like its ancestor it generates its galaxy instead of storing it, now a full-scale model of the Milky Way. Expansions added planetary landings in 2015 and walking on foot in 2021, and the game is still being updated on PC.

Sega's 1986 arcade game put players on a dirt bike over hills, jumps and boulders. Activision's 1987 home conversions followed; the Spectrum version, by Giga Games, was a CRASH Smash at 92%, sold near the top of Gallup's Spectrum chart that summer, and reached number 1 in CRASH's readers' chart at Christmas 1987.

Nintendo's side-on motocross game for the Famicom (November 1984) and NES, made by Shigeru Miyamoto with the SRD programmer Toshihiko Nakago. Its B button gave extra speed at the cost of an overheating engine, and its Design mode let players lay out their own tracks, saved to cassette in Japan and lost at switch-off elsewhere. A Vs. System arcade version followed, and Miyamoto later said Excitebike gave Super Mario Bros. both its partial scrolling and the idea for warp zones.

Exolon is a flick-screen shoot-'em-up by Raffaele Cecco, published by Hewson in 1987. It filled the Spectrum screen with colour without the usual clash by making sprites pass behind the scenery, a trick Cecco explained in Sinclair User. CRASH gave it 90% and a Smash, and its readers voted it to number 1 twice in the spring of 1988.

Nintendo's 1998 Nintendo 64 sequel to F-Zero put 30 hover-racers on every track and kept the game running at 60 frames a second by giving each craft only about 50 polygons and the tracks almost no scenery. Its energy meter was shield and boost at once, it let racers knock each other off rail-less sections of track, and it added a Death Race, a four-player mode and an X Cup of randomly generated tracks. Takaya Imamura was its chief designer. A 64DD expansion with a track editor followed in Japan in 2000.

Made by Lionhead's satellite studio Big Blue Box and published by Microsoft in 2004, Fable followed one hero from childhood in the very British fairy-tale land of Albion, and changed his looks and his reputation with every good or bad deed. Peter Molyneux had promised far more than it delivered, and apologised for it, but the game sold well and began a series that outlived the studio.

Bo Jangeborg's isometric arcade adventure for The Edge took 95% in CRASH in November 1985. Its objects had mass, so a chair slid further than a table and a barrel had to be carried with empty hands, and players built ramps out of furniture to reach what they could not jump to. It was drawn with Grax, the graphics utility behind The Edge's Worldmaker technique.

Interplay's Fallout (1997) sent one character out of an underground shelter into a wrecked California in the year 2161, with 150 days to find a replacement water-purification chip. Built over about three years, and designed first around Steve Jackson Games' GURPS rules before Interplay replaced them with its own SPECIAL system, it let players talk, sneak or shoot their way through, and arrived as reviewers were writing off the computer role-playing game. Bethesda took the series over in 2004 and it has run to the present, with a television adaptation in 2024.

Obsidian Entertainment's 2010 Fallout, made in 18 months for Bethesda on Fallout 3's engine, sent a courier shot in the head and left in a shallow grave across the Mojave to a Las Vegas that survived the bombs. Its rival factions and dark humour won praise; its crashes and glitches cost it marks, and Obsidian missed a Metacritic bonus by a point. It shipped five million copies in its first month, and PC players are still modding it.

Yoji Ishii's 1986 arcade shooter for Sega swapped the dark of space for pastel planets and gave its winged ship, Opa-Opa, a shop: shoot enemies for coins, then buy engines, guns and bombs. Mutsuhiro Fujii squeezed it on to a one-megabit Master System cartridge the same year, and the conversion became one of the console's early showpieces.

SNK's answer to Street Fighter II reached arcades in November 1991 on the Neo Geo. It was led by Takashi Nishiyama, who had made the original Street Fighter at Capcom, and fought across two planes, foreground and background. The Bogard brothers and Geese Howard went on to carry sequels, The King of Fighters and a new Fatal Fury in 2025.

FIFA International Soccer, developed by Extended Play for EA Sports and released on the Mega Drive in December 1993, looked at football from an isometric angle and sold it with crowd noise and national teams. It became a yearly series built on licences: EA Canada's FIFA 96 added a 3D stadium and thousands of real player names, FIFA Ultimate Team arrived with FIFA 09, and by 2022 EA counted more than 325 million copies sold. The agreement with football's governing body ended in 2022, and the series carried on as EA Sports FC from 2023.

Square's 1987 Famicom role-playing game, directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi as what he treated as his last attempt at a hit. It let the player build a party of four from six classes, cross the world by ship, canoe and airship, and fight battles in which both sides were on screen. It was a hit in Japan, Nintendo published it in America in 1990, and it began a series that is still running.

Square's 1997 strategy RPG for the PlayStation, directed by Yasumi Matsuno with much of the team behind Quest's Tactics Ogre, put Final Fantasy's jobs on a rotating 3D battlefield of tiles. It topped the Japanese charts, reached America in January 1998 and never had a European release on the PlayStation. Its first English translation was poor; the 2007 PSP version, The War of the Lions, replaced it, and The Ivalice Chronicles brought the game back in 2025.

Square moved Final Fantasy from Nintendo to Sony's PlayStation for the space a CD gave, and filled three discs with 3D characters, pre-rendered backgrounds and computer-generated film. Released in Japan on 31 January 1997, it was the first Final Fantasy sold in Europe, reached the PC through Eidos in 1998, had sold 9.2 million copies by late 2002, and was remade from 2020 as a trilogy.

Capcom's 1989 arcade game sent the mayor of Metro City, Mike Haggar, and his friends Cody and Guy after the Mad Gear gang, who had kidnapped Haggar's daughter Jessica. It ran on the CP System board with some of the largest sprites the arcades had seen, and was shown at a trade show as Street Fighter '89 before taking its own name. The Super Famicom version of 1990 lost Guy, the two-player mode and a level; U.S. Gold's 1991 home computer versions, converted by Creative Materials, divided reviewers; Sega's Mega-CD version of 1993 put everything back.

Fire Emblem began on the Famicom in April 1990: a war fought on a map of squares, turn by turn, by named characters who each had one life. Made by Intelligent Systems with Nintendo, it stayed in Japan for thirteen years, through Famicom and Super Famicom sequels, until a Game Boy Advance game known simply as Fire Emblem reached the West in 2003. Fire Emblem: Awakening (2012) was nearly the last; its success kept the series going to Three Houses (2019) and beyond.

Paul Cuisset's Flashback began as a US Gold commission for a Godfather game and became a science-fiction adventure about Conrad Hart, an agent with his memory wiped, animated from traced video. Delphine Software released it on the Amiga in France in late 1992; the Amiga, Mega Drive and PC versions reached Britain and America in 1993, followed by Super Nintendo, Acorn and CD versions. It was remade in 2013, remastered in 2018 and given a sequel, Flashback 2, in 2023.

When Sports Interactive left the publisher Eidos, Eidos kept the Championship Manager name and the studio kept its game. It bought the rights to the name of Kevin Toms's 1982 Football Manager, and Sega published Football Manager 2005 in November 2004. Sega bought the studio in 2006. The series has come out almost every year since, with a database of real players built by volunteer researchers that a Premier League club signed up to use for scouting in 2008. Football Manager 25 was cancelled in 2025, and Football Manager 26 followed that November.

Kevin Toms wrote it for the ZX81, and Addictive Games advertised it as a great new game in February 1982. The Spectrum version followed that September, it came second to The Hobbit for C&VG's Best Strategy Game of 1983, and it was one of the best-selling Spectrum games of 1984. It is widely credited with starting the football management game.

Konami's 1981 arcade game sent a frog across five lanes of traffic and a river of logs, turtles and crocodiles to five homes on the far bank. Sega sold it, so most players thought it was a Sega game. Parker Brothers and Sierra On-Line licensed the home versions, British companies sold a shelf of unlicensed copies for the Spectrum, and Konami has kept making Frogger games since taking the name back in the 1990s.

LucasArts' 1995 adventure, the first Tim Schafer led on his own, cast the player as Ben, leader of the Polecats biker gang, framed for the murder of the head of Corley Motors. It was LucasArts' first adventure sold only on CD-ROM, with every line spoken, Mark Hamill as the villain, a biker tattoo for an interface and road fights between the puzzles. Reviewers loved the look and the voices and found it short and easy; Double Fine remastered it in 2017.

Namco's 1981 follow-up to Galaxian, designed by Shigeru Yokoyama. A Boss Galaga could capture the player's fighter with a tractor beam, and winning it back gave two ships firing side by side. Midway built it for America, it added bonus Challenging Stages to the formation shooter, and a flaw in its code let patient players stop the aliens firing altogether. Namco has re-released it many times since.

Namco's 1979 answer to Space Invaders kept the formation of aliens but sent them peeling off to dive at the player, drew everything in colour generated by the hardware, and flew over a twinkling starfield. Midway built it for America, it seeded Galaga and a generation of clones, and Atari brought it home to the 2600, 5200 and its computers.

SNK's 1999 Neo Geo fighting game replaced almost the whole Fatal Fury cast with a new generation led by Rock Howard, Geese Howard's son, and added the T.O.P. zone and the Just Defend block. It reached arcades weeks before SNK passed to Aruze and was the series' last new game for more than 25 years, until Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves in 2025.

Ed Logg's 1985 arcade game for Atari Games let four players fight through a maze of dungeons at once, with a voice that told the table who was dying and who was eating the food. In Britain U.S. Gold's home conversions, programmed by Tony Porter's team for Gremlin, scored 92% in CRASH and 93% in Zzap!64 and won the Golden Joystick for 1986's Game of the Year.

Stephen Cakebread of Bizarre Creations wrote Geometry Wars in his spare time, and it first appeared as a hidden arcade machine in Project Gotham Racing 2 (2003). Its expanded version, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, sold for 400 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live Arcade when the Xbox 360 launched in 2005 and became one of the service's best-known games, bringing Robotron's twin-stick shooting back in neon.

Capcom's 1985 arcade platformer, Makaimura in Japan, sent the knight Arthur through graveyards, forests and ice palaces to rescue Princess Prin Prin, losing his armour at the first touch and his life at the second. Beat it and it sent you back to the start to do it all again. In Britain, Elite's 1986 home versions scored 95% in CRASH and became an Amstrad Action Rave.

Capcom's 1988 arcade sequel to Ghosts 'n Goblins, Daimakaimura in Japan, was the second game on the company's new CP System board. Arthur could now throw up and down, find gold armour that charged his weapons, and be turned into a duck; beating the game once sent him back to the start. Yuji Naka squeezed it onto the Mega Drive, and Software Creations' conversions for U.S. Gold won a CRASH Smash and a ZZAP! Gold Medal.

The first release on Renegade, the Bitmap Brothers' own label, in early 1991: a platform game of switches, keys and hidden rooms through four levels of a mythical city, with music by John Foxx's Nation 12 and a system that quietly made the game easier or harder depending on how well you were doing.

Sega's 1989 arcade game took the side-scrolling fight of Double Dragon into a Conan-style fantasy: a barbarian, an Amazon and a dwarf against Death Adder, with magic potions to collect and beasts to ride. The Mega Drive version was close enough to the coin-op that Zero suggested few arcade players would notice the difference, and it led Mean Machines' Mega Drive chart when the console was launched in Britain in 1990. Virgin's conversions for the home computers followed that winter.

Camelot's role-playing game for the Game Boy Advance came out in Japan in August 2001, in America that November and in Europe in March 2002. Its heroes are Adepts who use magic called Psynergy both in battle and to move, freeze and grow things in its dungeons, and its 28 collectable Djinn change each character's class and fuel big summoned attacks. Edge called it an RPG 'so old school you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a Super Famicom conversion'.

A first-person shooter made by a small Rare team led by Martin Hollis, for eight of whose nine members it was a first game. Released by Nintendo in 1997, nearly two years after the film, it gave console players mission objectives, sniping, hit locations and guards who came running at gunfire, plus a four-player split-screen mode added in the last months. Retro Gamer put its sales at 8 million, and several of its makers left Rare to found Free Radical Design.

The Fullbright Company's first game, released for PC in August 2013. The player returns from a year abroad to find the family's new house empty and pieces together, from letters, notes, tapes and her sister's voice, what happened while she was away. Its makers called it a 'story exploration' game; it became one of the best-known examples of what critics were already calling the walking simulator, and won the BAFTA for Debut Game.

Konami's 1985 arcade shoot-'em-up, sold in Europe as Nemesis, let the player choose which upgrade to take from a gauge along the bottom of the screen. Its Famicom conversion introduced the Konami Code, and British home-computer versions divided reviewers.

Kazunori Yamauchi's PlayStation racing game, made by Sony's in-house team that became Polyphony Digital and released in Japan in December 1997. Players bought a second-hand car, passed driving licences, won prize money and tuned real production cars whose handling came from a physics model years in the making. Edge gave it ten out of ten, only the second game to earn that score, and it sold more than ten million copies.

DMA Design's 1997 game for BMG Interactive. It began as a cops-and-robbers driving game called Race'n'Chase, became a game about stealing cars and working for gangsters in three cities, and was sold with the help of the publicist Max Clifford. It started a series that has sold nearly 475 million copies.

DMA Design's 2001 PlayStation 2 game moved Grand Theft Auto from a top-down view into a 3D city, Liberty City, that the player could explore on foot or in any vehicle they could steal. Built by a small team in Edinburgh on Criterion's RenderWare, it came out six weeks after the September 11 attacks, sold about eight million copies in just over a year, and set the pattern for Rockstar's later games.

A 1983 BBC Micro adventure for young children by Mike Matson of 4Mation, a small educational publisher in Barnstaple. Players searched the Kingdom of the Mountains for the King and Queen's missing children while a witch sent them home for every wrong turn. It sold over 4,000 copies in its first year, spread through primary schools, and is still sold today.

Tim Schafer's 1998 adventure for LucasArts sent Manny Calavera, a travel agent for the dead, on a four-year journey through a Mexican afterlife styled after 1940s film noir. It was LucasArts' first adventure without SCUMM: 3D characters on pre-rendered backgrounds, steered from the keyboard or a joypad with no cursor. Critics loved it and it reached number one in the UK chart for a week, but it did not sell in proportion to its acclaim. Double Fine remastered it in 2015.

Harmonix built Guitar Hero for the peripherals maker RedOctane on a small budget, around a three-quarter-size Gibson SG with five coloured buttons. It came out on the PlayStation 2 in North America in November 2005, sold by word of mouth, and turned Konami's arcade idea of a guitar game into a Western hit. Activision bought RedOctane in 2006 and made the series one of the biggest of the decade, until the market for plastic instruments collapsed and Activision closed its Guitar Hero business in 2011.

Treasure's first game, a 1993 run-and-gun shooter for Sega's Mega Drive, gave its two heroes a vitality counter instead of one-hit deaths, four weapons and ten combinations, and a run of inventive bosses, among them the seven-form Seven Force and a stage played as a board game. Edge thought it too short; later players made it one of the Mega Drive's best-remembered games.

Supergiant Games' action roguelike about Zagreus, son of Hades, trying to fight his way out of the Greek underworld. Every failed escape sends him home to a house full of characters with something new to say. Built in public through two years of early access from December 2018, it reached version 1.0 on PC and Switch on 17 September 2020, sold a million copies within days, and won the BAFTA for Best Game. A sequel followed in 2025.

Half-Life was the first game from Valve, a Seattle-area studio founded by two former Microsoft employees, Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, and published by Sierra in November 1998. Built on an enhanced version of id Software's Quake engine, it told the story of a research-base disaster entirely from the player's own eyes, with no cut-scenes, and filled the base with scientists, guards, aliens and soldiers who reacted to the player. Computer Gaming World named it Game of the Year, its free development kit gave rise to Counter-Strike, and Valve published the kit's source code on GitHub in 2013.

Valve's Half-Life 2 (November 2004) put Gordon Freeman in City 17, an eastern European city occupied by the alien Combine. Built on Valve's own Source engine with physics derived from Havok, it gave the player the gravity gun, and Edge gave it ten out of ten. Its road to release ran through a missed 2003 date, the theft of its source code and a court fight with its publisher, and it was the first game that needed Steam even when bought in a box. Episodes followed in 2006 and 2007.

Halo was shown as a Mac and PC game at Macworld in 1999. Microsoft bought its developer, Bungie, in June 2000, and the game was remade as a first-person shooter that went on sale with the Xbox in North America on 15 November 2001. Edge gave it ten out of ten, and it began a series that Microsoft still publishes.

Yu Suzuki's first big arcade game for Sega, released in July 1985. Players sat astride a replica racing motorbike and leaned it to steer, while two 68000 processors and a sprite-scaling board drew the road rushing towards them. It was the first of Sega's taikan ('body sensation') cabinets, and a Master System version came free with the console in Britain.

Atari Games' 1989 arcade game drew its world in filled polygons and modelled how a real car handles, with a clutch, a four-speed gearbox, a steering wheel that pushed back and a stunt track with a drawbridge jump and a loop-the-loop. Domark converted it under the Tengen label to every British home computer, where it won a Golden Joystick and split reviewers from 92% in CRASH to 20% in ZZAP! for the Commodore 64 version.

Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond's follow-up to Batman, published by Ocean in spring 1987, gave the player two heroes with different abilities who could split up or travel one on top of the other. CRASH gave it 97% and its readers voted it the best arcade adventure of 1987. It reached the Atari ST and Amiga in 1991, was remade for modern computers in 2003, and got a sequel in 2026.

Gargoyle Games' 1986 dungeon adventure put a large, animated sorcerer on screen and let the player command him in a terse typed language. CRASH gave it 9 out of 10 and Sinclair User five stars; CRASH's readers put it at number 1 in their Adventure chart for ten months out of twelve, voted it the best adventure of 1986, and were still voting for it in late 1988.

IO Interactive's first game, Hitman: Codename 47 (2000), made a bald, bar-coded assassin into a puzzle-solver: each mission is a place full of people on routines, and disguises, timing and a garrotte decide how the target dies. Its Glacier engine gave the dead physics-driven bodies. Eidos published four games to 2006; after Absolution (2012) the series was rebuilt as the World of Assassination trilogy (2016–2021).

A hand-drawn Metroidvania from Team Cherry, a small studio in Adelaide led by Ari Gibson and William Pellen. Funded on Kickstarter with A$57,138 in 2014, it came out for Windows on 24 February 2017, gained four free content packs and console versions, and became one of the best-loved independent games of its decade. Its sequel, Silksong, arrived in September 2025.

Relic Entertainment's first game, published by Sierra in 1999, took real-time strategy off the flat map and into fully 3D space. The player commands a single fleet, led by a vast mothership, that carries over from mission to mission on a journey to a lost home planet, to Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. Computer Gaming World named it strategy game of the year; Relic released its source code in 2003, and Gearbox revived the series in the 2010s.

A top-down action game made in nine months by two Swedes, programmer Jonatan Söderström and artist Dennis Wedin, as Dennaton Games, and published by Devolver Digital on 23 October 2012. Every room is a puzzle solved with violence; one hit kills the player or anyone else. Built in GameMaker from a prototype Söderström started at 18, it sold more than 300,000 copies on PC in four months and was followed by Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number in 2015.

Konami's Hyper Sports (1984) followed Track & Field into the arcades with seven events, from swimming to the pole vault, each needing hammered buttons and careful timing. In 1985 Ocean's revived Imagine label converted it for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and BBC Micro. CRASH gave the Spectrum version, programmed by Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith, 92%; it reached number two in the Gallup Spectrum chart and topped CRASH's readers' chart in November 1985.

Nintendo's Famicom game of January 1985, also made for its Vs. System arcade boards, in which Popo and Nana knock holes in floors of ice to climb eight levels of each of 32 mountains, chased up the screen by a polar bear. In Europe it was an early NES cartridge and, in Germany, part of the console's bundle; British reviewers later found it primitive. Popo and Nana later became fighters in the Super Smash Bros. series.

Icewind Dale (2000) was Black Isle Studios' second game on BioWare's Infinity Engine: an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure in the frozen north of the Forgotten Realms, built for fighting rather than talking, in which the player created all six members of the party. Critics split between those who welcomed an old-fashioned dungeon crawl and those who saw an expansion pack for Baldur's Gate. It was followed by Heart of Winter, a free add-on, Icewind Dale II (2002) and an Enhanced Edition from Beamdog.

Dennis Caswell's 1984 Commodore 64 game for Epyx sends a somersaulting secret agent through a robot-guarded lair in search of 36 puzzle pieces, to a digitised voice that players still quote. It came to Britain through CBS, was converted by U.S. Gold for the Spectrum and other machines, and had sequels in 1988 and 1994.

Daniel Mullins's card game, released by Devolver Digital in October 2021, grew from a Ludum Dare entry of 2018. It opens in a dark cabin where the player builds a deck of woodland creatures and sacrifices them to play stronger ones against a figure called Leshy, then keeps changing what kind of game it is. It sold over a million copies in under three months and in 2022 became the first game to win the top prizes at both the Independent Games Festival and the Game Developers Choice Awards.

System 3's karate game reached British shops at the end of 1985, months after Way of the Exploding Fist. CRASH gave the Spectrum version 68% and Sinclair User five stars. Archer Maclean's Commodore 64 version, with music by Rob Hubbard, was sold in America by Epyx as World Karate Championship, and Data East sued over its likeness to Karate Champ. A district court ordered a recall in 1987; the Ninth Circuit reversed it in November 1988.

System 3's sequel to International Karate put three fighters in the ring at once: finish in the top two and you stay in, finish last and you are out. Archer Maclean wrote it for the Commodore 64, where ZZAP!64 gave it 93% in November 1987; the Spectrum version followed early in 1988 with 91% from CRASH, and Atari ST and Amiga versions came at the turn of 1989. Rob Hubbard's remixed music won the Golden Joystick for best 8-bit soundtrack.

Konami's Jackal combines a scrolling battlefield with prisoner rescue. Its arcade game and NES adaptation share the jeep-and-helicopter premise, but organise their campaigns differently.

Smilebit's Dreamcast game of 2000, called Jet Grind Radio in North America, sent a gang of teenage inline skaters around a cartoon Tokyo spraying graffiti while the police closed in. Its flat colours and heavy black outlines made 3D look hand-drawn, and Edge told readers to expect imitations. Sega and later records credit it as the first cel-shaded game, though magazines at the time compared its look with Wacky Races and Fear Effect. It sold poorly, and became a cult classic.

Matthew Smith's 1984 sequel to Manic Miner: sixty rooms of a mansion to explore in any order, 83 objects to collect, a colour-code card to keep safe and a bug in The Attic that could cost every life you had. Software Projects first called the bug a feature, then released the POKEs to fix it.

Jetpac was the first game from Ultimate Play the Game: a 16K ZX Spectrum shoot-'em-up from the summer of 1983 in which a spaceman with a jet pack builds, fuels and launches a rocket while aliens pour in from the sides. It was in the charts within weeks, came out on Sinclair's ROM cartridge, the VIC-20 and the BBC Micro, and C&VG's readers voted it Game of the Year for 1983.

Williams' 1982 coin-op, designed by the former toy designer John Newcomer: knights riding flying ostriches, a flap button instead of a fire button, and a two-player mode that rewarded players first for working together and then for knocking each other off. It topped the American arcade charts early in 1983 and was converted by Atari to its consoles and computers, and later to the NES, Atari ST and Game Boy.

Judge Dredd's games range from Beam Software's crime map and platform screens to Virgin's comic-strip missions, a film tie-in, Gremlin's light-gun shooter and Rebellion's Dredd vs. Death. The shared title conceals different games and different ideas of what a Judge should do.

A martial-arts game for the Apple II that Jordan Mechner wrote as a student at Yale and Brøderbund published in 1984. He traced its fighters from Super 8 film of a karate teacher, cut between scenes like a film, and sold more than half a million copies across the Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari and other machines. It led directly to Prince of Persia.

Keita Takahashi's PlayStation 2 game for Namco, released in Japan in March 2004 and in America later that year as a $19.99 budget title. The player rolls a sticky ball that picks up anything smaller than itself, from drawing pins to buildings, to replace the stars the King of All Cosmos has knocked out of the sky. Western developers adopted it as a model of what games could be; Europe had to wait for the 2018 remaster, Reroll.

Nintendo R&D1's Famicom Disk System game of December 1986 sent the angel Pit up out of the Underworld to rescue the goddess Palutena. It was Toru Osawa's first game as a designer, directed by Satoru Okada, and its climbing stages, shops and cursed eggplants earned it a reputation for difficulty. It reached the NES in 1987.

A one-on-one fighting game made by Rare and released in American arcades by Midway in 1994, promoted as the first game for Nintendo's Ultra 64. Its pre-rendered fighters, long combos and the combo breaker set it apart; the Super Nintendo conversion came in a black cartridge in 1995. A sequel and a Nintendo 64 version followed in 1996, and the series returned on the Xbox One in 2013.

King's Quest began as a game IBM commissioned from Sierra On-Line to show off the colour graphics of its PCjr. Roberta Williams designed it, and Sierra's team made an adventure in which the player walked a knight, Sir Graham, around the kingdom of Daventry, ducking behind trees and rocks, while typing commands. The PCjr failed, but the Tandy 1000 kept the game alive, and the series ran to eight games by 1998, moving from Sierra's AGI system to SCI with King's Quest IV, and returned in an episodic revival in 2015.

Kirby's Dream Land (Game Boy, 1992) was designed by Masahiro Sakurai at HAL Laboratory as a platformer anyone could finish: Kirby floats over any gap and swallows his enemies. It sold more than a million copies in its first year. Players called it too easy and too short, so the NES sequel, Kirby's Adventure (1993), let Kirby copy the powers of what he swallowed, and the series has run ever since.

Released in November 1984, Knight Lore drew each room of a wizard's castle as a solid-looking 3D scene that Sabreman could walk behind, over and through, without flicker. It won Game of the Year at the 1985 Golden Joysticks, and CRASH later said it started a genre.

Irem's 1984 arcade game sent Thomas up five floors of a temple, kicking and punching through a stream of henchmen, to rescue his girlfriend Sylvia. Designed by Takashi Nishiyama and tied in with a Jackie Chan film in Japan, where it was called Spartan X, it is usually named as the first scrolling beat 'em up. Nintendo brought it to the NES as Kung Fu; in Britain U.S. Gold's conversions were panned on the Spectrum and liked on the Commodore 64.

An action role-playing game by Climax Entertainment, published by Sega for the Mega Drive in Japan in October 1992 and in America and Europe in 1993. The elf treasure hunter Nigel and the wood nymph Friday search for King Nole's treasure through a world drawn in isometric 3D, which made the game look like nothing else and made its jumps notoriously hard to judge. Climax went on to make Lady Stalker, Dark Savior and Time Stalkers.

Julian Gollop's turn-based squad wargame came out on the ZX Spectrum in 1988 from his own mail-order label, Target Games, and moved to the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and Amiga through Blade Software in 1989. Its action points, opportunity fire and hidden movement drew scores in the high 80s and 90s, and a demo of its sequel became UFO: Enemy Unknown.

Al Lowe's Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (Sierra On-Line, 1987) rebuilt the 1981 text adventure Softporn Adventure as a comedy about Larry Laffer, a 40-year-old in a white polyester suit with one night to find romance. Sold as an adults-only game behind a warning label and a trivia quiz meant to keep children out, it had the worst first month of any Sierra game, then sold by word of mouth to the top of the charts. Six sequels followed under Lowe, and the series carried on without him and, once, with him again.

DMA Design's 1991 puzzle game for Psygnosis. Up to a hundred tiny green-haired creatures walk blindly towards danger, and the player saves them by giving individuals one of eight jobs. It began as a few seconds of animation, reached more than 20 formats within a decade and became a series that Sony still owns.

Konami used the name Life Force three times. It was Salamander's title in North American arcades in 1986; then, in Japan in 1987, the name of a reworked coin-op that brought back Gradius's power-up gauge and redrew its backgrounds as the inside of a living body; and in 1988 the name of the NES conversion, a six-stage flight through the planet-eating creature Zelos.

Dontnod's five-episode adventure of 2015, published by Square Enix, gave its heroine, the photography student Max Caulfield, the power to rewind time and redo her choices in the Oregon town of Arcadia Bay. It sold a million copies within six months, won the BAFTA for Story in 2016 and became a series.

A sword-swinging platform game for the Amiga from the German developer Thalion, released early in 1993. Programmed by Erwin Kloibhofer and Michael Bittner and drawn by Henk Nieborg, it put hundreds of colours and layer upon layer of parallax scrolling on an ordinary Amiga, and was meant, Amiga Joker reported, as Thalion's last action game. Amiga Power's review prompted last-minute changes before release, and a quarrel between magazines about whether the game had been reviewed too early.

Capcom's 1990 NES platformer gives Nemo an unlimited supply of candy, which lets him tame certain animals and use their abilities. Reaching each exit involves choosing suitable helpers and finding the required keys.

Media Molecule's PlayStation 3 platform game of 2008 starred Sackboy, a knitted doll, in levels built with the same tools players got to make and share their own. By 2010 its players had uploaded 2.3 million levels. Sequels, spin-offs and handheld versions followed; the online servers for the PlayStation 3 games closed in 2021 and those for LittleBigPlanet 3 in 2024.

Doug Smith's 1983 Apple II game for Broderbund: collect every ingot on a screen of bricks and ladders, trap the guards in holes you dig, and escape up the ladder that appears. It shipped with 150 screens and a game generator that let anyone build their own, and was converted for most home machines, the Famicom and Irem's arcade boards.

Mike Singleton's 1984 epic for Beyond drew each view of its land from a map and a stock of pre-drawn pictures, giving a claimed 32,000 views from 4,000 locations on a 48K Spectrum. It was a quest and a wargame at once, won the Golden Joystick for best strategy game, and was still in CRASH's readers' charts four years later.

Q Entertainment's first game, a launch title for Sony's PSP in Japan in December 2004: a falling-block puzzle in which a line sweeps across the screen in time with the music, clearing squares of one colour. Produced by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who called the PSP an 'interactive Walkman', it changed its music and look every few levels, and grew into a series that Mizuguchi's later company, Enhance, still makes.

Revolution Software's first game, published by Virgin in 1992 for the Amiga, Atari ST and PC. Its Virtual Theatre system gave the people of the town of Turnvale routes and routines of their own, and let the player send a servant off to run errands. It took two years to make, cost £20,000–30,000, and is now free.

Electronic Arts' American football series began as John Madden Football, which Robin Antonick spent about five years building and which reached the Apple II in 1989 after a delay the press called 'long awaited'. Madden himself insisted on eleven players a side. The 1990 Mega Drive version, by Park Place Productions, made the series' name; it became Madden NFL from 1993 and has come out every year since.

Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick's 1987 adventure for the Commodore 64 and Apple II sent three teenagers into Dr Fred's house to rescue a kidnapped girlfriend, with commands built from verbs on the screen instead of typed. Gilbert wrote the SCUMM scripting system to finish it, and Lucasfilm used that system for its adventures for the next ten years. The NES version of 1990 had to pass Nintendo's content rules, and the sequel, Day of the Tentacle (1993), hid the whole original inside it.

Matthew Smith's 1983 platformer for the 48K ZX Spectrum: twenty single-screen caverns of precision jumping, mutant telephones and ferocious toilets, with Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' playing on the beeper throughout. It was on sale and reviewed by August 1983, and within weeks was the best-selling computer game in Britain.

Marble Madness (Atari Games, 1984) asked the player to roll a marble with a trackball down six short, steep isometric courses against the clock, alone or racing a second player. Mark Cerny designed it and drew its playfields with a ray-tracer he wrote himself; Bob Flanagan programmed it with him in C, and Brad Fuller and Hal Canon wrote its music for a Yamaha FM chip, a first for Atari Games. It topped the earnings in the arcades Atari tracked, then faded fast because a good player could finish it in about four minutes. Electronic Arts' 1986 Amiga version was one of the first big games for the machine, and conversions followed for the C64, Apple II, NES, Mega Drive and more.

Nintendo's 1983 arcade game, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto with Gunpei Yokoi, made Mario a plumber, gave him a brother called Luigi and put two players on one screen to clear pipes of turtles, crabs and flies. Atari won the first home rights outside Japan, and Ocean's 1987 conversions for British computers were poorly reviewed.

Nintendo's 1996 sequel to Super Mario Kart moved the karts onto hilly 3D tracks and let four people race or fight at once on one Nintendo 64. Directed by Hideki Konno with Shigeru Miyamoto as producer, it introduced the blue shell that hunts down the race leader, and British magazines that thought its PAL version slow kept playing it anyway.

Camelot Software Planning followed Mario Golf with a Nintendo 64 tennis game played with two buttons and the analogue stick. It came out in Japan in July 2000, introduced Waluigi, and was joined by a Game Boy Color version with a role-playing story mode whose players could be carried across to the console game with the Transfer Pak.

BioWare's 2007 science-fiction role-playing game for the Xbox 360, announced as the first of a trilogy whose saved games would carry the player's decisions into the sequels. Edge found it a KOTOR without the licence and gave it 7; Mass Effect 2 (2010) turned it into a sharper shooter and scored 9, and Mass Effect 3 (2012) ended the trilogy with a finale that angered many of its players.

Jon Ritman and Chris Clarke's football game for Ocean arrived before Christmas 1984 and split the critics, from CRASH's 86% to Sinclair Programs' 50%. CRASH's readers kept it in their chart for more than three years. Ritman and Bernie Drummond's Match Day II, reviewed at Christmas 1987, went to number one in the same chart.

Capcom's 1987 Famicom and NES game, Rockman in Japan, sent a small robot boy against six Robot Masters whose weapons he took for himself. Directed by Akira Kitamura, with Keiji Inafune among its artists, it became what one American magazine called the sleeper hit of 1988 and began a series that is still running.

Capcom's 1988 Famicom sequel, Rockman 2 in Japan, gave Mega Man eight Robot Masters, a password system and Energy Tanks. Directed by Akira Kitamura and produced by Tokuro Fujiwara, it was made in about three months, sold 1.51 million copies and was later called the zenith of the series.

Hideo Kojima's 1998 PlayStation game sent Solid Snake into an Alaskan nuclear weapons base where being seen was the mistake. It told its story in long voiced cut-scenes, hid a radio frequency on the back of its box, and gave the psychic Psycho Mantis the power to read your memory card and shake your controller. Konami counted 5.51 million copies sold by the end of 2004.

A 1996 run-and-gun shooter for SNK's Neo Geo, made by Nazca, a small studio of former Irem staff. Two players fought through six missions, freed prisoners for power-ups and drove a tank that could jump. It was short, funny and lavishly animated, it sold slowly outside Japan, and it became one of SNK's longest-running series.

Nintendo R&D1's science-fiction action adventure came out on the Famicom Disk System in August 1986 and on NES cartridge in 1987. Players explored one large, connected map, gathering the equipment that opened the way further in, and those who finished quickly enough learned that the armoured bounty hunter Samus Aran was a woman.

Nintendo's 1991 Game Boy sequel to Metroid sent Samus Aran to the planet SR388 to destroy every Metroid there, with a counter on screen ticking down as she found them. Made by a new team, it added the Spider Ball, a battery save and Metroids that grew through several forms, and it ended with a newly hatched Metroid that Samus could not bring herself to kill, the starting point for Super Metroid.

Retro Studios, a Texas studio set up with Nintendo's backing in 1998, turned Metroid into a first-person game at Shigeru Miyamoto's suggestion. Released for the GameCube in November 2002, with a scan visor that made exploring the planet Tallon IV the point of the game, it won Edge's game of the year and began a trilogy, and Retro remastered it for the Switch in 2023.

Code Masters' top-down racing game, programmed by Andrew Graham and based on Galoob's Micro Machines toys, came out on the NES in 1991 through Camerica without a Nintendo licence. Its races across desks, pool tables and bathtubs, and a two-player mode won by pushing your rival off the screen, carried it to the Mega Drive, the Amiga and a run of sequels.

Bruce Artwick's subLOGIC sold its FS1 Flight Simulator for the Apple II and TRS-80 from 1980, and licensed an IBM PC version to Microsoft, which published it in 1982. Microsoft Flight Simulator became a test of whether a PC clone was truly compatible, grew through versions 4.0 and 5 into a Cessna-to-Learjet simulator, paused when Microsoft closed its Aces studio in 2009, and returned in 2020 from Asobo Studio, built on satellite map data of the whole Earth.

Markus Persson started Minecraft in May 2009 after seeing Infiniminer, sold it while it was still unfinished, and released version 1.0 in November 2011. Microsoft bought his company, Mojang, for $2.5 billion in 2014; by April 2025 the game had sold 350 million copies.

Atari's 1980 arcade game asked the player to defend six cities from falling missiles with a trackball and three missile bases, and ended not with GAME OVER but with THE END. The brief came from Atari's management; Dave Theurer and Rich Adam built it, and Theurer had nightmares about nuclear attack during and after the work. It reached the Atari 2600 and 400/800 in 1981, and its program files, under the working title WWIII, were published in 2021.

Peter Harrap's Spectrum platform game sent Gremlin Graphics' Monty Mole on the run from prison in October 1985. CRASH gave it 94%, and the Commodore 64 conversion carried a Rob Hubbard tune that ZZAP!64's readers voted the best music of the year.

Irem's 1982 arcade game, sold in America by Williams, sent a six-wheeled patrol car across the Moon, jumping craters and mines while shooting rocks ahead and saucers overhead with one button. Its hills scrolled in layers at different speeds, and it is widely credited as the first mainstream game with parallax scrolling. Atari and Atarisoft converted it for most home systems of the time.

Midway's 1992 arcade fighting game, created by Ed Boon and John Tobias, built its fighters from video of real martial artists and let the winner kill the loser. Acclaim's home versions arrived on 'Mortal Monday', 13 September 1993: Sega's kept the blood behind a code and Nintendo's replaced it with sweat. Three months later the game was at the centre of the US Senate hearings on violent video games that led to the ESRB. The series has run ever since, from Midway to Warner Bros. and NetherRealm Studios.

Myst, made by Rand and Robyn Miller's studio Cyan and published by Brøderbund on Macintosh CD-ROM in 1993, put the player on an empty island with no instructions, no enemies and no way to die. It was a HyperCard stack of about 2,500 rendered pictures and QuickTime films, and it sold for years: over three million copies by 1997, seven million by 1999 according to PC Zone, and it was the best-selling PC game until The Sims overtook it in 2002. Riven (1997) and three more sequels followed, and Cyan has remade it in real-time 3D and virtual reality.

Midway's 1993 arcade basketball game, designed by Mark Turmell, put digitised NBA stars into two-on-two games with no fouls, ten-foot dunks and a ball that caught fire after three baskets in a row, called by announcer Tim Kitzrow. Acclaim's home versions of 1994 were among its biggest sellers, and the game was followed by Tournament Edition, NBA Hangtime, Acclaim's own NBA Jam sequels and EA's 2010 revival.

John M. Phillips's 1987 platform game for Hewson wrapped its ledges round a tower that rotated as the player walked. Released on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum at the end of 1987, it won a ZZAP!64 Gold Medal and a Sinclair User Classic, was voted Best Original Game at the 1988 Golden Joysticks, and reached the United States as Tower Toppler. A sequel, programmed in Germany, followed in 1991.

NetHack grew out of Hack, a Rogue-like game begun by Jay Fenlason and rebuilt by Andries Brouwer. Mike Stephenson posted it to Usenet as source code in July 1987, and a team of volunteers, the DevTeam, has developed it ever since: 3.4.3 in 2003, 3.6.0 in 2015 and NetHack 5.0.0 in May 2026. It has always been free, under its own NetHack General Public License.

BioWare's 2002 Dungeons & Dragons game for Windows came with the Aurora toolset its designers had used to build it, and with a client that let one player run an adventure as dungeon master for others over the internet. Announced under Interplay and published by Infogrames after BioWare broke with Interplay, it borrowed its name from AOL's online game of 1991, and players went on building modules and running servers for years after its two expansions.

EA's 1993 hockey game added one-timers, manual goalie control and four-player support. Its console versions offered individual matches and playoffs rather than a full season, and its players later built online leagues and tournaments around the original games.

Tecmo made two different games called Ninja Gaiden at the same time: a scrolling fighting game for the arcades, known in Europe as Shadow Warriors, and a platform game for the Famicom and NES. The NES game told Ryu Hayabusa's revenge story in animated 'Cinema Display' scenes between its levels and became known for its difficulty. Team Ninja revived the name on the Xbox in 2004.

Hello Games, a small studio in Guildford, revealed No Man's Sky in December 2013: a space game whose planets, about 18 quintillion of them, are generated from rules as the player finds them. It launched in August 2016 to anger at what players found missing, including any real way to meet each other. The studio said little and kept working, and a long run of free updates, starting with base-building in November 2016 and full multiplayer in 2018, turned it into a game people came back to.

Yu Suzuki's 1986 arcade driving game for Sega put the player in a red Ferrari convertible on a branching road to five finishing lines, with a car radio offering three tunes. US Gold's home computer conversions sold in huge numbers over Christmas 1987 and split the critics, from 93% for the Spectrum game in CRASH to 37% for the Amstrad version in Amstrad Action.

Red Barrels' first game, released for Windows in September 2013, sent the journalist Miles Upshur into Mount Massive, a Colorado asylum whose inmates have broken loose. He cannot fight; he can run, hide and see in the dark only through his camcorder's night vision, which eats batteries. Videos of people playing it spread widely on YouTube, and by 2018 the series had sold 15 million units.

Toru Iwatani's 1980 maze game for Namco, released in Japan as Puck-Man and in America by Midway. It had no shooting, four ghosts that each chased in their own way, and a hero shaped like a pizza with a slice missing. By August 1982 there were 100,000 machines in American arcades, and the character was on some 500 licensed products.

Atari's 1982 cartridge of Pac-Man for the Video Computer System, programmed by Tod Frye in 4K of ROM. It sold in the millions, but players found horizontal mazes, square dots and ghosts that flickered because the machine could draw only one of them at a time. Later accounts say Atari made about 12 million cartridges and sold about seven million.

Panzer Dragoon (1995) was a 3D shoot 'em up for the Sega Saturn, made by a fifteen-strong Sega team, Team Andromeda, and directed by Yukio Futatsugi. The player rode a dragon along a fixed path through a ruined world, turning to fire in any direction and locking on to several enemies at once. It came out in Japan in March 1995 and was part of the Saturn's American launch that May. Its world, drawn partly from the French artist Moebius, carried three sequels, among them the role-playing game Panzer Dragoon Saga and the Xbox's Panzer Dragoon Orta.

Paperboy (Atari Games, 1985) put the player on a bicycle for a week of paper rounds down a suburban street, throwing the Daily Sun into subscribers' mailboxes, breaking the windows of everyone else and dodging dogs, cars, breakdancers and the Grim Reaper. John Salwitz and Dave Ralston's team spent two years on it and steered it with chrome handlebars built from Atari's Star Wars controller. Elite's Spectrum version topped the charts in 1986; most other home versions got a cooler reception.

Andrew Braybrook's 1985 Commodore 64 game for Hewson: a feeble Influence Device clears a freighter of rogue robots by seizing their bodies in a timed circuit-board duel. ZZAP!64 printed his development diary for four months before awarding the finished game a Gold Medal and 97%.

A PlayStation game in which a flat, cut-out dog learns to rap by copying his teachers in time with the music. The musician Masaya Matsuura made it with the American artist Rodney Greenblat, and Sony published it in Japan in December 1996, where it sold around a million copies and became a PlayStation mascot. It sold less well in the West, but the rhythm games that followed, from Konami's Beatmania to Harmonix's Guitar Hero, were measured against it.

Konami's parody of its own Gradius began on the MSX in 1988 and became an arcade game in 1990, Parodius Da!, which Europe knew simply as Parodius. It kept Gradius's power-up bar, added TwinBee's bells and a roulette, and let players fly an octopus or a penguin past pirate cats, sumo wrestlers and a female Moai head. Sequels ran into the late 1990s.

Rare's first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64, released in 2000 and built on the GoldenEye engine. Its director and several of its designers left before it was finished; it needed the Expansion Pak for its missions and most of its multiplayer, and added computer-controlled simulants, secondary fire on every weapon and a Counter-Operative mode. A Game Boy Color prequel, an Xbox 360 sequel and a remaster followed; a 2020s reboot was cancelled in 2025.

Atlus's Persona series began in 1996 as a spin-off from Megami Tensei: modern-day teenagers who summon Personas, figures from their own psyches, and talk to the demons they meet. Persona 3 (2006) split each day between school life and a nightly dungeon, with friendships that make the Personas stronger, and that pattern carried Persona 4 and Persona 5, which with its Royal edition had sold more than ten million copies by 2025.

Sega's first role-playing game, released for the Mark III and Master System in December 1987 on a 4-megabit battery-backed cartridge, sent a young woman, Alis, across three planets to avenge her brother. Its smoothly animated first-person dungeons were programmed by Yuji Naka, Rieko Kodama drew its characters, and the series it began ran through three Mega Drive sequels to Phantasy Star Online and beyond.

Pillars of Eternity (2015) was Obsidian Entertainment's Kickstarter-funded return to the party-based, real-time-with-pause role-playing games of Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment. Directed by Josh Sawyer and published by Paradox Interactive, it set its story in a world of its own, where souls are reborn and a new science studies them. Its 2012 campaign raised $3,986,929 on Kickstarter and $4,163,208 in all, and the game had sold more than 700,000 copies by February 2016.

MicroProse's 1987 game for the Commodore 64 made the player a privateer in the 17th-century Caribbean, free to trade, raid, duel, sack towns and court a governor's daughter until age forced retirement. Sid Meier programmed it alone; it won two Origins Awards, was converted to a dozen machines, and was remade as Pirates! Gold in 1993 and by Firaxis in 2004.

David Crane's Pitfall! (Activision, 1982) sent Pitfall Harry through 255 screens of jungle in search of 32 treasures, with 20 minutes on the clock. Activision said it was the best-selling video game of 1982, and it won Electronic Games' award for best adventure videogame.

Planescape: Torment (1999) was Black Isle Studios' first game on BioWare's Infinity Engine: an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game set in TSR's Planescape multiverse, led by Chris Avellone, in which the hero wakes on a mortuary slab, cannot stay dead, and can talk his way past most fights. Critics named it role-playing game of the year, but it sold modestly; Beamdog released an Enhanced Edition in 2017.

Steve Meretzky's first game for Infocom (1983) stranded a lowly Stellar Patrol ensign on a deserted planet with a childlike robot called Floyd. Billed as Infocom's first humorous adventure, it is remembered above all for a scene its author wrote to make players feel something. Its sequel, Stationfall, followed in 1987, and its original source code was published in 2019.

Game Freak's Pokémon series began with Pocket Monsters Red and Green on the Game Boy in Japan in February 1996: catch monsters, train them, battle them and trade them with friends over a cable. Every few years a new pair of versions has followed, from Gold and Silver (1999) to Scarlet and Violet (2022), alongside the card game, the anime and Pokémon GO. By March 2026 Pokémon software had shipped more than 515 million units.

Game Freak's sequel to Pokémon Red and Green came out in Japan in November 1999, two years later than first planned. It added 100 Pokémon, breeding, a new Dark type and a clock in the cartridge that ran the game's days and nights in step with the real world, and after the new Johto region it let players return to Kanto, the setting of the first games.

In 2005 Chunsoft, the makers of the Mystery Dungeon roguelikes, put the player inside Pokémon's world as a Pokémon. Red Rescue Team (Game Boy Advance) and Blue Rescue Team (Nintendo DS) opened with a personality quiz that decided which Pokémon you had become, then sent you into dungeons that changed every visit. Sequels followed on the DS, WiiWare, 3DS and Switch.

Game Freak's monster-collecting role-playing game went on sale in Japan as Pocket Monsters Red and Green on 27 February 1996, followed by a Blue version that October. Each cartridge held a different mix of the 150 monsters, so finishing the collection meant trading with a friend over the Game Boy's link cable. Red and Blue reached America in September 1998 and Britain in October 1999.

Namco's first video racing game, released in Japan in September 1982, put the player behind a Formula One car at Fuji Speedway, with a qualifying lap to earn a place on the grid and roadside billboards along the track. Atari built it under licence for America, where it topped the operators' earnings charts in the summer and autumn of 1983. Home versions followed for Atari's consoles and computers, the Vectrex, and, under the Atarisoft label, the Commodore 64, BBC Micro and Spectrum.

Atari's coin-operated table tennis game of 1972, built by Al Alcorn to Nolan Bushnell's specification. It was not the first video game, and a federal judge later found that Bushnell had copied the idea from the Magnavox Odyssey, but it was the first to make money in bars and arcades. Atari settled Magnavox's patent claims, sold a home version through Sears for Christmas 1975, and watched more than 25 other companies copy it.

Released by Electronic Arts for the Amiga and Atari ST in spring 1989, Bullfrog's Populous put the player above a small world as a god, raising and lowering the land so that followers could build, breed and make war on a rival deity's people. Peter Molyneux designed and programmed it, Glenn Corpes drew it, and the team first tried out the idea on a Lego model. It scored 95% in The One and an ACE rating of 963, won awards across Europe, and by the early 1990s magazines were quoting sales of between 750,000 and more than a million.

Jordan Mechner's Apple II game of 1989, published by Brøderbund. The prince's running, climbing and falling were traced from videotape of Mechner's brother, the player had an hour to escape the dungeons and rescue a princess, and the game was converted to most computers and consoles of the next few years. Mechner published his development journals, and in 2012 recovered the game's 6502 source code from old floppy disks and put it on GitHub.

Konami's Tokyo studio, KCET, began its Winning Eleven football series on the PlayStation in 1995. In Europe it was sold as ISS Pro and ISS Pro Evolution, and from 2001 as Pro Evolution Soccer, produced by Shingo 'Seabass' Takatsuka. Short of licences, with made-up names for many players, it won critics over with how it played, and in 2021 Konami replaced it with the free-to-play eFootball.

Nintendo's Punch-Out!! began as a two-screen arcade boxing game in 1984. The NES adaptation introduced Little Mac, Doc Louis and a career ending in a fight with Mike Tyson, while later versions developed the series' emphasis on recognising an opponent's moves.

Compile's 1991 puzzle game for the MSX2 and Famicom Disk System dropped pairs of coloured blobs that burst in groups of four. Its two-player game, in which chain reactions bury the opponent in clear 'nuisance' blobs, made it a hit in Japanese arcades and on the Mega Drive; the West mostly met it reskinned as Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine and Kirby's Avalanche. Sega took the series over when Compile failed and still makes it.

Taito's 1994 arcade puzzle game handed Bubble Bobble's dragons a bubble launcher: aim, bounce shots off the walls, and clear a ceiling of coloured bubbles before it grinds down to the floor. SNK put it on the Neo Geo, it reached home consoles as Bust-A-Move, and its aim-and-match idea has been copied ever since.

Gottlieb's 1982 coin-op put an orange, big-nosed creature on a pyramid of 28 cubes, changing their colours one hop at a time while a snake called Coily chased him. Warren Davis programmed it and Jeff Lee drew it; its random-phoneme speech and the '@!#?@!' that appeared when he was caught made it famous. Parker Brothers took it to the home machines in 1983, and it became a cartoon, a pile of merchandise and, decades later, a film cameo.

id Software's 1996 shooter drew its levels and monsters as true 3D polygons, let any owner run a server and play over the internet, and gave players QuakeC to rewrite its rules. QuakeWorld, GLQuake, Team Fortress and a line of licensed engines grew from it, and id released its source code under the GNU GPL in 1999.

Irem's 1987 arcade shoot-'em-up gave the player a detachable, bullet-proof pod called the Force and a chargeable Wave Cannon, and sent them through eight levels of biomechanical horror. Its 1988 home conversions included a Spectrum version that magazines had expected to be impossible.

Rare's 1988 NES racing game put a radio-controlled truck on a track seen from above and behind, against three computer cars, with missiles, bombs and letters that spelled NINTENDO. American shops voted it their favourite game in Nintendo Power's first poll, and Computer Gaming World named it best action game of 1988.

Seibu Kaihatsu's 1990 arcade shoot-'em-up looked like one more copy of Toaplan's Flying Shark, but its fighter's two switchable guns, a spreading Vulcan and a narrow laser, and its tanks-and-battleships plainness kept it in the arcade charts for years. Ports ranged from a superb PC Engine version to a badly cut Super Nintendo one; Raiden II followed in 1993, and the series carried on under MOSS, a company founded by former Seibu staff.

Fukio Mitsuji's 1987 sequel to Bubble Bobble turned Bub and Bob back into boys, gave them rainbows to walk on and fight with, and sent them up a scrolling tower of islands. Graftgold's home conversions were reviewed under the Firebird label in 1989, shelved when the Taito deal fell through, and finally released by Ocean in 1990 to scores in the nineties.

Bally Midway's 1986 coin-op let up to three players be George the gorilla, Lizzie the lizard and Ralph the wolf, climbing and punching buildings until they fell, eating the people inside and dodging the army. Activision converted it to the home computers in 1987, Data East, Sega and Atari brought it to consoles and the Lynx, and Midway revived it in 1997 as Rampage World Tour.

Rayman began as an animation Michel Ancel drew on an Atari ST: a hero with no arms, legs or neck, whose fists and feet float free. Ubi Soft's 1995 platform game for the Jaguar, PlayStation and Saturn was hand-drawn, colourful and notoriously hard, and sold millions. The series went 3D with Rayman 2 (1999), handed the stage to the Raving Rabbids in 2006, and returned to 2D in Rayman Origins (2011) and Rayman Legends (2013). Ancel left the industry in 2020.

Technos Japan's 1986 arcade game Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun was redrawn for the West as Renegade: one man against gangs that surrounded him, held him and kicked him when he was down. Ocean published the home versions under its Imagine label in 1987. Mike Lamb's Spectrum version scored 89% in CRASH, reached number one in the Gallup Spectrum chart, and stayed in CRASH's readers' chart for a year.

Tim Tyler was 16 when he posted Repton to Superior Software in early 1985: a lizard digging for diamonds under falling rocks, written in about a month with its levels drawn on paper and typed in as binary. It became the defining series for the BBC Micro and Electron, sold over 120,000 copies with its sequels and screen sets, and is still sold by Superior Interactive today.

Capcom's 1996 PlayStation horror game, Biohazard in Japan, trapped two police officers in a mansion full of zombies with too little ammunition. Shinji Mikami directed it from an idea his boss Tokuro Fujiwara gave him, to reuse the system of Capcom's Famicom game Sweet Home. It was nearly cancelled, its English script became a running joke, and it sold 2.75 million copies on the PlayStation alone. Capcom's marketing phrase for it, survival horror, became the name of a genre, and the series had sold 213 million games by 2026.

Reversi and the closely related Othello turn a small board into a contest over legal moves and permanent control. Published computer versions made the game a practical introduction to board representation, move evaluation and search.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi's team at United Game Artists made Rez for Sega in 2001, a rail shooter set inside a computer network in which every lock-on and every destroyed enemy adds a sound to a building trance soundtrack. Released on the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2, it earned nine out of ten from Edge, came with an optional Trance Vibrator in Japan, and returned as Rez HD on the Xbox 360 in 2008 and Rez Infinite for virtual reality in 2016.

Namco’s Ridge Racer brought fast polygon racing to arcades in 1993, then to PlayStation. Its course branches and time limits turn a small road network into a demanding route to learn.

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari (1989) took Technos Japan's Kunio-kun, the hero of Renegade, into an open city where beaten gang members dropped money to spend on food, books of fighting moves and other stat-boosting goods. American Technos released it on the NES in 1990 as River City Ransom, and Infogrames brought it to Europe in 1991 as Street Gangs. It never matched its Japanese success in the West, but it gained a lasting following, a Game Boy Advance remake, and a family of later games.

Electronic Arts' 1991 motorcycle racer put fights, traffic and police on five Californian roads. A crash left the rider running back to the bike while the race continued; sequels added split-screen competition and new weapons.

The Learning Company's 1984 sequel to Rocky's Boots, sold as Robot Odyssey I and designed by Mike Wallace and Leslie Grimm. Players fall into an underground city and escape through five levels by wiring logic gates, flip-flops and home-made chips into three robots. Written for ages 13 and up, it was still being described in 2014 as the hardest computer game of all time.

Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar's 1982 arcade game for Williams, made at their own company, Vid Kidz. One crowded screen, waves of robots closing in from every side, the last human family to rescue, and two joysticks: one to move and one to fire. It was not the first game with two sticks, but it was arguably the first shooter designed around them, and twin-stick shooting came back in force twenty years later.

Harmonix's answer to losing Guitar Hero: a game for guitar, bass, drums and vocals together, published by MTV Games and distributed by Electronic Arts. It came out in North America in November 2007 and in Europe in 2008, in a box of instruments that cost nearly $200, and was built from the original multitrack studio recordings of its 58 songs. Weekly downloadable songs turned it into a music shop, and Rock Band and Rock Band 2 sold 3.8 million instrument bundles in the United States in 2008 before the market for plastic instruments collapsed.

The Learning Company's 1982 Apple II program by Warren Robinett and Leslie Grimm, in which children built working logic machines from AND, OR and NOT gates, sensors and a kicking boot. Priced at $75 on launch, it later came out for the IBM PC and PCjr, the Commodore 64 and the Tandy Color Computer, was still on sale in 1988, and led to Robot Odyssey.

Rogue, begun around 1980 by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman at UC Santa Cruz and finished with Ken Arnold at Berkeley, built a new dungeon of letters and symbols for every game and deleted your saved game when you loaded it. Shipped with BSD Unix, it spread through university computers; A.I. Design sold it for the IBM PC, Epyx for home computers from 1985, and Mastertronic on budget tape in 1988. Its source code was later released under a BSD licence.

Chris Sawyer's theme park simulation came out on the PC in the spring of 1999, published by Hasbro Interactive under its MicroProse label. Players laid their own coasters piece by piece and watched individual guests enjoy them or be sick. Sawyer wrote it almost entirely in x86 assembly language. It was the best-selling PC game of 1999 in America, and a community rewrite of its sequel, OpenRCT2, keeps both games playable.

Namco's 1986 arcade game sent Agent Albatross of the Rolling Thunder spy unit through the secret base of the criminal society Geldra, hiding in doorways, jumping between two floors and rationing every bullet. Atari distributed it in Britain and America. U.S. Gold's home computer conversions by Tiertex split reviewers in 1988, Tengen brought it to the NES, and Namco followed it with Rolling Thunder 2 in 1990 and a Mega Drive-only third game in 1993.

Tecmo's 1986 arcade game sent a warrior through scrolling fantasy landscapes armed with the Diskarmor, a spiked shield on a chain. Its Famicom and NES version of 1987 kept the name and hero but turned it into a slower adventure with side-on and overhead areas, a map to explore and no password. Home-computer, Master System and Lynx versions followed, and Tecmo revived it in 3D in 2002.

Ultimate's summer 1984 follow-up to Atic Atac put a new hero, Sabreman, into a 256-screen jungle to find four pieces of an amulet. It cost £9.95 when Ultimate's games had cost £5.50, CRASH declined to give it a percentage at all, and it sold more than 350,000 copies on the Spectrum.

Konami's 1986 arcade shoot-'em-up followed Gradius with two ships flying together, weapons picked up directly instead of bought from a gauge, and stages that switched between horizontal and vertical scrolling through living caverns, solar flares and a fire dragon. North America knew it as Life Force. Home versions reached the Famicom, MSX, Spectrum, Commodore 64 and PC Engine, and Konami added Salamander 2 in 1996 and a new Salamander III in 2025.

LucasArts' 1993 adventure turned Steve Purcell's comic about a dog detective and a manic rabbit into a hunt for a runaway Bigfoot across America's tourist traps, from the World's Largest Ball of Twine to Gator Golf. It dropped the verb list from the SCUMM screen, chose conversation by attitude instead of by line, and came out on floppy disk before a fully voiced CD-ROM version. A cancelled sequel led to Telltale's episodic Sam & Max games from 2006.

SNK's 1993 Neo Geo fighting game, Samurai Spirits in Japan, armed twelve fighters in late 18th-century Japan with swords and other weapons, let them lock blades and lose their weapons, and rewarded a few heavy, well-timed blows over long combinations. Japan's Gamest named it game of the year. Its conversions were cut down to fit, and the series has run through sequels, 3D games and handhelds to a 2019 reboot.

Konami's 1981 arcade game, sold in America by Stern, sent a ship through six scrolling stages to an enemy base, bombing fuel tanks to stay in the air. It ran on a board descended from Galaxian's, sold about 10,000 machines in its first two months in the United States, and was at the centre of the 1982 appeal which held that a video game's pictures and sounds could be copyrighted.

Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan, was Square's 1993 Super Famicom action RPG, directed by Koichi Ishii and produced by Hiromichi Tanaka. It fought in real time, put its menus on rings of icons around the hero, and let up to three people play at once through a Multitap. It had been planned for Nintendo's CD-ROM add-on and was cut down to fit a cartridge when the add-on was abandoned. Edge gave it nine out of ten and Super Play 94%.

Sega AM3's 1995 arcade game put a Toyota Celica and a Lancia Delta on dirt, gravel and tarmac stages, running on an enhanced Model 2 board. Directed by Kenji Sasaki and produced by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, its sliding handling impressed players and developers alike, and its Saturn conversion, released in Japan on 29 December 1995, was Edge's driving game of the year.

Sensible Soccer was Sensible Software's overhead football game, published by Renegade for the Amiga in 1992 as Sensible Soccer: European Champions. It took on Kick Off with tiny players, a zoomed-out view and simple one-button control, and topped the charts for months. Sensible updated it for the 92/93 season and again as the International Edition, then expanded it into Sensible World of Soccer (1994), with some 1,500 teams and 26,000 players, which AMIGA POWER gave 95%.

A 1989 Amiga action game by Reflections, the Gateshead team of Martin Edmondson and Paul Howarth, published by Psygnosis at £34.99 in an outsized box with Roger Dean art and a free T-shirt. Its scenery scrolled in up to 13 layers, and David Whittaker's sampled music was voted among the best on the machine. Reviewers found the game itself hard and old-fashioned; it sold anyway, and led to two sequels, a long list of ports and a 2016 PlayStation 4 remake.

Denton Designs' 1985 game for Beyond put six characters aboard General Zoff's ship with 100 minutes to rescue an ambassador, and gave every order through icons instead of typed words. CRASH gave it 96%, and its readers voted it straight to number 1 in both the Hotline and the Adventure chart in August 1985.

Shenmue, directed by Yu Suzuki at Sega AM2, came out for the Dreamcast in Japan on 29 December 1999 and in the West a year later. It follows Ryo Hazuki through a detailed recreation of Yokosuka in 1986 as he hunts his father's killer, with a running clock, shop hours, weather, part-time jobs and playable Sega arcade games, and fights staged as 'Quick Time Events'. Its cost was reported at anything from $20 million to $70 million, and it did not save the Dreamcast. A sequel followed in 2001, and Shenmue III, funded on Kickstarter, in 2019.

Atlus's Megami Tensei games, which began on the Famicom in 1987, let the player talk to the demons they meet, recruit them and fuse them into new ones. Shin Megami Tensei (1992) on the Super Famicom destroyed Tokyo and asked the player to side with Law, Chaos or neither. The series stayed in Japan for years, reaching English with spin-offs such as Persona and with Nocturne in 2004, and continued to Shin Megami Tensei V in 2021.

A tactical role-playing game made for Sega by the four-person studio Sonic, led by Hiroyuki and Shugo Takahashi, with help from Climax. Released in Japan in March 1992 and in Britain and America in 1993, it moved an army of up to 12 named characters around a grid of squares, cut to animated close-ups for every blow, and brought Mega Drive owners a style of game that Nintendo's Fire Emblem had so far kept in Japan.

Sega's 1987 arcade game sent the ninja Joe Musashi through five missions to free kidnapped children, with unlimited throwing stars, one hit to kill him and a screen-clearing ninja magic once per stage. It came to the Master System in 1988 and to British home computers in 1989, and Musashi's series was revived as recently as 2025.

Yacht Club Games' Kickstarter-funded platform game of 2014, drawn and scored to look and sound like a NES game while quietly breaking the console's rules: a wider screen, extra colours, no sprite flicker and music written for a Famicom sound chip. It borrowed from Mega Man, DuckTales, Castlevania and Zelda II, added free campaigns for three of its bosses over the next five years, and had sold 2.65 million copies by 2019.

Konami's 1999 PlayStation horror game, directed by Keiichiro Toyama at Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, sent Harry Mason into a fog-bound American resort town to look for his missing daughter, Cheryl. It built its town in real-time 3D, hid the short draw distance in fog and darkness, warned of monsters with a radio that hissed static, and divided the critics: 10/10 in the Official UK PlayStation Magazine, three stars in Computer and Video Games.

Released by Maxis in early 1989 for the Macintosh and Amiga, and distributed by Brøderbund, SimCity made the player the mayor of a city that grew, decayed and suffered disasters according to a simulation running underneath. Will Wright began it on the Commodore 64 after finding that building the islands in his Raid on Bungeling Bay was more fun than bombing them. It had no way to win. Magazines on both sides of the Atlantic praised it, it reached a million copies by early 1992, and in 2008 its code was released as free software under the name Micropolis.

Electronic Arts' 1987 skateboarding game for the Commodore 64, designed by Michael Kosaka, Stephen Landrum and David Bunch, with a Rob Hubbard title tune. Five events, from a freestyle ramp to a joust in an empty swimming pool, start from Rodney's skate shop; up to eight players could take part. ZZAP!64 made it a Sizzler, and Konami's Ultra label took it to the NES.

An isometric off-road racing game for the Amiga, written in Blitz Basic 2 by Andrew Blackbourne in Acid Software's Auckland office and published at the turn of 1994. Up to four cars raced over twelve tracks, with split-screen, linked-Amiga and modem play. It was the first commercial game written in Blitz Basic 2, and its 1995 sequel, Super Skidmarks, added more tracks, more cars and cows on wheels.

Taneli Armanto's Nokia Snake turned eating into an increasingly difficult navigation problem. Developed for the 6110 in 1997, it reached customers with the handset's volume deliveries in early 1998 and spread through Nokia's phone range.

Rare's 1990 NES game sends Rattle and Roll through raised platforms, water and traps. Eating Nibbley Pibbleys increases their weight, while a scale opens the route onwards. Two players share the adventure and compete for bonuses.

Sega's 1991 Mega Drive platform game, made by the team that took its name from it: Naoto Ohshima designed the hedgehog, Yuji Naka programmed him and Hirokazu Yasuhara planned the game. It came free in the box with the American Genesis, and by 1997 Sega's own magazine put its sales at over 14 million. A separate 8-bit version by Ancient followed on the Master System and Game Gear; the home computers never got one.

Namco's 3D weapon-fighting game reached Japanese arcades in July 1998 on the System 12 board. The Dreamcast version, rebuilt in about seven months, added new modes, a new character and graphics beyond the arcade original. It was a US launch title for the console in September 1999, the second game to score 40 out of 40 in Famitsu, and sold more than a million copies.

A 1999 Dreamcast rhythm game from Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Sega team, in which the 25th-century TV reporter Ulala defeats dancing aliens by copying their moves in time to the music. Aimed at people who did not play games, it launched in Tokyo with a street event and a cameo by Michael Jackson, was followed in 2002 by the better-regarded Part 2, and gave its name to a 2006 California court ruling on whether Ulala copied a singer's likeness.

Yu Suzuki's 1985 arcade shooter for Sega sent a jet-propelled hero racing over a chequered plain at monsters flying out of the screen, on scaling hardware and, in its deluxe form, in a seat that moved with the joystick. Elite's 1986 conversions for the Spectrum, Amstrad and Commodore 64 drew scores from 90% to 45%; Sega's own versions ran from the Master System to the 32X, where it finally reached home nearly intact.

Tomohiro Nishikado's 1978 arcade game for Taito, built almost single-handed on an Intel 8080 board he adapted himself. Its aliens marched, sped up and fired back. Japan's 'invader boom' filled cafés with table machines; Midway took it to America; and in 1980 Atari's home version sold the VCS. The famous 100-yen coin shortage is a story period magazines repeated, not a documented fact.

Space Quest began in 1985 as "Star Quest", a science-fiction parody pitched to Ken Williams by two Sierra staff, the programmer Scott Murphy and the artist Mark Crowe, who called themselves the Two Guys from Andromeda. Its hero, Roger Wilco, is a janitor who sleeps through an alien attack on his spaceship. Six games followed from 1986 to 1995, moving from Sierra's AGI system to SCI with Space Quest III; Crowe made the fifth at Dynamix without Murphy, and Murphy returned for the sixth. A seventh was cancelled in 1999, and the two designers reunited for a crowdfunded successor, SpaceVenture, released in 2025.

Bill Budge's Space War put a two-player space battle inside California Pacific's Trilogy. Contemporary coverage records both enthusiasm for the duel and a complaint about unequal gravity.

The Bitmap Brothers' 1990 sequel to Speedball, published by Mirrorsoft's Image Works: a violent future sport of nine-a-side teams in a steel arena, 90-second halves, bonus stars, score multipliers and a league of sixteen teams in which you start with the worst of them, Brutal Deluxe. Reviewers called it the best two-player game since Kick Off 2, and its Nation 12 soundtrack won a Golden Joystick.

David Jones's second Magic Knight game, published at Christmas 1985 on Mastertronic's new £2.99 MAD label, looked like a platform game until you pressed fire and a window of commands opened over it. CRASH gave it 95% and said it made Shadowfire's icons seem outdated, and its readers kept it in their adventure chart for more than two years.

Derek Yu's Spelunky, a free PC game made with Game Maker and released in December 2008, put the random levels and permanent death of roguelikes into a real-time platform game. Yu published its source code a year later. A rebuilt version with new art and multiplayer came to the Xbox 360 in July 2012, followed by other platforms, and Spelunky 2 arrived in 2020.

Namco's 1988 arcade action game sends Rick through a haunted mansion to rescue Jennifer. Its horror imagery continued through a PC Engine conversion, console sequels and a 2010 reboot.

Bally Midway's 1983 arcade game put players in a spy car with a steering wheel, a pedal and a two-speed gearstick, fighting enemy cars down a scrolling road with machine guns, oil slicks, smoke screens and missiles from a weapons van, to an electronic Peter Gunn theme. U.S. Gold brought it to British computers in 1985, Sunsoft to the NES in 1987, and the name was revived on consoles in the 2000s.

Mike Riedel's 1984 game of MAD magazine's wordless comic strip, published by First Star Software of New York. Two spies search the same embassy at the same time, each in their own half of the screen, hiding bombs, springs and buckets of water for each other and racing to catch the plane. Electronic Games made it Game of the Month; Beyond brought it to Britain, where the Spectrum version scored 93% in CRASH.

Insomniac Games' second game, a 1998 PlayStation platform game produced with Universal Interactive Studios and published by Sony. A small purple dragon charges and breathes fire through large, open worlds drawn without fog, freeing dragons turned to crystal by Gnasty Gnorc. Stewart Copeland wrote the music. Insomniac made two sequels before the series passed to other studios, and it returned in the 2018 Reignited Trilogy.

SSX, short for Snowboard Supercross, was an arcade snowboard racing game for the PlayStation 2, made by EA Canada and released for the console's Western launch in late 2000. Its executive producer had invented the real boardercross event; its riders flew huge jumps, scored tricks to fill a boost meter and punched each other on the way down. It was the first game on EA's EA Sports Big label and led to SSX Tricky, SSX 3 and a 2012 revival.

Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford combined ship-to-ship combat with strategy. Different vessels changed how a pilot approached the duel; the creators later identified the arcade Space Wars as an influence.

Nintendo's 1993 Super NES space shooter, Starwing in Europe, was made by Shigeru Miyamoto's team in Kyoto with programmers from the British company Argonaut, and ran on Argonaut's Super FX chip inside the cartridge. It drew its ships and planets in flat-shaded polygons, Nintendo Magazine System gave it 96%, and it sold about four million copies. The series has continued from Star Fox 64 to a Switch 2 remake in 2026.

Nintendo's 1997 retelling of Star Fox for the Nintendo 64, called Lylat Wars in Europe, filled its missions with spoken radio chatter, let the player's performance choose the route through the Lylat system, and was the first game to come with the Rumble Pak. Edge gave it nine out of ten.

Doug Neubauer, a chip designer at Atari, wrote Star Raiders in his spare time: a real-time, first-person space battle with a galactic map, built on the text-only Star Trek games of the day. First shown in May 1979 and sold on an 8K cartridge from 1980, it became the game people bought an Atari 400 or 800 to play.

BioWare's 2003 role-playing game, published by LucasArts, set its story about 4,000 years before the Star Wars films and let the player follow the light side or the dark. It came out on the Xbox first, sold 250,000 copies in its first four days, and won Computer Gaming World's Game of the Year when it reached the PC. Obsidian made its sequel; a remake announced in 2021 was still in development in 2026.

Shown at E3 in 1996 and dismissed as 'Orcs in space', StarCraft was rebuilt by Blizzard and released in 1998 with three races, the Terrans, Zerg and Protoss, that built, fought and paid for their armies in different ways. Computer Gaming World called it the most satisfying real-time strategy game to date. In South Korea it sold more than a million copies within two years, filled thousands of PC rooms and became a televised professional sport.

Jez San's 3D combat game for the Atari ST, published by Rainbird in 1986: fast wireframe vector graphics with hidden-line removal, sampled music the ST was not designed to play, and a novella by James Follett. Realtime Games converted it to the Spectrum and Amstrad, and it made the name of San's company, Argonaut.

Stormlord is a scrolling platform and puzzle game by Raffaele Cecco, published by Hewson in 1989. Cecco described its making month by month in a diary in CRASH, which gave the Spectrum game 91% and a Smash; Sinclair User gave it 71%. Its nude statues and fairies were edited out of some later versions, and a sequel, Deliverance, followed in 1990.

Capcom's 1987 arcade game sent Ryu around the world to fight ten opponents, gave him the Hadoken and its joystick motion, and in its deluxe cabinet measured how hard the player hit two big rubber pads. It was not a success, and its designers left for SNK, but its hero, his friend Ken and its last boss, Sagat, returned in Street Fighter II.

Capcom's 1991 arcade game gave players eight fighters, six buttons and a hidden way to chain hits together that its producer said was found by accident. It sold a Super NES cartridge for £65, filled arcades around the world, and left U.S. Gold trying to fit it onto Amiga disks and Spectrum cassettes.

Sega built Streets of Rage (Bare Knuckle in Japan) for the Mega Drive in 1991 as its answer to Capcom's Final Fight, keeping the two-player mode that the Super Famicom conversion had lost. Yuzo Koshiro wrote its house-inspired music on a PC-8801 in his own music language, and his name appeared on the title screen. Two sequels followed in 1992 and 1994, and a fourth game in 2020.

Strider was one of the first games on Capcom's CP System arcade board in 1989: a ninja who cartwheels, slides, climbs walls and hangs from ceilings on his way across a future Soviet empire. Kouichi Yotsui planned it. Tiertex converted it for U.S. Gold to the home computers in 1989, Sega made a celebrated Mega Drive version in 1990, and Capcom returned with Strider 2 in 1999 and a new Strider in 2014.

Geoff Crammond’s Stunt Car Racer puts a simulated car on raised, twisting tracks. Boost helps clear gaps, while damage and the threat of falling make speed a judgement call.

Konami's 1995 PlayStation role-playing game turns a rebellion into a search for 108 allies. Recruits fill a castle headquarters, fight in a six-person party and contribute to battles between armies.

Epyx's 1984 multi-event sports game for the Commodore 64 and Atari computers, timed for the Los Angeles Olympics without an Olympic licence. Its eight events, national anthems and opening ceremony made it the model for Summer Games II, Winter Games, World Games and California Games.

Konami's 1991 Western shooting game combines gunfights with rooftops, stampedes and dynamite. Its arcade version supports four players; the SNES and Mega Drive adaptations make different choices about the hunters and stages.

Super Contra (1988) was Konami's only arcade sequel to Contra, and the first game in the series with overhead stages. Its NES version, Super C, reached America in 1990 with different level layouts and a lives code of its own; Europe got it as Probotector II: Return of the Evil Forces, with robots for heroes.

Capcom's 1991 Super Famicom game, Chō Makaimura in Japan, was a new adventure rather than a conversion of the arcade Ghouls 'n Ghosts. It gave Arthur a double jump, armour that powered up his weapons and stages that collapsed, flooded and rotated around him, and it sent anyone who reached the end back to the start to find a bracelet. Capcom counts it among its million-sellers.

Nintendo's launch game for the Nintendo 64, directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and released in Japan with the console on 23 June 1996. It moved Mario into open 3D courses, used the new analogue stick to let him tiptoe, walk or run, and gave the player a cameraman, Lakitu, to steer. Edge gave it ten out of ten. In 2019 fans published a reverse-engineered reconstruction of its source code; Nintendo has never released the original.

Released for the Famicom on 13 September 1985, Super Mario Bros. was meant to be Nintendo's last big cartridge game before the Disk System. Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka drew its levels by hand and squeezed a scrolling world into 32K of program and 8K of graphics. It sold out in Japan, was packed with the NES in America and Britain, and Nintendo says it sold more than 40 million copies.

Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. 3 for the Famicom on 23 October 1988. Takashi Tezuka directed it under Shigeru Miyamoto, and it gave Mario a map of eight worlds, a raccoon tail that let him fly and a pocketful of suits. American children first saw it at the climax of the film The Wizard at Christmas 1989, months before the game reached shops in 1990; Britain waited until late 1991.

A Game Boy launch title of April 1989, made by Gunpei Yokoi's R&D1 rather than Shigeru Miyamoto's team. It sends Mario to Sarasaland to rescue Princess Daisy from the alien Tatanga, past Egyptian sphinxes and Moai heads, in a submarine and a plane, with bouncing Superballs in place of fireballs.

Nintendo R&D1's 1992 sequel to Super Mario Land brought Mario home from Sarasaland to find his castle taken by a new rival, Wario. Bigger sprites, a 4-megabit cartridge with a battery save, six themed zones and a carrot that gave Mario rabbit ears made it the Game Boy's biggest Mario game; reviewers' main complaint was that it was too easy. Wario starred in his own game two years later.

Nintendo R&D1 and Intelligent Systems made Super Metroid for the Super Nintendo, directed by Yoshio Sakamoto and released in Japan on 19 March 1994. One large map opened up by Samus Aran's new equipment, a story told almost without words and an ending that made players cry won over the press, and its open structure made it a favourite of speed-runners and sequence-breakers. Later games that borrowed its design gave the Metroidvania genre half its name.

Philip and Andrew Oliver pitched a Robin Hood game to the Darling brothers at the 1986 PCW Show and wrote it on one Amstrad CPC in a month. Code Masters sold it for £1.99 at the end of 1986, with the twins' mother as the voice of Maid Marian, then had it converted to the Spectrum and Commodore 64. Reviews ran from a Rave in Amstrad Action to 52% in CRASH. The twins later remade it for the NES.

Chris Taylor's Gas Powered Games made this 2007 real-time strategy game as the successor in all but name to his Total Annihilation. Three factions fight across maps more than 80 kilometres wide, and a turn of the mouse wheel pulls the camera back until the whole battle is a map of icons.

Bullfrog's 1993 game for the PC and Amiga, led by Sean Cooper and published by Electronic Arts, gave the player four armed cyborg agents to send through the cities of a future run by corporations, with 50 territories to take and tax. It scored 91% in Amiga Format and 88% in The One, which also called it 'good, violent stuff'. A network mode dropped before release came back in the American Revolt data disk, and the game was converted to most consoles of the day. Syndicate Wars followed in 1996.

Looking Glass Technologies' System Shock (1994), published by Origin, put the player alone on a space station run by the murderous AI SHODAN and told its story through the logs of the dead crew. Reviewers loved it, sales were modest, and its reputation grew until Irrational Games made System Shock 2 in 1999. Nightdive Studios bought the rights, released the Mac source code in 2018 and remade the game in 2023.

System Shock 2 (1999) was the first game from Irrational Games, a three-person studio of former Looking Glass developers, made with Looking Glass on the Dark engine from Thief and published by Electronic Arts. It mixed first-person shooting with role-playing skills and told its story through the logs of a dead crew. It won near-universal praise and sold poorly, and its reputation grew until Irrational's BioShock (2007) and Nightdive's 2025 remaster.

Developed by Wolf Team and published by Namco in Japan in December 1995, Tales of Phantasia filled a 48-megabit Super Famicom cartridge, about a third of it with voice samples and a sung theme song. Its battles were fought in real time on a side-on field, with the player controlling one fighter and the rest of the party left to the computer. It never left Japan on the Super Famicom, but it began the Tales series, which Namco and its successor Bandai Namco have continued ever since.

Namco's 1994 arcade fighting game was the first on the System 11 board, built from PlayStation hardware, and its 1995 PlayStation version was a near-exact copy of the coin-op. Directed by Seiichi Ishii, who had come from Sega's Virtua Fighter team, it gave each of the four buttons to one of the fighter's limbs. It became the PlayStation's first million-seller and began a series that Katsuhiro Harada, who balanced the first game, led for three decades.

Dave Theurer's 1981 coin-op for Atari put the player on the rim of a glowing wireframe tube, spinning a knob to meet the creatures climbing out of it. It was Atari's first colour vector game, sold about 30,000 machines, reached home computers in 1986 and returned in Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 for the Jaguar in 1994.

Jeff Minter's 1994 remake of Atari's 1981 coin-op Tempest for the Atari Jaguar replaced the wireframe tubes with shaded, swinging webs, filled them with particle explosions and bonus warps, and set it all to a rave soundtrack by Imagitec Design. Edge gave it nine out of ten and ST Format 97%; later versions came out for the PC, Saturn and, as Tempest X3, the PlayStation.

Alexey Pajitnov wrote the first Tetris at the Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1984, on a machine that could only draw pieces with square brackets. A 16-year-old, Vadim Gerasimov, ported it to the IBM PC; a London agent, Robert Stein, carried it west; Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte sold it in a red box in 1988; and Nintendo packed it with the Game Boy outside Japan.

Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros's puzzle game, made by their studio Trilobyte and published by Virgin in 1993, set 23 logic puzzles in a rendered 22-room mansion haunted by filmed actors. It filled two CD-ROMs, cost $99.95, needed a fast PC and a patch, and reached its millionth sale by August 1994.

Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl's 2011 action game combined Zelda-like rooms with randomised dungeons, death and unlockable items. Its disturbing family story accompanied a game built around repeated attempts. Nicalis and McMillen remade it as Rebirth, then expanded that version through Repentance and Repentance+.

The Bitmap Brothers' 1993 shoot-'em-up for Renegade: two of six Victorian mercenaries, one of them played by the computer if you had no friend, fight through four worlds to destroy a steam-powered computer that has turned its surroundings into mutants. Music by Richard Joseph. Ported to the ST, PC, CD32, Archimedes, Super Nintendo and Mega Drive, and followed by a competitive sequel in 1996.

Morrowind (2002) was the third Elder Scrolls game, made by Bethesda Softworks for Windows PCs and the Xbox. Instead of the generated countryside of Daggerfall it offered one hand-made island, Vvardenfell, with silt-strider transport, ash storms and a player who could ignore the main story for as long as they liked. Critics argued over its combat and its journal, but it shipped with the editor Bethesda had used to build it, and the mods and fan projects that followed are still being made more than twenty years later.

Melbourne House's 1982 adventure for the 48K Spectrum, written in Melbourne by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler of Beam Software. It came with Tolkien's novel in the box, understood whole sentences through a parser called Inglish, and let Gandalf and Thorin wander off and act on their own. CRASH called it the biggest-selling Spectrum adventure of all time, and C&VG readers voted it Best Strategy Game of 1983.

Sega AM1's Model 2 light-gun game, shown at Japan's AOU show in February 1997 and in British arcades that summer, swapped Virtua Cop's gangsters for zombies in a gothic mansion. Shooting a zombie tore pieces off it, saving scientists opened easier routes, and a Saturn version followed in 1998.

SNK's crossover series began in the arcades in 1994 with The King of Fighters '94, which put fighters from Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Ikari Warriors and Psycho Soldier into eight teams of three. SNK released a new edition every year until 2003, carried the series through its own bankruptcy, and was still making it in 2022 with The King of Fighters XV; it was especially popular in Japan and Latin America.

Advertised for January 1987 on five machines, The Last Ninja reached the Commodore 64 that summer after two failed development teams. John Twiddy built the engine around Hugh Riley's graphics, Ben Daglish and Anthony Lees wrote the music, and ZZAP!64 gave it 94%. The Spectrum version was abandoned, and two sequels followed.

Shigeru Miyamoto's team made The Legend of Zelda alongside Super Mario Bros. and released it on 21 February 1986, the day the Famicom Disk System went on sale in Japan. It saved the player's progress, sent them into eight labyrinths across an open overworld with little guidance, and reached America in 1987 on a gold cartridge with a battery to keep the save.

Nintendo's Zelda for the Switch and Wii U, released on 3 March 2017 as the Switch arrived. Directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and produced by Eiji Aonuma, it let players go almost anywhere from the start and built its puzzles on rules for fire, water, wind and metal rather than fixed solutions. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2017, has sold more than 34 million copies on the Switch, and was followed by Tears of the Kingdom in 2023.

Nintendo's first handheld Zelda sends Link to Koholint Island, where escaping depends on waking the Wind Fish. Its experiments with characters and setting grew from an unofficial Game Boy project, before later colour and Switch versions revisited the island.

Nintendo's first 3D Zelda, released for the Nintendo 64 in November 1998 after three years' work by a core team of nearly 50, with Shigeru Miyamoto as producer and four directors. Its lock-on targeting made sword fighting in 3D manageable, and Link's journey across seven years of Hyrule's history earned ten out of ten from Edge and a place among the best-reviewed games ever made.

Nintendo's first Zelda for the GameCube, released in Japan in December 2002 and in America and Europe in 2003. Directed by Eiji Aonuma, it swapped the realistic Link of a 2000 demo for a cel-shaded, cartoon child, flooded Hyrule under a sea crossed by sailboat, and gave Link a conductor's baton that controls the wind. The look divided fans when it was shown in 2001, Edge gave the finished game nine out of ten, and Nintendo remade it in high definition for the Wii U in 2013.

Three student teachers in Minnesota wrote The Oregon Trail in 1971 to teach an eighth-grade history class, on a teletype linked to a time-sharing computer. Don Rawitsch revived it at MECC in 1974, Creative Computing published its BASIC listing in 1978, and MECC's 1985 Apple II version, with its hunting, river crossings and tombstones, became the educational game generations of American schoolchildren remember.

Ron Gilbert's 1990 point-and-click adventure, written with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, sent the would-be pirate Guybrush Threepwood against the ghost pirate LeChuck, won sword fights with insults, and was built so that the player could almost never die or get stuck for good. Its sequels ran through LucasArts, Telltale and, in 2022, a return by Gilbert and Grossman.

Released by Electronic Arts for the PC in June 1994 and the Amiga that September, Bullfrog's Theme Park made the player owner of an amusement park, from laying paths and building rides to haggling with a union over wages while a plate of biscuits emptied. Peter Molyneux and the teenage Demis Hassabis shared most of the design and programming. It scored 95% in PC Gamer and 91% in Amiga Format, went on to consoles from the Mega Drive to the PlayStation, and by 1998 magazines were putting its sales at over 3.5 million.

Looking Glass Studios' Thief (1998), published by Eidos, made a first-person game out of hiding: the player is Garrett, a burglar who avoids fights, reads a light gem to judge how visible he is and listens for guards who can hear his footsteps. Two sequels followed, Thief II (2000) from Looking Glass and Thief: Deadly Shadows (2004) from Ion Storm, and Eidos Montreal rebooted the series in 2014.

Jeremy Smith's 1986 cave-flying game asks you to tow a heavy pod out of a planet's gravity well on a tractor beam. Firebird sold it at £1.99 on the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, Superior Software sold the BBC Micro and Electron versions at full price, and reviewers who found its graphics dated kept playing it into the small hours.

Technosoft's Thunder Force began on Japanese home computers in the early 1980s as an overhead shooter that scrolled in eight directions. Thunder Force II mixed that with side-scrolling stages and was an early third-party Mega Drive game; Thunder Force III and IV, side-scrolling only, became two of the console's best-known shooters. The series moved to the Saturn with Thunder Force V (1997), and a sixth game, made by Sega, followed on the PlayStation 2 in 2008.

Namco's 1995 light-gun game for its System Super 22 arcade board. A foot pedal let the player duck behind cover to dodge fire and reload, while a clock that never stopped forced them back out. The 1997 PlayStation version came with Namco's GunCon, replaced the pedal with a button, added a new hotel mode, and was rated among the best home gun games of its day.

Konami's 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game let four players fight together. Its NES conversion added stages but reduced the group to two; Probe brought it to home computers, and later collections returned the arcade and console versions to newer machines.

Ubi Soft Montreal's 2002 stealth game made darkness the player's main tool: Sam Fisher, an agent of the NSA's fictional Third Echelon, hides in shadow, shoots out lights and sees through night-vision and thermal goggles, while a meter shows how visible he is. Built for the Xbox and then ported to the PC, PlayStation 2 and GameCube, it started a series that ran to Blacklist (2013), a remake in development and a 2025 animated series.

Tomb Raider, made by Core Design in Derby and published by Eidos, came out for the Saturn, PlayStation and PC at the end of 1996. It sent Lara Croft, a character created by lead artist Toby Gard, through the lost cities of Peru, Egypt and the classical world in a mix of precise jumping, puzzles and gunfights. Reviewers called it Prince of Persia in 3D; Eidos later said it sold over seven million copies, and the series continues today.

Neversoft's 1999 skateboarding game for the PlayStation, published by Activision and called Tony Hawk's Skateboarding in Britain. Players chained tricks across open levels in two-minute runs, chasing scores and hidden videotapes, to a soundtrack of punk bands. It was converted to the Nintendo 64, Dreamcast and PC, and Neversoft made a new Tony Hawk's game every year until 2006.

Chris Taylor's Total Annihilation, made by Cavedog Entertainment, a division of Humongous Entertainment, and distributed by GT Interactive in September 1997, drew its units as 3D polygons on terrain that changed how they moved and fought, and kept growing after release as Cavedog posted new units on its website. Reviewers called it the best real-time strategy game yet; it sold less well than its rivals.

Konami's 1983 arcade game, Hyper Olympic in Japan, put six athletics events behind two run buttons and a jump button, for up to four players at once. Centuri licensed it for America with the Los Angeles Olympics in mind, and it became one of the most popular coin-ops of 1984. Konami followed it with Hyper Sports; home versions ran from MSX cartridges with their own two-button pad to the NES.

Chris Sawyer's transport business game came out through MicroProse at the end of 1994. Players build rail lines, roads, docks and airports across a randomly generated isometric landscape and run a transport company from 1930 for a century. Sawyer wrote the program himself in x86 assembly language, with graphics by Simon Foster and jazz by John Broomhall. Transport Tycoon Deluxe followed in 1995, and the fan project OpenTTD has kept rebuilding and extending it since 2004.

Turrican is a scrolling run-and-gun game written by Manfred Trenz for the Commodore 64 and published by Rainbow Arts in 1990. It combined huge explorable levels with a rotating lightning weapon and a gyroscope form. ZZAP! gave the C64 original 97% and a Gold Medal, and Factor 5's Amiga version, with music by Chris Hülsbeck, 94%. It led to Turrican II, Turrican 3 and console sequels.

Konami's 1985 arcade shooter put two players side by side in cartoon ships and replaced power-up capsules with bells: shoot a bell to change its colour, then catch it. An early cute 'em up, it came out a year before Sega's Fantasy Zone, reached the Famicom and MSX in 1986 and grew into a long-running series.

Richard Garriott's Ultima began as a teenager's Apple II game sold in zip-lock bags and ran to nine numbered games between 1981 and 1999. Its fourth game, Quest of the Avatar, replaced the final villain with a quest to live by eight virtues; later games added a world where almost any object could be picked up, and the online Britannia of Ultima Online, which opened in 1997 and is still running.

Ultima Underworld combines first-person movement with conversation, trade, survival and magic. Its dungeon gives several systems room to interact, helping establish the approach later called the immersive sim.

Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes spent about four years on Unreal, a first-person shooter that GT Interactive released for the PC in May 1998. It opened with an escape from a crashed prison ship on the alien world Na Pali and was praised above all for its coloured lighting, water and monsters that dodged and retreated. It shipped with the editor used to build it, topped the British PC charts, and its engine became a business of its own.

Andrew Braybrook's Commodore 64 shoot 'em up of February 1986: a Manta fighter strafing the hulls of fifteen alien dreadnoughts, scrolling at a full 50 frames a second. ZZAP!64 gave it 94%; Dominic Robinson's Spectrum conversion, the version people had said could not be done, took 90% in CRASH and won its readers' vote for best shoot 'em up of 1986.

Square's 2000 PlayStation adventure follows Ashley Riot through the ruined city of Leá Monde. Battles combine deliberate targeting with timed attacks, while weapons change through use and a story of uncertain memories leaves room for interpretation.

Troika Games' role-playing game set in the Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop world, published by Activision in November 2004 and built on Valve's Source engine. Reviewers praised its night-time Los Angeles, its writing and its seven vampire clans, and listed its crashes, long loading times and clumsy combat. Troika closed in February 2005; players kept patching the game for years, and a sequel by other studios followed in 2025.

BlueSky Software's 1995 run-and-gun game for Sega's Mega Drive starred a robot made of separate glowing spheres, which let it animate smoothly, stay recognisable from any angle and change shape into a drill, a bomb or a fish. Released as Sega's attention moved to the Saturn, it was widely praised, gained a sequel in 1996 and has been re-released many times since.

Sega AM2's 1994 arcade light-gun game, built on the Model 2 board. It kept the point-and-shoot play of Lethal Enforcers but set it in a texture-mapped 3D world, where villains reacted to where they were hit and a coloured circle warned which one was about to fire. The 1995 Saturn conversion came with Sega's own gun and was hailed as arcade perfect.

Sega AM2's 1993 arcade fighting game built its eight fighters from flat-shaded polygons on the Model 1 board and animated them with motion capture, using just three buttons: punch, kick and guard. It became a craze in Japanese arcades, and its 1994 Saturn conversion was the game that sold Sega's new console in Japan. The series has run from Virtua Fighter 2 on Model 2 to Virtua Fighter 5, and a new game from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is due in 2027.

Sega’s Virtua Racing put polygon cars and tracks on Model 1 arcade hardware in 1992. Switchable viewpoints, linked cabinets and visible pit crews made the whole race part of the spectacle.

Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) moved Westwood's Dune II formula to a fantasy war between humans and orcs, with peasants cutting timber and mining gold, and added what Dune II had lacked: two players fighting each other by modem or network. Reviewers saw the debt at once; its designer says Dune II was the inspiration. It started the series that led to Warcraft II, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.

Wario's first starring game gives him a shoulder charge, transforming hats and a reason to search every corner of Kitchen Island: he wants a bigger castle than Mario.

Interplay's Wasteland (1988), published by Electronic Arts, sent a squad of Desert Rangers into a post-nuclear American south-west. Designed by Alan Pavlish, Michael Stackpole, Ken St. Andre and Brian Fargo, it built its characters from skills rather than classes, gave its recruits minds of their own, remembered what the party changed, and kept much of its story in a printed book of numbered paragraphs. Computer Gaming World made it Adventure Game of the Year. Electronic Arts kept the name, and in Fargo's words Fallout exists as a franchise because Interplay did not have the rights to Wasteland; Fargo's inXile Entertainment returned to the series with Wasteland 2 (2014) and Wasteland 3 (2020).

Written in Melbourne by Beam Software and published by Melbourne House in 1985, The Way of the Exploding Fist brought arcade karate of the Karate Champ kind to the Commodore 64, Spectrum, Amstrad, BBC Micro and Electron. ZZAP!64 gave it 93% and CRASH 92%, it topped the charts, and C&VG's readers voted it Game of the Year. Two very different sequels followed.

Chris Roberts's Wing Commander (Origin Systems, 1990) put bitmapped, scaling starfighters, a score that changed with the battle and a story told between missions into one space combat game. Computer Gaming World made it its game of the year for 1991 and said it had persuaded more readers to upgrade their computers than any other product. The series moved to filmed actors with Wing Commander III, a feature film followed in 1999, and Roberts's Squadron 42, which he calls its spiritual successor, is still in development.

Steve Waldo's Apple II action game puts a Hellcat between a damaged aircraft carrier and enemy islands, ships and aircraft. Returning to refuel and rearm is part of every mission.

Epyx's 1985 follow-up to Summer Games put seven winter events on the Commodore 64, from the bobsled to the biathlon. ZZAP!64 made it a Sizzler, and CRASH gave U.S. Gold's Spectrum version 93%.

WipEout, made in Liverpool by Sony-owned Psygnosis, was an anti-gravity racing game released for the PlayStation's European launch in September 1995. It outsold Ridge Racer at launch, wore a look designed by The Designers Republic and a soundtrack with Leftfield, Orbital and the Chemical Brothers, and became Sony's calling card to a club-going audience. The series ran until 2012, when Sony closed the studio that made it.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was designed by Andrew Greenberg and programmed with Robert Woodhead, two Cornell students, and published for the Apple II by Sir-Tech in September 1981. It sent a party of up to six player-made characters down a ten-level maze, and grew into a series of eight main games that ended with Wizardry 8 in 2001. In Japan it became a phenomenon: its Famicom version was a hit, Robert Woodhead was mobbed by fans in a Japanese computer shop, and Japanese companies kept making Wizardry games after Sir-Tech stopped. A remake built on the original code came out in 2024.

Wizball was Sensible Software's second Commodore 64 game for Ocean, released in 1987: a scrolling shoot-'em-up in which a wizard bounces through eight grey levels in a green ball while his cat, Catelite, collects drops of paint to colour them in. Martin Galway wrote the music. ZZAP!64 gave it 96%, CRASH 92% for the Spectrum version, and Sensible followed it in 1992 with the Amiga and ST sequel Wizkid.

Wolfenstein 3D turned a constrained grid into fast first-person action on DOS PCs. Its raycasting renderer and shareware episodes helped establish id Software’s route to Doom.

Ryuichi Nishizawa designed Wonder Boy at the Tokyo developer Escape, later Westone, and Sega released it in the arcades in 1986. Its energy bar drained all the time and only fruit refilled it, so the player had to keep running. Sega owned the name and Westone the game, which let Hudson Soft remake it as Adventure Island while Sega's own sequels turned into the Monster World adventure series.

Andy Davidson's Total Wormage, a turn-based artillery game for teams of cartoon worms, went unnoticed in an Amiga Format programming competition in 1994. Team17 took it on after five minutes at that September's ECTS trade show, and Ocean published it as Worms in late 1995 for the Amiga, the PC and the PlayStation, followed by most of the other machines of the day. The series is still running.

Nintendo's 1985 puzzle-action game for the Famicom and NES, made by R&D1, in which Mario and Luigi work as demolition men and must knock out every wall and ladder on a screen without trapping themselves. It came with a Design mode for building your own stages, which in Japan could be saved to cassette on the Famicom Data Recorder. A Vs. System arcade version was on show in 1985, and the Eggplant Man went on to inspire Kid Icarus's Eggplant Wizard.

Julian and Nick Gollop's Mythos Games designed it and MicroProse published it in 1994: a strategy game on a spinning globe wrapped around a turn-based squad wargame that grew out of Laser Squad. Britain knew it as UFO: Enemy Unknown, America as X-COM: UFO Defense, and the 1995 PlayStation version as X-COM: Enemy Unknown.

Firaxis Games' 2012 remake of the 1994 X-COM kept the alien invasion, the base, the research and soldiers who die for good, but replaced time units with two actions a turn and gave every recruit a class. Lead designer Jake Solomon first tried a faithful remake and threw it away. The result started a series that ran to XCOM 2 and Chimera Squad.

Xenogears was a PlayStation role-playing game directed by Tetsuya Takahashi, who created it with Kaori Tanaka. It mixed fighting-game combos with Active Time Battle, put its characters in giant robots called Gears, and told a story about a young man with a split personality and a god built as a weapon. It sold 500,000 copies in Japan within months, nearly missed an American release because of its religious themes, and never came out in Europe. Its second disc tells much of its story in cut-scenes, a sign of a project that ran out of time. Takahashi's team went on to form Monolith Soft.

Designed by the Bitmap Brothers, programmed by The Assembly Line and published by Mirrorsoft's Image Works label in 1989, Xenon 2 was a vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up through five periods of evolution, with a shop run by an alien called Crispin and David Whittaker's arrangement of Bomb the Bass's "Megablast" on the title screen. ZZAP! gave it a Gold Medal and The Games Machine 96%.

Masanobu Endo's vertical shooter for Namco reached Japanese arcades early in 1983. The player's Solvalou fought on two levels at once, shooting aircraft and bombing ground targets over forests, roads and the Nazca lines, with hidden objects for those who knew where to look. Atari built it under licence for America, a teenage Satoshi Tajiri sold 10,000 copies of a fanzine issue about it, and the Famicom version paid for a new Namco office building.

Toshihiro Nagoshi's Ryu Ga Gotoku (Like a Dragon) came out for the PlayStation 2 in Japan at the end of 2005 and in the West as Yakuza in 2006. It follows the gangster Kazuma Kiryu through Kamurocho, a fictional Tokyo night district, mixing street brawls and a crime drama with dozens of side events. Yakuza 0 (2015) won the series a large Western audience, Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020) changed hero and switched to turn-based battles, and from 2022 the series took the name Like a Dragon everywhere.

Sega's 1982 arcade shooter looked down on its space fortress at an angle, so walls had height and the player had to judge altitude from an altimeter and the ship's shadow. Magazines called it 'the game that couldn't be brought home', and then it was brought home many times: Coleco's ColecoVision cartridge was the console's best-seller in 1983, Datasoft and Synapse converted it to the American home computers, and US Gold's Spectrum version scored 58% in CRASH.

Zork was written for fun in 1977 by four members of MIT's Dynamic Modelling Group on a PDP-10, and spread by word of mouth to players across the United States. Its parser understood whole sentences. Cut into three parts and run on a virtual machine, it became Infocom's first product: Zork I in 1980, Zork II in 1981 and Zork III in 1982. Zork I alone had sold about a quarter of a million copies by 1984. MIT has since published the 1977 mainframe source, and Microsoft released the Infocom source of the trilogy under the MIT licence in 2025.

Zynaps is a horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up published by Hewson in 1987, written for the Spectrum by Dominic Robinson with John Cumming, graphics by Steve Crow and music by Steve Turner. Andrew Hewson asked for speed, colour and no attribute clash; Robinson delivered 25 frames a second by drawing straight to the screen while keeping out of the way of the television's beam. CRASH made it a Smash at 91%, and its readers voted it the best shoot 'em up of 1987, ahead of Hewson's own Exolon.