Retro Bucket List

A worm in a super suit; the strangest and best-animated platformer of the 16-bit era.

A bear and a bird collect jiggies; Rare's 3D platformer at its most joyful.

Ryu, Chun-Li and the hadouken; the fighting game that filled arcades in 1991.

Two commandos, spread guns and the Konami code; run-and-gun at its hardest.

A beat-em-up set in Gdynia with a broken bottle as a weapon; the most Polish game ever released.

Raven build a fantasy Doom with an inventory, an elvish wand and the ability to look up.

Bomberman on the Amiga and DOS, and the four-player mode that ruined friendships in one afternoon.

Dig for diamonds, keep the boulders above you where they are, and get out before the wall closes.

The first Polish adventure game: a journalist, a stolen statuette and 1993 EGA graphics drawn by hand.

Twelve tables, one soundtrack by Robert Prince, and a ball that behaves like a ball; the Android table is the one everyone remembers.

Rotoscoped animation, a rifle and a memory-wiped agent on Titan; the French answer to Another World.

The best DOS shoot-em-up: a shop between missions, a story told in text screens, and art that still looks sharp.

The 1997 sequel: the ninja rope, the Holy Hand Grenade and a level editor to draw your own island.

An Atari puzzle game about a robot pushing crates and dodging lasers, still being remade forty years on.

Cut the playing field into pieces without letting the bouncing balls touch your line; four kilobytes of it.

Three classes, hub levels you walk back through, and puzzle switches instead of coloured keys.

Robot fighting with a pilot who levels up between bouts; the shareware Street Fighter of the DOS years.

Kyle Katarn steals the Death Star plans in a Doom-era shooter with levels you can look up and down in.

Ski down an endless slope until the yeti eats you, because the yeti always eats you.

One hundred and forty-nine tile puzzles with a fixed camera and a chip count; the Windows Entertainment Pack in one game.

One city, two alien factions and a real-time mode; the last X-COM the original team made.

Epic MegaGames answer Sonic with a rabbit, a gun and parallax scrolling nobody thought a PC could do.

Bounce a character up a tower that has no top, chaining multi-floor combos while the floors scroll faster; Swedish freeware from 2001 that lived on school computers.

Fifty-four levels of a motorbike on rubber suspension, collecting apples and touching the flower without landing on your head; one Hungarian programmer, and a time-attack scene still going.

The Mega Drive entry: 1917 Europe, two playable hunters and a stage that walks up the leaning tower of Pisa.

Thirty-two hills and a World Cup, the whole flight steered with one mouse gesture; the DOS game every Polish computer ran through Malyszomania.

The whip finally aims in eight directions; the 1991 remake of the first game and its high point on the SNES.

Score a game, or write one chiptune track under the constraints of a real sound chip - three channels and a noise generator.

A cabinet with real buttons and a real stick, whether it holds an original board or a small computer running MAME.

Samus sent to exterminate the Metroids on their home planet, on a Game Boy screen with no map.