Do you ever feel like games just aren’t the same anymore?

Back in the day, or in the 90s to be precise, games couldn’t rely on stunning 4K graphics and 120 frames per second to wow players and needed to have a story and good gameplay to keep them entertained. Here is our list of the top twenty retro PC games that everyone should have on their shelves.

Half-Life

Half-Life 2 is the game everyone remembers, but the original is a classic and well worth revisiting. This is the game that started it all and is probably a lot stranger and more challenging than you remember. Without this game, there would be no Half-Life 2, 3, or the Portal games.

It’s a classic first-person shooter made by Valve and came out in 1998, It was their debut game. You assume the role of Gordon Freeman, a scientist who is trying to escape the Black Mesa Research Facility after an alien invasion. The core gameplay is all about killing aliens with a variety of weapons and solving puzzles.

Unlike many other games in the late 90s, you have almost uninterrupted control of Freeman, with the story being told mostly through cut scenes seen through his eyes. 

Doom

The daddy of first-person shooters, this single game probably did more for PC gaming in the 90s than any other. “Can it play Doom?” was the question on everyone’s lips when they went to buy a new PC or laptop. It is still a great game to play today.

You take the role of a space marine, known as ‘Doomguy’ by all the cool kids, and are tasked with fighting your way through shit tons of demons from Hell. Seriously, it was a genuinely scary game back in 1993!

The first episode of the game was given out freely as shareware and played by an estimated 15–20 million people within the first two years; the full game, with two extra episodes, was sold via special mail order. 

Star Wars: TIE Fighter

Possibly the best Star Wars game ever. This is a brilliant space shooter that puts you in the heat of the action from the films and their surrounding story. Its predecessor X-Wing often gets talked about more, but the real 90s gamers know that TIE fighter was a superior space sim.

The game puts the player in the role of an Imperial starfighter pilot in a plot made to fit between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The game supported Gouraud shading and had extra gameplay features not available in X-Wing. 

Missions included dogfights, escort jobs, vehicle inspections, and attacks on space stations.

Sim City:2000

Who knew that city planning and balancing a budget could be so much fun? Millions of man-hours have been spent hunched over a CRT monitor, planning out cities and developing their economies and simply watching them grow. Step back in time with this must-have classic.

SimCity 2000 is played using that weird side -on an isometric perspective as opposed to the OG Sim City, which had a top-down perspective. The objective of the game is simple enough: create a city, develop commercial, industrial and residential properties, collect taxes and by more stuff for your city.

The hard bit is scaling everything whilst satisfying the standard of living of the population, maintaining a balance between your sectors, and of course monitoring your region’s environmental situation to prevent it from declining and going bankrupt, as extreme deficit spending gets you a game over. Bummer.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!

This swash-buckling sim was many people’s first introduction to simulation games, and it was a baptism of fire for them. This game had plenty of challenging elements, though the sword fighting was a bit tame even by 90s standards. Fire this one up and you will be hooked for hours.

Pirates! is set in the Caribbean and is a single-player, open-world game. At the start you receive a letter of marque authorising service as a privateer for the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Republic, the Kingdom of England, or the French colonial empire.

Player’s loyalties can change over the course of the game and may turn to piracy at any time. The gameplay is very open-ended; tyou can choose to attack enemy ships or towns, hunt pirates, seek buried treasure, rescue long-lost family members, or even avoid violence altogether!

Syndicate

This was, and still is, one of the best cyberpunk games ever to hit the market. Its style and graphics seem to define the 90s era today, and its gameplay set standards that many modern games still hold themselves to. What lengths will you go to for power? Find out in Syndicate.

The game boasts a series of missions, in which the player controls a team of cybernetically modified agent dudes attempting to take over a country. As an agent, you must overcome police and other heavily armed agents from rival syndicates to achieve your objectives, which often feature assassinations or rescue missions.

Armaments, cybernetic mods and special attributes are controlled by the player to make them more suited for particular tasks.

Day of the Tentacle

This point-and-click classic has stood the test of time. Still today, it offers great gameplay and a fun adventure, and its comic book style graphics hold up well. Play this today and it won’t feel like you are playing a game that is approaching its 30th birthday.

Day of the Tentacle uses time travel mechanics to tell the story of our hapless trio of misfits: Bernard, Hoagie and Laverne. Early in the game, they are separated across time by the effects of a dodgy time machine built by the mad scientist Dr. Fred Eddison.

The player, after completing puzzles, can then freely switch characters, interacting with small inventory items that can be shared by placing the item into a “Chron-o-John”, a modified portable toilet that instantly transports objects to one of the other time periods.

The game has a hilarious script, as you’d expect from LucasArts, and was remastered in 2016.

Hoyle Casino

This probably still is the best casino sim on available on PC. It offers hours of play and all the casino games you can imagine. If you want a more modern casino experience, you’ll want to find a site that reviews the top 20 online casinos UK based, like Online Casinos. They rate and review the top casino sites so you know you are playing at a safe and reputable casino. For example, they think that this is one of the top 20 online casinos in the UK.

Duke Nukem 3D

Hail to the king, baby! This is one of the biggest and best games from the 90s and defined a genre. If you haven’t got a copy, why not?

Duke Nukem 3D features one of gamings greatest creations, Duke Nukem. Voiced by the very talented Jon St. John, you fight against an alien invasion on Earth. Along with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Duke Nukem 3D is one of the great early first-person shooters and was released to major acclaim. 

Our flat-top, babe-magnet, big-gun-touting no-bullshit American anti-hero is not one for the kids, but in the mid 90s was the coolest video games character there was.

Heroes of Might and Magic III

Hours, days, and weeks can be lost to this game. It has a mix of everything you could want from a PC game in a perfect package. It is still downloaded in high numbers today.

It’s a turn-based strategy game and is very similar to its predecessors, with the player controlling a number of heroes that command an army of creatures inspired by myth. The gameplay is sub-divided, with tactical overland exploration and a turn-based system.

You gain experience by engaging in combat with enemy heroes and monsters. Victory conditions vary depending on the map. It was released to universal acclaim and was praised by critics.

Baldur’s Gate II

This huge game showed PC gamers just how big a game can be. Size isn’t everything, however, and the story and gameplay are what makes this game an absolute classic. It should have a place in everyone’s collection.

The game is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition RPG. Main quests take about 50 to 60 hours to play, while the full game, including all side quests, can be as much as 200 to 300 hours. You control a party of up to six characters, one of whom is the protagonist; if your protagonist dies, it’s game over – or load from your last save.

The game is set in the fictional Forgotten Realms, much of Baldur’s Gate II takes place in and around a place called Athkatla, a city in the fantasy country of Amn. 

The Operative: No One Lives Forever

The sequel to this game is probably better known, but the original is the best. Hard to find to buy online these days, this polished game is a hard-boiled spy drama with a wicked sense of humour.

It’s a first-person shooter video with stealth gameplay elements and is a story-driven video game, set in the 1960s, and stars spy Cate Archer who works for a secret international organization called UNITY – “dedicated to protecting humanity from megalomaniacs bent upon world domination.”

Most missions can be finished in multiple ways, using sneak skills to avoid danger or by just blowing everything up as you go.

Dungeon Keeper

This is another game that lets players play as the bad guy so they can have more fun. Booting up this legend will fill you with feelings of nostalgia, but the gameplay feels as fresh as the day it was made. The sequel is also worth looking for.

The player creates and actively manages an underground dungeon, protecting it from invading ‘hero’ characters intent on stealing your stolen treasures, killing your loyal monsters and with that, ending your game. The real goal is to conquer the entire world by destroying all heroic kingdoms and rival dungeon keepers in each realm.

An absolute classic crying out for a proper modern sequel.

Myst

This puzzle game was simply beautiful to look at, which was a good thing as players often spent time walking around its landscapes looking for another clue to help unravel its deep mystery. It’s nearly thirty years old and still few people have completed it and solved its puzzle.

Myst‘s gameplay is of a first-person nature, as you journey through an interactive world. You can interact with various objects on some screens by clicking or dragging. You move your character by clicking on locations shown on the screen; the scene then crossfades into another frame, and you can then explore the new area. 

It’s graphics were simply mind-blowing back in 1993, and a lot of machines couldn’t run it as a result. It has an eerie and engrossing atmosphere that still resonates to this day.

Quake

This game took the first-person shooter genre to a higher level for PC gamers and was the reason for many LAN parties. This game made online deathmatches what they are today.

In Quake players must find their way through various maze-like, medieval-style environments, all the while battling monsters using rusty and visceral weaponry. The overall atmosphere is gritty, dark and foreboding.

Unlike the Doom engine that came before it, the Quake engine had full real-time 3D rendering and even had early support for 3D acceleration via OpenGL. A revolutionary title.

Thief: The Dark Project

Stealth games owe everything to this trailblazer. Before there was Assassin’s Creed, there was Thief. This game made players avoid confrontation rather than head fist first into the action. Well worth replaying.

This is the start of a series of stealth video games in which you play as Garrett, a master thief in a fantasy steampunk world resembling that looks like a cross between the Late Middle Ages and the Victorian era, with more advanced technologies interspersed of course.

It’s mainly played in a first-person perspective, with the main tactic to avoid fights, stealthily traverse environments to complete objectives and sneak around enemies or subdue them, without creating noise or suspicion. 

Warcraft III

This classic is probably the best strategy game of the 90s. Without this, there would be no World of Warcraft today. Its predecessors were popular, but this is the game that made Warcraft a household name.

It’s a high fantasy RTS in which, as you’d expect, players collect resources, train units and build bases. Four playable factions can be chosen from: Humans, Orcs, (both of which appeared in the previous games) and two new factions: Night Elves and the Undead. 

It received great acclaim from critics, who praised the presentation and multiplayer features. It is considered a great example of the RTS genre.

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge

This sequel to the smash hit The Secret of Monkey Island somehow managed to be better than the original. Still challenging today, this puzzle game left many players stumped at some of its more challenging tasks.

The game’s story centres once again on everyone’s favourite wimpy pirate wanna-be Guybrush Threepwood. After defeating ghost pirate douche-bag LeChuck in the first game, The Secret of Monkey Island, we find out, in flashback, what happened between Guybrush Threepwood and Elaine Marley. The story revolves around Guybrush’s attempts to find the mysterious treasure of Big Whoop.

LeChuck’s Revenge plays like most SCUMM-based point-and-click adventure games, but is much richer in its art design, much longer and more complex than its predecessor.

Resident Evil

This game was a big hit on the Sony PlayStation, and its PC port quickly became popular with keyboard and mouse players. The atmospherics of this game are really creepy, and its mix of puzzles and intense gameplay has never been equalled.

It’s a survival horror game in which you play as Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, members of an elite task force (S.T.A.R.S.) investigating the outskirts of Raccoon City following the disappearance of some of their crew. Before they know it, they’re trapped in a mansion stuffed full of zombies and other random monsters. The objective, other than survival, is to explore the mansion to uncover its secrets.

Resident Evil was extremely well reviewed critically, and is seen as a defining title in the horror game genre.

Diablo

This game arguably created the dungeon exploration genre and still holds up today for its fantastic gameplay. Rivalled only by its successor, this is a game that belongs on every retro fan’s shelf.

It’s set in a fictional Kingdom (Khanduras), in which the player is a lone hero battling to rid the world of Diablo, the Lord of Terror. The player must journey through sixteen randomly generated dungeon-like levels, eventually entering ‘Hell’ in order to face Diablo.

It’s an action role-playing hack and slash video game and has three character classes: Warrior, Rogue, and Sorcerer. The game’s great success led to two fantastic sequels: Diablo II in 2000 and Diablo III in 2012. A third sequel, Diablo IV, is currently in development.

What do you reckon to our top 20?

Just a handful of the games on this list will keep you busy for weeks. Have a look around online to see if you can find some of these classics available to buy – we know you won’t regret it!