Retro Bucket List

Escape Castle Wolfenstein floor by floor; id's first-person shooter before Doom.

Settle the New World, build an economy and declare independence from the king you serve.

A biker gang, a murder and Roy Conrad's voice; LucasArts in leather.

The original, before the sequels: hot-seat artillery with a banana bomb.

Two players, top-down corridors and a self-destruct countdown; Team17's Aliens tribute.

Haggar, Cody and Guy clean up Metro City; the Capcom beat-em-up everyone fed coins to.

A New Orleans bookseller investigates voodoo murders; Jane Jensen's gothic adventure.

The Genesis Sonic made by fans, officially; the best Sonic since 1994.

An 8-bit knight with a shovel; the retro platformer done right.

Left click, right click, guess on the last square; the Windows game of every office.

Sixteen levels under Tristram's cathedral; the click-and-loot game begins.

Fly for the Empire; the best space combat sim, from 1994.

Base building, research and squads that die in the dark; the 1994 original of the tactics genre.

Dogfights against the Kilrathi and a branching campaign; Chris Roberts in 1990.

The Nokia 3310 game everyone played in 1999.

A purple dragon glides through pastel worlds; Insomniac's first hit.

Four fighters, a Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack and two-player co-op; the best beat-em-up of its era.

Zone, tax, build a stadium and watch it burn; the city builder that defined the genre.

Guide a hundred green-haired creatures to the exit by giving them jobs; the DMA puzzle hit before GTA.

Guybrush hunts the treasure of Big Whoop; the sequel with the ending fans still argue about.

Wumpa fruit and a marsupial running into the screen; Sony's answer to Mario.

Digitised fighters and fatalities; the game that created the ESRB.

Samus Aran on Zebes, and the reveal at the end; the first half of Metroidvania.

An island of puzzles and books that are doorways; the best-selling PC game of the 1990s.

Strippers, pigs in cop uniforms and "it's time to kick ass"; the Build engine shooter.

Lara Croft in Peru, the T. rex in the valley and a whole new kind of hero.

The BFG, the imps and the shareware episode that ran on every office PC in 1993.

Cure Bloaty Head and Slack Tongue while the patients queue; Bullfrog's comedy management sim.

The atmospheric map, the wall jump and the baby Metroid; the SNES masterpiece.

Sixty minutes to save the princess, rotoscoped animation and the first cinematic platformer.