The Ten Runners-Up
The Seventh Guest
In 1992, Trilobyte released The Seventh Guest, an adventure game that combined cutting-edge graphics and challenging puzzles. The game was one of the first to show the full potential of the CD-ROM. The story of the toy maker Stauf and his mysterious mansion was revealed over the course of the game through haunting visions of ghosts. As you wound your way through the 3D environments exploring rooms and solving puzzles, the house's previous victims were shown in creepy, semitransparent full-motion video. The game was a phenomenal success, selling over two million copies. It showed that games on CDs could be commercially successful and encouraged other game developers to use more cinematic content in their games. For more information about the history of Trilobyte, take a look at GameSpot's Haunted Glory: The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte.
WarBirds
If the future of hardcore flight simulations is in the massively multiplayer arena, much of the credit has to go to WarBirds. Like Air Warrior before it, WarBirds brought flight sim pilots together into a mutually supportive community where experienced players help the novices become acclimated so as to broaden the game's appeal. WarBirds had the good fortune to take advantage of emerging Internet technology just as it was becoming available, and, as a result, it set the standard for the many online massively multiplayer sims that followed. Should massively multiplayer flight sims save the genre, we'll have WarBirds to thank.
Pool of Radiance
Computer role-playing games have used high-fantasy settings ever since they've existed - that's because role-playing games as we know them were, for the most part, originally founded on Arneson and Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons paper-and-pencil system. Pool of Radiance was the first to bring this formal system to computer-game format, and it did so remarkably well. Pool of Radiance took Dungeons & Dragons' infamously arcane rules and converted them into a high-resolution computer game that didn't focus on crunching numbers or rolling dice, but on colorful graphics, crisp sound, and enjoyably strategic battles. It proved that tabletop paper-and-pencil game systems could be comprehensively translated into an attractive and well-rounded computer game, and it set the stage for SSI's dominance of the computer role-playing game market. You can read more about Pool of Radiance and SSI's gold-box role-playing games in our History of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons feature.
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
At a time when very few computer games were using 3D polygonal graphics, Ultima Underworld pushed Intel's x86 processors to their highest potential and delivered detailed, realistic texture-mapped 3D environments. Underworld was a seamless, fully 3D first-person dungeon crawl that was much more immersive than any other role-playing game before it. In fact, Ultima Underworld helped coin the word "immersive" as the popular game-marketing term and design catchphrase that it's become since then. Although first-person role-playing games like The Bard's Tale had been around for years, Ultima Underworld - much more than any of its predecessors - truly managed to make players feel as if they were actually a part of the game.
Deer Hunter
Regardless of what you might think of this game, Deer Hunter's development and retail strategy was the envy of game publishers in the early months of 1998. Developed by a group of three designers who were working part-time hours, Deer Hunter was completed in three short months, and its development cost less than $75,000. The game was designed for the average PC user, not the hardcore game player, and went on to be a best-seller. Deer Hunter proved to publishers that the majority of PC owners - those who use their computers for surfing the Net, word processing, and such - would buy simple, value-priced games for entertainment. As a result, numerous game companies have since released countless games (from Professional Bull Rider to Trophy Bass) that follow the same development model in hopes of creating the next Deer Hunter. Some existing publishers have even gone so far as to found brand new divisions specifically to handle the production of these types of games, including Gathering of Developers' On Deck Interactive and GT Interactive's WizardWorks.
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