After you guys so enthusiastically took to the idea of listing the best classic PC games of all time, I wanted to pull out the alphabetical directory in order to make it easy for everyone to find their favourite games.
Updated over several weeks, the list has an absolutely absurd number of excellent PC games — we’ve stopped doing official updates, but there are still new PC games coming in every now and then. Thanks so much to everyone who contributed.
And so! Our full directory of the Classic PC Games You Must Play:
0-9
4D Sports Boxing
A
Age of Empires II: Age of Kings (Seconded)
Another World/Out of This World
Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (Seconded)
B
Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Battle Realms: Winter of the Wolf
Battlezone (Seconded) (Thirded)
Betrayal at Krondor (Seconded)
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars
C
Clive Barker’s Undying (Seconded)
Close Combat II – A Bridge too Far
Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood
D
Diablo I and II (Seconded) (Thirded)
Day of the Tentacle (Seconded)
Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty
Dust: A Tale Of The Wired West
E
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (Seconded) (Thirded)
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Escape Velocity Nova (Seconded)
F
Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist
G
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within
Giants: Citizen Kabuto (Seconded)
H
Halo: Combat Evolved (Seconded)
H.E.D.Z. (Head Extreme Destruction Zone)
Heroes of Might & Magic III (Seconded) (Thirded)
I
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos
Incubation: Time is Running Out
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (Seconded) (Thirded) (Fourthed)
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine
J
The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
Jurassic Park: Trespasser (Seconded)
K
King’s Quest V: Absence Makes The Heart Go Yonder!
L
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos
The Legend of Kyrandia, Book 2: Hand of Fate (Seconded)
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
Little Big Adventure 2 (Seconded) (Thrirded) (Fourthed!)
M
Marathon Series (Seconded) (Thirded)
Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim
Master of Orion (s) (Seconded) (Thirded) (Fourthed) (Fifthed)
Medal of Honour: Allied Assault
Microsoft’s “Best of Windows Entertainment Pack”
Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven (Seconded)
Moraff’s Dungeons of the Unforgiven
Myth II: Soulblighter (Seconded) (Thirded)
N
Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi
O
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (Seconded)
P
Planescape Torment (Seconded) (Thirded)
Q
The Quest for Glory Series (Seconded) (Thirded)
R
S
Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator
Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire (Seconded)
SkiFree (Ha, ha.)
Spycraft: The Great Game (Seconded)
Star Control II (Seconded) (Thirded) (Fourthed)
Star Wars: Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight
Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds
Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter
T
Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon
Titanic: Adventure out of Time
Total Annihilation (Seconded) (Thirded ) (Fourthed) (Fifthed)
U
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
Ultima Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams
V
Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption (Seconded)
W
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (Seconded)
Warlords III: Darklords Rising
Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge
Wizardry VII: Crusaders of Dark Savant (Seconded)
Wing Commander: Privateer (Seconded)
Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny
Worlds of Ultima 1: Savage Empire
WWF Wrestlemania The Arcade Game
X
Z
Second update: 9/5/2013 AM, added 150+ games. Keep ’em coming.
Third update: 9/6/2013 PM, added 80+ games.
Fourth update: 9/18/2013 AM, added 20+ games. This will probably be our last official update. If you’ve added a game that you feel desperately needs to be included in the list, don’t hesitate to email me.
Image via Shutterstock.
To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @kirkhamilton.
Comments
79 responses to “A Complete Directory Of The Classic PC Games You Must Play”
List is completely invalidated by including X-Wing and X-Wing vs TIE Fighter but not TIE Fighter itself, which is the best of all of those games by a mile.
Yeah, what the hell? Especially XvT – yeah it had prettier graphics, but it was basically a multiplayer game. One of the first instances of multiplayer focus ruining an historically awesome single-player franchise.
+1
Bah! After Freespace II and Wing Commander III, every other space sim was a very distant third. :p
(Disclaimer: before you two grab your shotguns, I’m just poking the bear. XW vs Tie was pretty awesome back in the day!)
X-wing: Alliance was pretty rad too!
Yeah no idea what’s going on here,
X-Wing alliance was by far the best of the entire series.
It had the absolute bees knees of features and a freaking AMAZINGLY enjoyable plot.
Not to mention you can play it right now, with updated hi-res assets.
I love that 5 of the 12 screens are for adventure games
C&C RA 2 but not C&C Gold? Be slippin.
No Z either? http://www.gamegoldies.org/z-zed-bitmap-brothers/
i noticed that too, its like putting half life 2 on the list but not the original.
So many awesome memories in this list. Would love to work through the Legend of Kyrandia series again. Only problem is that freakin’ fireberry cavern…
Oh yeah! Tyrian!
I loved that game! While definitely not as difficult as most of todays modern shooters it was an awesome PC shooter w/ so many unlocks, upgrades and hidden ships (go Banana Ship!) and it also had a great 2 player mode! 😀
Oh yea Tyrian FTW! I still play it frequently but I believe its a carrot ship 😛
Carrot ship, shoots banana bombs.
The lack of SimAnt on this list bothers me.
No Abuse? No Little Big Adventure 1? No Cannon Fodder? No Magic Carpet? The link for “The Curse of Monkey Island” actually goes to MI2: LeChuck’s Revenge? What kind of a list is this? At least they have Tyrian.
Edit: As fortalyst said, no SimAnt. There’s also no Stunts. Oh, and why isn’t Daikatana on here? ^_-
Little Big Adventure was the bomb!
KKND!!
I too came here to complain about the omission of Stunts. I rocked that hard on the old 386DX!
386DX? Real Men and Real Women play that game on a 486DX running at 133MHz with maths co-processor and a mind boggling 8 MB of RAM! Enough hardware to last until the year 3000! 😛
Jokes aside, I too liked that game and spent many a day in the track editor building levels and seeing how far me and my siblings could get.
On a technical note, it was through that game I found out the hard way that the ye ol’ floppy disk could only hold at most 150 files per directory. The disk started to corrupt before I found this out and managed to save it keeping the tracks in one directory and the demos (you could load them if I remember right) in another.
Stunts was oh so awesome! My siblings and I made so many great tracks on that game…
….and go the 386DX!! I remember upgrading from 2MB to 8MB of RAM. Whoah! Those were the days…..
Because the list is about games you should play. Not games you should avoid like the plague.
I think you missed his subtle joke – evidenced by the wink at the end of the statement.
Otherwise, I too would reaching for the shotgun..
Abuse ! Loved that game.
Cannon Fodder. I still recall that catchy intro song..
Well, there’s always going to be games missed on any list. But still, they did list LBA2, so I’m confused why they didn’t also list the original LBA.
Would have liked Lemmings Tribes to be mentioned too. I found it superior to the original Lemmings.
They absolutely got it right with Star Control 2, though. Also pleasantly surprised to see Bloodnet listed. It’s an often overlooked game, and a great experience.
No love for A-10 Warthog 🙁
But One Must Fall 2097 and Lords of the Realm 2 make up for it! \o/
Albion… AWESOME RPG…
I loved Albion so much, I played the demo through about 30 times before getting the full game! Did not disappoint! Was basically a better Avatar in 1995!
same here, i got it with pc powerplay, one of the original issues
I got it off a friend. I still have the CD around somewhere, but I think it, like my Duke Nukem 3D original CD, are too scratched to be read.
Still one of my all time favourite RPGs. Heck, I printed out the offical walkthrough for the game and used to read it at primary school during lunch time. I would imagine the game world as I had played it, or when I got to chapters I hadn’t been to yet, imagine what it might be like.
did you also get that dodgy aussie cut down version of duke nukem 3d, where you had to copy the us-ver.dat and us-ver.bat files to the install directory and run it to patch it to the uncut?
Yes 🙁 And since we didn’t have (or know?) about the Internet back in ’96, we had no way of obtaining those files, either.
Though, I think by 98 or 99 a friend (who actually had that mysterious internet) had the US version and happily gave it out 😀
oh, mine actually had the files on the disc… after installing the game, i just had to drag the two files to the duke 3d directory and run us-ver.bat which patched the game…
Have fun playing Grim Fandango on a modern computer 🙁
http://www.pcworld.com/article/239339/how_to_play_grim_fandango_on_your_windows_7_pc.html
it works 🙂
I did it recently on 64 bit Win7 and don’t remember it being too hard… I did have to change something but as I remember just google your issue and there is a fix or patch or something for it (sorry don’t remember details). Didn’t have a single issue past that.
Zetro beat me to it. I also forgot to mention it was bloody amazing.
Great trip down memory lane
I know there were some awful titles, but no Need For Speed titles made the cut at all?
+1
The first one was a pioneering masterpiece with real brands, and the most accurate recreations of those cars at the time – I remember reading how they had hooked up each car to a dyno in order to record the actual engine noises. Easily the best racing game of the time.
Also, what about Hi-Octane!?
Pioneering… I think you are referring to Street Rod 2 in that case.
Also, where the hell is Jones in the Fast lane.
Street Rod 2! Loved it!
With NFS though, I meant pioneering in the sense of the detail they went to in licensing and recreating each supercar in relation to its real life counterpart. Something later games like Gran Turismo and pretty much any racing game since has done as well.
Jones was also a lot of fun – there are so many omissions here! Can we do a Kotaku AU version to add to the list please?!
Dark Earth 1997 was one of my fave adventure games
List reminds me of my childhood….is that a good thing?
Hexen but not Heretic?
Well that’s hilarious, Total Annihilation has been fifthed…
What happened to the Turok games and Will Rock? Don’t forget those
I think the list is about games that were on PC first then ported elsewhere. Turok was the reverse.
Speaking of the series itself, it can be summed up as this:
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter – WOW! That was fun!
Turok 2: Seed of Evil – Fun, but not as much as the first.
Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion – What on earth?
Turok Evolution – What is this?! The series cannot get any worse!
Turok (2008) – I stand corrected….
Maaaaaaan I remember playing a similar game on the first line of iMacs (apparently it wasn’t ported to OS 9) wish I could remember the name of it..
I’ve played a lot of these games and I gotta say, definitely not all of them are a must play.
The 7th guest? C’mon, that game sucked back in 1995 when it came free with the PC we bought it on.
XIII? Great game. Loved it. But a must play? No. Not at all.
Even the absolute classics on the list, which I am SO glad i played back in the day, are getting unplayable now. Deus Ex and System Shock 2 are the big ones there. Brilliant games but they were ugly when they came out, they’re pretty unplayable now.
Full Throttle however is still beautiful. The 2D games stay nice for a lot longer than the 3d ones, for obvious reasons.
F117A? That was the first game I ever bought! Hell yeah I loved it, but the learning curve was steep (for a 10 year old).
Freespace 2 is still pretty damn awesome though. So unfair we never saw a Freespace 3.
Sorry about the negative post, but I’m pretty realistic about classic games. I have a decent GOG library, but I find I tend to only play them when I’ve been drinking. That seems to be when I’m most primed to be digging the nostalgia kick.
I just finished deus ex last week and definitely not unplayable! all it needed was a high res mod and good to go.
I’m playing Deus Ex now, and I find it is just as playable as it was a decade ago.
Not sure why some outdated graphics make it so unbearable for you, but hey, each to their own.
Full Throttle – what a gem.
I didn’t say gfx make it unplayable. Just that they were ugly when they came out.
It’s more the gameplay, the art form has moved on. Sure you can spend hrs of your life playing old games, but in my view, you’re better off picking one of the best games from the last 6 years and sinking time into that instead. It will be more fun.
I loved Deus Ex more than most, but with games like Mass Effect and Deus Ex Hum Rev around, I’m only playing the original to remember what I was like 10 years ago. The original was awesome, but it’s the nostalgia that gets me going. I maintain that if you didn’t play the game back in the day, if this is your first run on it, you’ll find it waaaaay too dated to get into it.
I came here thinking it would be a list of twenty or so games, you know a small list I could make it through easily. My god was I wrong.
At the risk of being chased out of here, what about Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic?
Definitely one of the most complete lists of this type I’ve seen.
Surely, you forgot Final Fantasy 7 & 8 by mistake?
They were both PC Releases.
They were on the Playstation first and even then the porting was a joke.
Transport Tycoon is not on the list? Spent many hours of my misspent youth on nearly all the games on this list but none more then Transport Tycoon!!!
If anyone cares, thens a fun android port for tablets around these days.
Cultures 2 : Gates of Asgard, probably some of the most fun I had at my computer back in the day.
Need more high end graphic card killing games to make the PC master race feel mighty with their $3000 rigs
now now… don’t get your knickers in a knot
I’m not. I’m a PC gamer myself and grew up with a lot of this list checked off. It’s just unfortunate that in today’s ultra graphics intensive, FPS only, blood and gore PC gaming landscape; a lot of the “PC Master Race” gamers wouldn’t touch this list with a 20 foot pole.
Alright my bad, I just misunderstood your comment. <3
I feel high & mighty with my 600 dollar rig, what’s your problem? 😛
Needs more Shadow Warrior.
Go Total Annihilation!
I tried playing the XCOM games after they announced Enemy Unknown. I find them completely and utterly impossible to get into for a first timer, they’re just too dated. I tried, but without any nostalgia to rely on, they were just so clumsy and laborious I couldn’t even bring myself to finish a mission 🙁 wish I’d played them when they came out….
No Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, the game that more or less started everything? 🙁 That game would come to define a lot of my current tastes in gaming and fiction.
Just wan’t to say I came in here to be disappointed and feel let down by a promising title. I made it as far as the first entry
“4D-Sports Boxing”
This is as far as I made it, I already know everything else on this list will be perfect, thankyou Mr Hamilton, you have made my lifetime, this is literally the first ever game I tried to install onto my 386.
No goldbox love? pool of radiance, silver blades etc + other ssi games
Defender of the crown
Fantasy Empires
Imperialism 1 and 2
What game is that image from (the one just above B)?
Baldur’s Gate II.
thanks, ill have a look at it.. i thought i had played BG2 but dont remember the screen lol..
thanks again
If I remember correctly it’s from a city where there are two families feuding in a nod to Romeo and Juliet. I vaguely remember people turned into statues in the town square as well. I think the main quest there was to free them. There was also some kind of carnival outside the city gates with a couple of colourful tents.
I remember the carnival and the nod towards Romeo and Juliet, I found my cd’s for the game so I might load it up some time over the weekend and play it haha.
Very sad to see ‘Electroman’ not on the list, that game was AMAZING!!!
Good Selection. Everyone had ‘something’. I went through the list and went (not in alphabetical order here): Fallout 1&2, Arcanum, Planescape, Wasteland. Check (Many others, but they are my real highlights in gaming) And yes, I know about the planescape/Wasteland kickstarters and looking forward to their release. Not much longer now. (Deep breath)
What about Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure?
This is a great list of games, we actually cover about 30 first person shooters and we provide cheats for just about every game. We are covering the new BF5 game and we plan to release Battlefield Hardline Hacks once the game comes online.
Hey Telltale games recently released a remastered version of Grim Fandango so its much easier now 🙂
GOG
https://www.gog.com/game/grim_fandango_remastered
Steam
http://store.steampowered.com/app/316790/
This list is sorely missing the You Don’t Know Jack games.
With a group of friends, it’s the best trivia series ever made.
On your own, it’s a series that’ll make you dumber than you thought you were, whilst still being the best trivia series ever made.