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What would you say are the most famous or most popular PC games from the start of PC gaming until the mid-90s?

The games have to be games that were natively created for the PC. If it's a port of a console or arcade game, it doesn't count.
Maybe a little exception: If the arcade or console game was some totally obscure game and it was only due to the PC version that it got famous, this might count as well.
All in all, the game had to be famous on the PC. (Please don't name "Pac-Man" or "Street Fighter II" just because they had PC ports.)

I will start the list with "Doom".

What others do you know that were really the most famous old school PC games?

A few off of the top of my head (in other words, the games that I played the most ): Sierra's Adventure games (King's/Space/Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.), Wing Commander, Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen, Falcon 3.0, Dungeons and Dragons Gold Box games, Dune II, Masters of Orion, Civilization...

Obligatory mention of The Oregon Trail by MECC.

Monkey Island and King's Quest

I'd add Prince of Persia. Although it wasn't natively created for MS-DOS PC, it only got the fame when it has been ported to it.

Warcraft and C&C also could be in the list, at least the first Warcraft (1994). Heroes of Might and Magic, maybe (1995).

ZZT, Epic (Mega)Games's ASCII GCS is worth a mention

Also, Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit 1 and 2

Snarkily, Microsoft's implementations of Hearts, Reversi, Minesweeper, and Klondike ("Solitaire").

Slightly less snarky, but slightly less true: the games from the Microsoft Entertainment Pack.

All of the Apogee- and Epic- published shareware games.

Sopwith.

mikejmoffitt wrote:Obligatory mention of The Oregon Trail by MECC.

Does PC here refer to all home computers or only the IBM platform? If the former, Number Munchers. If the latter, Number Munchers and The Oregon Trail are ports from Apple II. In any case, Tetris and Block Out both began on PC.

Tetris got its fame from MS-DOS PC port, but it began on an obscure LSI-11 based Soviet computer.

Myst - technically it's a port from Macintosh but I guess it'll enter the cathegory of "became popular because of it's PC version".

Solitaire game that came with Windows 3.1. I think everyone played this game back then.

Hamtaro126 wrote:ZZT, Epic (Mega)Games's ASCII GCS is worth a mention

Also, Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit 1 and 2

I have played all of those games and they are really very good. There is also Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. (I also like Apogee's Pharaoh's Tomb and Arctic Adventure; I also think they are good although some people don't like it so much) All of them are a bit too easy, though.

Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen, Monkey Island, The 7th Guest, Doom, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and all the other Sierra games. When VGA games really started to take off in 1990 is when the PC started to take off.

I was an Amiga gamer after the NES, and finally got a PC when Pentiums came out.

Wow, I have played almost none of these games. I have always been a console guy. Maybe I should try some of them.

Alright, so what would you say are THE top 10 most famous games for the PC from that time?
(And no, Solitaire doesn't count.)

By the way, I always thought "Tetris" got its fame by the Game Boy version.

I do like the controls in Apogee/MicroFX's Pharaoh's Tomb and Arctic Adventure (left shift = move left, right shift = move right, space = jump (fixed height), any key between the two shift keys on the same row = shoot) far better than the more modern games; too bad other games don't use those control schemes! (These games do allow the arrow keys to move too, and F to shoot, although I prefer the shift keys to move and others on the same row to shoot) (Fixed jump height is also a feature I like)

I did play other games from Apogee Software, such as Paganitzu, Hocus Pocus (although I think it is too easy, even on hard mode), and several others; I forget what all of them are at this time. ZZT (by Potomac Computer Systems) is not bad (I have even managed to figure out a lot of stuff about it by observation, so can pretty much guess exactly why it does certain strange things), and the games included with it are actually pretty good except that they seem to be a bit too easy in my opinion.

It's hard to pick a "top 10" that everyone will agree on. But I agree with almost all the games everyone else has named in this thread.
They're not terribly good games, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the other EGA platformers that were made by Apogee between Commander Keen 1-3 and 4-6, like Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, and the original Duke Nukem.
Kroz and ZZT are very formative games, so I'd recommend taking a gander; don't feel obliged to play through them, though.

Not exactly related, but I really like the version of the soundtrack for Lemmings and Lemmings 2 on machines with the SN76489.