What Games Should Still Be Added to the Perfect 2000s Gamer Desktop

Any attempt to build a complete list of games from an entire era ends the same way – someone always finds a gap the size of Homeworld. And when the topic is Windows 95 and 98, the gaps number in the dozens, since half of what people actually played back then never came in a box to begin with

The reason for this revisit is simple. Ahead of the release of a book about the Win9x era, an alphabetical grid of game icons from 1995 to 2001 was put together, based on names hundreds of people brought up over a week of discussion, and that led to an obvious question – what got left out.

Turns out plenty got left out, and the first omission to surface was also the most obvious one.

Nobody bought 3D Pinball: Space Cadet, because it just came with the OS. The trimmed-down Full Tilt! Pinball from Maxis, originally from 1995, ended up bundled into Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95, then kept riding along through 98, ME, 2000, and XP, turning it into the most-played game of the generation purely by accident. SkiFree belongs to that same category – the skier from the Microsoft Entertainment Pack who inevitably got eaten by a yeti at the end of the run, a phenomenon xkcd eventually gave its own comic to.

From there the discussion moved into genre-sized blind spots, and those turned out to be a lot more serious than missing pinball:

• Space sims – Descent: FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2, whose engine Volition open-sourced in 2002, which is a big part of why the games are still playable today

• Turn-based tactics and strategy – Master of Orion II, X-COM: Terror from the Deep, X-COM: Apocalypse, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Homeworld

• LucasArts adventure games – Full Throttle, The Dig, and Grim Fandango, essentially the closing chapter of the genre golden age

• Real-time tactics – Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive, sitting right alongside the already-mentioned Commandos 2

• City building and management – Caesar III, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, The Settlers II

• Missing sequels – Baldur's Gate II, MechWarrior 3, Red Alert 2, Jazz Jackrabbit 2

Nox deserves its own mention – a Westwood action RPG from 2000 about a guy from Earth pulled into a fantasy world, where players picked between warrior, conjurer, and wizard classes. It's technically sold on GOG, but multiplayer in practice requires a third-party client built by fans.

The rest of these titles survive in similar fashion: Caesar III runs through the open-source Julius and Augustus engines, while Lego Island from 1997, after being decompiled, now runs straight in a browser at isle.pizza.