Build a house, fill eight need bars and steer a family through work and neighbours; the best-selling PC game.
Cure Bloaty Head and Slack Tongue while the patients queue; Bullfrog's comedy management sim.
Tesla coils, Tanya and full-motion video generals; Westwood's alternate Cold War.
Heroes, four races and the custom map that became DotA; Blizzard's RTS peak.
Terran, Zerg and Protoss in perfect balance; the national sport of South Korea.
Thirteen civilisations from the Dark Age to the Imperial Age; still played competitively.
From a settler to Alpha Centauri, one more turn at a time; Sid Meier's masterpiece of 1996.
Zone, tax, build a stadium and watch it burn; the city builder that defined the genre.
An island of puzzles and books that are doorways; the best-selling PC game of the 1990s.
A travel agent for the dead in an Art Deco afterlife; Tim Schafer's noir.
Guybrush hunts the treasure of Big Whoop; the sequel with the ending fans still argue about.
Guide a hundred green-haired creatures to the exit by giving them jobs; the DMA puzzle hit before GTA.
A physicist teleported to an alien planet; Eric Chahi's wordless cinematic game.
Sixty minutes to save the princess, rotoscoped animation and the first cinematic platformer.
Four fighters, a Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack and two-player co-op; the best beat-em-up of its era.
The atmospheric map, the wall jump and the baby Metroid; the SNES masterpiece.
Samus Aran on Zebes, and the reveal at the end; the first half of Metroidvania.
Digitised fighters and fatalities; the game that created the ESRB.
Anywhere City, three gangs to play against each other and a respect meter.
The free follow-up pack, the same London eight years earlier.
The swinging-sixties expansion; driving on the left, in the only GTA set outside America.
The 1997 top-down original: Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas as three flat maps.
Niko Bellic arrives in a grimy Liberty City looking for the American dream and a man to kill.
CJ across a whole state; three cities, a countryside and a jetpack.
Miami in 1986, Tommy Vercetti, and the best licensed radio ever put in a game.
Liberty City in 2001: the first open-world 3D city, and the reason the genre exists.
Breath of the Wild plus sky islands, the Depths and a build-anything Ultrahand.
Three days until the moon falls, replayed until you have saved everyone in Termina.
The Reapers arrive and the trilogy ends; BioWare added an epilogue after the backlash.
Recruit a crew and take them through the Omega-4 relay; whoever you neglected dies.
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