Most famous/popular PC games until the mid 90s

[tokumaru]

I hardly noticed this back in the day, but looking at some of these PC platformers now I'm amazed by how stiff the physics, sprite movement and scrolling are. I imagine that smooth scrolling would have made the games unplayable on older machines, which is probably why the games are like this, but when you compare them to what was available on consoles at the time, it's a surprise that anyone would want to play Hocus Pocus...

[tepples]

I imagine that smooth scrolling would have made the games unplayable on older machines, which is probably why the games are like this

More likely, not everyone was skilled enough to program the VGA for smooth scrolling and sprite animation in mode X. Yes, it's possible, using a sliding double buffer technique not unlike that used by Kirby's Adventure.

but when you compare them to what was available on consoles at the time, it's a surprise that anyone would want to play Hocus Pocus

Unless they lived in a country with far larger import duties on consoles than on PCs. Or unless they took advantage of the common "shareware" practice of distributing a disk with the first world of a bunch of different games on it. I don't think fourth-generation consoles had demo carts the way the PS1 had demo discs, did they?

[never-obsolete]

X-COM: UFO Defense is a fun game that I hadn't played until recently. The UI is sorta clunky by today's standards, but it's a solid game.

[Memblers]

Cool list so far, and would also add these:

Populous
SimCity (and/or SimCity 2000)
X-Wing (and/or the sequel, Tie Fighter)
Star Control (and/or it's fantastic sequel)
Railroad Tycoon
also can't leave out Scorched Earth!