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Ok lets see if we can narrow a list down to 20 or 25 (with some honorable mentions for those greats that don't make the cut.

I'm not a huge PC gamer, but Myst and DOOM come to mind.

racketboy wrote:Ok lets see if we can narrow a list down to 20 or 25 (with some honorable mentions for those greats that don't make the cut.

I'm not a huge PC gamer, but Myst and DOOM come to mind.

Myst and doom, 100%.

Others I would recommend are everquest for propelling the mmorpg genre into the stratosphere

Commander Keen for making a console style platform on pc.

The Secret of Monkey Island for its humor and great example of point and click adventure game.

Unreal Tournament for being the best of the best in first person arena shooters (sorry quake fans!)

Oregon trail for being the most hardcore of survival edutainment.

(Is the year 2000 the 20th century?) If so the sims which came out in 2000.

Those are just a couple I came up with on the fly. I'll think of some more.

Narrowing PC down to twenty games will be tough. Maybe you should do DOS and Windows separately?

Off the top of my head outside of what's already been mentioned:

Sci-Fi sim franchises: Wing Commander, X-Wing/TIE Fighter, MechWarrior

RTS franchises: Command & Conquer, WarCraft and especially StarCraft

Other id FPS games

Diablo

Ultima

Half-Life

Civilization

Sim City and The Sims

Sierra adventure games

Lucasarts adventure games

Quake also gets an entry for being the huge 3D game, as well as being one of the first big games to do over the internet games (whereas Doom was LAN only).

Command & Conquer was the first really major RTS to get a lot of traction and popularized a lot of genre conventions. StarCraft was the biggest RTS of the era.

Diablo brought back RPG gameplay after the genre stagnated. Baldur's Gate brought back D&D inspired games. Ultima and Wizardry were massive genre influences for RPGs. Pools of Radiance was the first awesome D&D game.

Microsoft Flight Simulator was huge for flight sims.

Oh Diablo should definitely be in there. If we had to whittle down based on genre I think wing commander should win out over x-wing.

Oohhh another fps that should be in the discussion... Duke Nukem 3d!!!

Let's talk rpgs... Big ones are Baldurs Gate, Fallout 2, might and magic, Daggerfall, Pool of radiance

I'd say no to Myst...

dsheinem wrote:I'd say no to Myst...

I would agree on the grounds that it would be more at home on a list for Macintosh.

Though regardless of my personal feelings about Myst, there's no denying its reach on PC. It was the best selling PC game until The Sims dethroned it.

Must cannot be removed from the list. It was WAY too huge.

I feel like there's way more than 20 games...

noiseredux wrote:I feel like there's way more than 20 games...

I still think at least separating DOS into its own specific platform would help, but it would still be tough.