Welcome to the Video Games wing of the Shacknews 2023 Hall of Fame class.This category celebrates the games that have shaped the industry and the lives of millions of players.
When you're finished, use the Table of Contents at the bottom of the page to visit other areas of the Shacknews Hall of Fame Class of 2023.
F-Zero X blasted onto the Nintendo 64 in 1998. The futuristic racing game was the sequel to SNES launch title F-Zero and added a whole slew of new machines, pilots, tracks, and songs. F-Zero X ran fast as well, pushing 60 frames per second on the N64 hardware. The game challenged players with multiple difficulty levels in the Grand Prix Mode and with a brand new Death Race Mode that really kicked things up a notch.
F-Zero X is one of the finest racing games to ever be released and was one of many great N64 games deserving the high praise of being inducted into the Shacknews Hall of Fame in its first year of eligibility. Canton’s “got boost power” now.
Grim Fandango’s title was fitting for the worst reason. The state of point-and-click adventure games was grim when it launched in 1998. More graphics-intensive genres such as first-person shooters were crowding retail shelves and topping sales charts. Puzzles, the core of adventures that drove story and contributed gameplay beyond clicking dialogue choices, were growing increasingly convoluted and obtuse. They also weren’t flashy compared to the droves of action-heavy titles competing for consumer dollars.
Enter Grim Fandango. Set in the Land of the Dead, the game’s premise sprung from the mind of Tim Schafer, by then a legend at LucasArts for direction other point-and-click hits such as Full Throttle and co-designing Day of the Tentacle. In Grim’s underworld, living a good life affords you better travel packages in the ever after, while those who lived worse lives must travel the Land of the Dead on foot. Your character, Manuel Calvavera, is a travel agent working off his debt to a higher power, and who works primarily with those poor unfortunate souls who have a lot of walking in their future. When you meet a client whom he believes should be traveling in luxury instead of on foot, you uncover a conspiracy and must do adventure-game things to stop it.
Grim Fandango’s striking visual direction, a dramatic shift from the pixel art and FMV cinematics that had defined the genre for so long, as well as its puzzles and nonintrusive interface that immersed players in the setting. It raked in awards from publications such as PC Gamer, GameSpot, IGN, and Next Generation magazine. But although it sold well during the 1998 holiday season, its commercial appeal was lower than previous point-and-clicks such as Full Throttle.
Adventure games petered out for a long time after Grim Fandango. When they re-emerged in the late 2000s, they were driven more by dialogue and character choices, as evidence in Telltale games such as The Walking Dead. The genre’s temporary decline wasn’t Grim Fandango’s fault. In many ways, it was the last bastion of a design model that had brought companies such as LucasArts and Sierra great success and acclaim, and it still holds up, as evidence by the popularity of the remastered version released in 2015.
The modern landscape of sports games is dominated by licensed titles such as Madden NFL and NBA 2K. In the 1990s, a wider variety of sports games—some arcade-y like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz, and some more simulation-focused—was on hand. 1080° Snowboarding is a perfect example of a 1990s-era sports game, and was also a perfect showcase for the then-nascent 3D era of gaming.
1080° Snowboarding offered several modes of play, most centered on performing tricks or competing in races. The graphics were astoundingly detailed and crisp for the time. That was important for Nintendo: Many NES owners had flocked to the Sega Genesis in the 16-bit era to swim in its deeper pool of increasingly realistic sports titles. The physics were just as impressive, adding a gripping sense of speed and gravity to every move you performed. And performing those moves felt natural and comfortable. That’s no surprise: The game was developed by Nintendo EAD, the group of rockstars who had made titles ranging from Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda to Pilotwings, F-Zero, Wave Race, and Stunt Race FX.
From its beautiful and realistic (for the time) depiction of snow to its immersive audiovisuals and tight controls, 1080° Snowboarding was one of the Nintendo 64’s best games, even if it didn’t garner as much attention as other first-party titles such as Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Early 3D video games were a grab bag. Some were attempts at envisioning 2D gameplay in a 3D space, usually to mixed results. Others were more experimental. There were party games before Mario Party, but the first, released on Nintendo 64 in 1998, rolled several experiments. The object of the game, which supported up to four players thanks to the N64’s four controller points (a novelty during a time when most consoles still supported a maximum of two), was to choose a character and compete in a gauntlet of minigames against your friends. Every challenge you win moves you farther along a boardgame-like interface.
Most of Mario Party’s assorted minigames relied on the N64 controller’s analog stick, a device still unfamiliar to gamers who had grown up with the directional pads of the Super NES and Genesis. That assortment was so diverse and deep that you would just figure out how to do what one minigame was asking you to do before moving on to another. Completing objectives usually boiled down to smashing buttons and rocking the analog stick. If your hands weren’t sore and aching after 15 minutes, you were doing it wrong.
The first Mario Party proved wildly successful, something that wasn’t surprising if you considered its formula: a party game aimed at kids and families, released on an affordable and durable hardware platform that was perfect for environments where more than two players wanted to get in on the fun. Perhaps its most enduring legacy is that it launched the Mario Party series, which is still going strong on Nintendo Switch today.
Street Fighter II gave arcades a second wind in 1991. By 1998, they were back on their deathbeds: Ports of coin-op games on consoles were close enough to the source material to be considered good enough, and lots of genres such as real-time strategy and RPGs were too involved to be suited for an environment where a few quarters bought you between 60 and 120 seconds of gameplay.
DDR was the Street Fighter II of 1998. Its hardware, comprised of giant dance pads you stomped on to match directions scrolling along the screen, wasn’t something people had in their living rooms, at least not for a little while. And even when home versions arrived, DDR was a performative arcade game. It attracted crowds the same way SFII and Mortal Kombat packed onlookers around cabinets in the early ‘90s, and it was a great way to work up a sweat if running laps wasn’t your style.
Perhaps most importantly, DDR fell into the same category of games such as Solitaire and Candy Crush that appealed to everyone, not just players who prided themselves on memorizing frame data for every character in their fighting game of choice.
In a year full of classic titles, perhaps no game released in 1998 stands taller than The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. On the surface, it’s the three-dimensional manifestation of a formula that some argue Nintendo perfected in 1992’s A Link to the Past. Delve deeper, and you’ll find the first rendition of Hyrule that felt like a living, breathing world.
Nintendo made great strides in establishing conventions for 3D movement and interaction with 1996’s Super Mario 64. Ocarina of Time builds on that foundation by establishing systems still in use in 3D games today. Z-targeting gave developers a way to let players target their attacks. Tapping Z also snapped the camera behind Link’s shoulders, allowing players to quickly and easily focus on terrain, obstacles, and other actors in front of them.
All of those features blend with a Hyrule that feels lived in, rather than video game fields teeming with targets and enemies. Every time the sun sets over Hyrule field, candlelight blooms in windows, the drawbridge to Hyrule Castle raises, and townsfolk turn in for the day. In the morning, the drawbridge descends, candles are snuffed out, and the activities available to players changes. These and other manifestations conveyed a passage of time that immersed players in a setting and story.
Combined with one of gaming’s most memorable soundtracks, exquisite dungeon design, and exhilarating boss battles, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time stands as one of gaming’s finest achievements.
And on the fifth day of June 1989, Peter Molyneux said, “Let there be god games.” Populous is considered by many to be the first such game. You, as a god, build up your land over hundreds of levels and channel your godly abilities to advance your people from stage to stage. There are enemies, of course, and your people must wipe them out, of course, but Populous is memorable more for the little details that made god games one of the most popular genres on the PC in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
You lower and raise land for your followers to build on, gradually build an army to prepare for the final battle, and otherwise utilize the game’s simple interface to do a variety of tasks. Some small, some more complex, all very relaxing and absorbing, the precise template Populous set for future strategy games of its kind.
Robotron 64—a Nintendo 64 exclusive, if the title didn’t give it away—was one of many examples of developers attempting to usher a 2D hit (in this case, the coin-op, twin-stick shooter Robotron 2084 that took arcades by storm in the ‘80s) into three dimensions. The idea made sense on paper: A multi-direction shooter is fun in 2D, so it should be even better in 3D. Robotron 64 was the result, and while it didn’t make the same splash compared to 2084, it was challenging in a fun and accessible way. There are dozens upon dozens of stages, giving you plenty of time to optimize strategy and maneuverability.
What Robotron 64 is perhaps most remembered for, however, is the option for one player to use two controllers. It evoked Robotron 2084’s dual-stick control scheme and, thanks to the layers of sensitivity build into the N64 controller’s analog stick, made the game even more fun to play, and retroactively made it a point of reference for dual-stick shooters like Geometry Wars and others that followed.
WWF No Mercy and WWF WrestleMania 2000 were arguably the most popular wrestling games of the 1990s, WWF War Zone hit at the zeitgeist of WWF’s “Attitude Era,” still heralded as one of the most creative and financially successful eras in pro wrestling. On top of that, it was one of the best all-in-one wrestling games from that period.
The roster of 18 wrestlers seems shallow in a year when WWE 2K23 packed in literally hundreds, but for the time it was a smorgasbord of personalities and move sets. The entrances were more cinematic thanks to the disc-based format of platforms such as the PlayStation In terms of gameplay, match types range from traditional one-on-one bouts to gimmicks such as count outs, submissions, and Decree of Vince McMahon, a contest where the player with the most health remaining when the timer expires is named the winner. Within those matches, you can add more gimmick layers such as cage matches, hardcore rules, battle royals, and the popular Royal Rumble.
Every wrestling fan who wore NWO t-shirts and made crotch chops in class had to have WWF War Zone when it dropped in 1998. It was as complete a wrestling package as you could find.
You could probably count on one hand the number of great licensed games in the 1980s and ‘90s. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a light-gun shooter known colloquially as T2: The Arcade Game, was one of them. There were T2 games for home consoles that predated Midway’s light gun shooter, but they were mediocre platformers with controls and mission objectives so frustrating they made you want to abandon John Conner rather than save him. The arcade T2 kept its premise simple: You’re a terminator, you have a big plastic gun, and you need to shoot all the other Terminators or… bad things will happen. Probably. Just shoot things.
T2: The Arcade Game came to home consoles, and while you could play it with a controller, it was built for light guns, a peripheral not all players had. That, combined with its simple yet addictive gameplay, cemented it as one of the best coin-op games of all time, and a compelling reason to frequent arcades.
Before Gordon Freeman’s fateful commute to Black Mesa, first-person shooters were known as “Doom clones,” shooting galleries were players rarely had to think about anything beyond shooting anything that moved. Valve’s debut title was nothing short of a paradigm shift that changed FPS titles by capitalizing on scripted events and grounded level design to create one of the most memorable spaces in video games.
Half-Life’s story takes a good 15 to 20 minutes to ramp up. That in itself was a major departure from the norm: Most FPS titles followed Doom’s lead by throwing enemies at you starting at the first or second screen. Half-Life’s calm before the storm made Xen’s invasion of Black Mesa, and the player’s role in it, a tension-filled spectacle. Scripted events (security guards being pulled into ducts by zombies, scientists fooling around with advanced weaponry and blasting holes in walls) added a sense of life to levels. Black Mesa’s labs and corridors weren’t a set of “maps” or “levels”; they were extensions of a place that felt real.
The game’s final act transports Gordon to Xen. Even though the alien planet isn’t nearly as memorable as the Black Mesa facility, the game’s campaign full of creative weapons, devious enemy AI, and exploration-driven gameplay more than makes up for it. Valve’s original holds up, but you should try Black Mesa, the 2020 remake, for an even more refined experience.
Resident Evil 2 could have gone down as one of Capcom’s biggest stumbles. The original game on the game was canceled during development, and what players have seen of that version looked half-baked (although, to be fair, development was far from finished). The version we got in 1998 was worth the longer-than-expected wait.
Featuring two characters multiplied by two campaigns per character and a “zapping” system that forced you to choose between taking certain items or leaving them for the other character, Resident Evil 2 boasts one of the biggest leaps from original to sequel. Stronger visual fidelity and sound design fostered a much more powerful atmosphere. Raccoon City’s police station was a maze of creepy corridors and puzzle boxes, and the solutions to some of those puzzled varied depending on whether you were playing Claire or Leon’s “A” or “B” campaign.
Resident Evil 2 was more than a great sequel to Resident Evil. It demonstrated how developers could harness CD-based media to tell compelling stories that changed in subtle and bigger ways depending on player actions.
Most players believed the Game Boy had run out of gas in 1998. Then Pikachu came along. While Pokemon had made waves in the east, its release in the west breathed new life into Nintendo’s black-and-green handheld. The game’s availability in two versions played a key part in Pokemon fever sweeping the globe. While there was plenty of overlap in the pocket monsters you could catch in Pokemon Red or Blue, the exclusivity of some critters encouraged players to dig around in the attic for their old Game Boy transfer cables and meet up with friends and strangers alike for trades.
Besides trading, Pokemon presented a fun twist on party- and turn-based JRPGs. Instead of playing a character in a party, you commanded groups of Pokemon in battle, using the inherent paper-rock-scissors system to decide which of your crew should go into battle and earn experience points to evolve into tougher, stronger types. Some players loved building up their squads to defeat the gym masters in regions of the world, while others sunk hundreds of hours in the game’s addictive collection systems. Looking back 25 years, it’s easy to see why Pokemon Red and Blue kicked off a craze that has yet to lose steam.
Before Metal Gear Solid hit PlayStation in 1998, most western players familiar with the franchise knew it as a short-lived pair of NES games rife with typos and often bewildering stealth mechanics. Metal Gear was much more popular in Japan, where director Hideo Kojima and his team designed absorbing top-down stealth games for Japanese PCs. The arrival of Metal Gear Solid transformed it into a cinematic tour de force in an era when “cinematic” was still associated (quite negatively) with grainy and poorly acted FMV-based CD-ROM games.
More than its “solid” stealth-focused gameplay, Metal Gear Solid is remembered for telling an engrossing story that expertly balanced fourth-wall-breaking absurdity and mature themes rooted in war, death, honor, and loyalty. Game systems such as Psycho Mantis, MGS’s most memorable boss character, “reading your mind” by alluding to save data on your memory card—and requiring you to reconnect your controller to player two’s port to be defeated—pulled players further into Kojima’s world of clock-and-dagger espionage.
Metal Gear Solid remains a landmark title that revealed the possibilities of cinematic storytelling in video games to millions of players, developers, and pundits.
Although the original Unreal is known today more as the unveiling of Epic’s prolific engine of the same name, the original co-designed by Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski was a major influence on single-player stories and multiplayer modes. Months ahead of Half-Life, Unreal took players on a journey through locations that felt real, rather than abstract maps littered with power-ups and monsters. The alternate-fire mechanic made each weapon feel like two for the price of one. Some of those weapons introduced fun spins on archetypes, such as the Flak Cannon’s shotgun-like burst of pellets combined with grenades that didn’t pack as much punch as a rocket launcher but were still effective (and less dangerous to the wielder) in close quarters.
On the multiplayer side, Epic hired Steven Polge, architect of the Reaper Bot mod for Quake, to program AI opponents. Players could challenge a mix of bots and human players on local networks or online, and the availability of bots even in circumstances such as poor or no Internet connections gave everyone an opportunity to learn map layouts as well as surprisingly competitive matches against machines. Unreal Tournament was born from Unreal’s experiments, and while the latter is the more popular, the original Unreal is rightfully remembered for immersive settings and well-designed deathmatch maps.
Reinforcing the late ‘90s as a banner year for the Final Fantasy franchise, the RPG genre as a whole, and Sony’s landmark debut console, Final Fantasy Tactics was the brainchild of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and designed by Ogre Battle creator Yasumi Matsuno. Tactics combines turn-based tactical combat with memorable characters and a gripping narrative. Battles unfold on 3D, isometric grids, and your characters’ attributes determine the actions available to them. Those chess-like battles are accessible to veterans and newcomers alike, and the story emphasizes character development, something players had come to expect from Final Fantasy games, especially following 1997’s groundbreaking FF7.
WarCraft and WarCraft II established Blizzard Entertainment as a competitor in the RTS space, either the best or second best compared to Dune II and Command & Conquer creator Westwood. There was no small amount of pressure around its follow-up. Initially, Blizzard viewed StarCraft as a slam dunk: A strategy title built it on WarCraft II's tech and given a sci-fi coat of paint. That changed when Blizzard and Westwood found themselves in competition not only with each other, but with everyone. Retail shelves were as packed with RTS titles in 1996 as they had been with first-person shooters following id Software's Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Blizzard's developers realized they needed to do more to stand out than simply release another RTS with "Craft" in the title. Rather than push what the press pejoratively referred to as "Orcs in space" out the door, they went back to the drawing board and created one of the finest RTS games ever designed. Where the Orc and Human factions of the WarCraft games were mostly synchronous (each side had similar units in terms of damage and movement, such as ax throwers for Orcs and archers for humans), StarCraft's Terran, Protoss, and Zerg were wildly diverse. The Protoss beamed in rather than trained units, and their structures required pylons to operate. Similarly, the Zerg's worker units evolved into buildings, and players had to construct those buildings on a slimy surface called the Creep, while Terran buildings could be placed anywhere, making them the most familiar to anyone with experience in WarCraft II.
Beyond robust asynchronous game mechanics, StarCraft offered a compelling story more ambitious than anything Blizzard had attempted. Its multiplayer grew so popular, and South Korean players so legendary for their prowess, that StarCraft was the first RTS to be crowned a competitive esport. StarCraft II's trilogy of releases were popular, but the original StarCraft--especially when coupled with its critically acclaimed Brood War expansion that added new units and story missions--was a phenomenon.
Before Rainbow Six, the team that formed the backbone of developer Red Storm Entertainment worked with Tom Clancy on other games such as SSN, a submarine sim. And when I say "worked with," I mean the devs made a game and Tom Clancy wrote a novel based on the premise. When the devs pitched a story centered on hostage rescue teams, Clancy agreed to lend them his name again.
Red Storm's goal in designing Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six was to create a tactical shooter rather than a run-and-gun twitch fest like Doom and Quake. You choose your squad and equipment before each mission, study points of ingress, formulate a strategy, and move out. Unlike FPS heroes such as Duke Nukem and Master Chief, your operatives are not bullet sponges. One bullet, maybe two, and they're dead.
Players who enjoyed the idea of FPS games but preferred more cerebral games embraced Rainbow Six as a shooter that catered to them. The Rainbow Six franchise has spun off in several directions since the original, but the original set a template that those spinoffs still (mostly) follow today.
In the 1990s, many landmark first-person shooters were sequels that took what worked in a previous game and made more of it. Iguana Entertainment's Turok 2: Seeds of Evil is one such, all the more remarkable because it was exclusive for the Nintendo 64 during an era when the PC hosted the biggest and best FPS titles. Turok 2's levels are more complex and brimming with more personality, and installing the N64's Expansion Pack bumps the resolution to 640x480, making them even prettier. Today and then, critics point out the heavy fog necessary to prevent the engine from drawing too many polygons at once. However, the fog had aesthetic value for the way it added dread to environments: You're picking your way forward, never certain when a dinosaur (or more than one) will come charging out of the mist.
Beyond graphics, Turok 2 received widespread acclaim for its gameplays systems. Single-player maps are complex puzzle boxes that must be explored thoroughly to progress, and they're filled with more enemy types than the first game, giving you ample reason to experiment with Turok's arsenal. That arsenal often steals the show: You've got staples such as the shotgun, but weapons such as the Cerebral Bore, which fires a projectile that drills into a target's skull, were as effective as they were creative, imbuing the game with even more personality. Those weapons are as effective and fun to use in multiplayer modes against friends.
GoldenEye 007 is often acknowledged as the best FPS on Nintendo 64, but many consider Turok 2 just as legendary, if not more. It's got everything GoldenEye has (extensive arsenal, fun and intricate level design, and robust multiplayer), plus dinosaurs. Few games tick that many boxes.
On-rails shooters, also known as lightgun games for the plastic peripherals with which they're commonly played, are a curious sub-genre of the FPS. Exploration is nominally a factor, focusing instead on blasting hordes of enemies as fast as possible. Sega's The House of the Dead took that formula and slapped a Resident Evil, B-horror-movie style onto it. Environments are memorable, as are the copious jump scares baked into the on-rails progression, but what makes House of the Dead so memorable is its campy writing and voice acting. Capcom wanted players to scare players, but Sega, knowing House of the Dead would be most popular in noisy arcades, opted for cheesy, laugh-out-loud fun over eerie atmosphere.
The House of the Dead occupies a special place in the hearts of shooter fans and remains a blast to revisit.
A decade before Jonathan Blow’s Braid came to Xbox Live Arcade, Oddworld Inhabitants sought to design 2D platformers that combined fun gameplay with a message. Directed by Lorne Lanning, Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee casts players as Abe, a slave at a meat processing factory who rebels when he discovers he and the other slaves will be slaughtered to create a new product that will boost company profits. Abe wants to escape, but he doesn’t want to go alone: Your goal is to guide Abe through the trap-riddled factory and liberate as many slaves as you can.
Abe’s repertoire goes beyond the usual run-and-jump fare. He can tiptoe around enemies to avoid alerting them, throw objects to defeat enemies and destroy obstacles, and control some creatures to perform tasks. Some enemies cannot see in dark areas and will hunt you by sound. When Abe finds a slave, he can issue commands such as follow, stay behind, and activate certain mechanisms. Abe’s Oddysee was praised for its beautiful yet somber visual direction, creative gameplay mechanics, and themes. Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus, the sequel released one year after the original, leaned into those strengths.
The freed slaves, a race called Mudokon to which Abe belongs, have emotional concerns in Abe’s Exoddus that determine how they’ll respond to you when you instruct them to perform a task. These states can product shocking results, such as depressed Mudokon committing suicide if they’re not comforted by Abe. You can console angry and depressed characters using GameSpeak, a series of commands that allows Abe to communicate with his people.
Abe’s Oddysee and Exoddus became staple platformers on Sony’s first PlayStation console. Their gameplay and messages still resonate with players 25+ years later.
The mid- to late-1990s were ripe with 3D platformers. Super Mario 64 was and still is considered one of the best, and a tough act to follow for any studio except Rare, arguably Nintendo’s best collaborative partner in the ‘90s. Where Super Mario 64 gives players control of Mario, Banjo-Kazooie hands over two protagonists: Banjo, a bear introduced in Rare’s 1997 kart racer Diddy Kong Racing, and his bird friend Kazooie.
Each character has abilities you have to use to navigate Banjo-Kazooie’s three-dimensional worlds. Kazooie can swoop up slopes too steep and high for his bipedal friend, while Banjo performs most of the platform-centric tasks you’d expect from the genre such as running and jumping. There are over a dozen abilities to unlock as you progress, adding layers to the gameplay and keeping you entertained and curious about what might come next.
Today, Banjo-Kazooie is famously and infamously known for its staggering amount of collectibles—over 1,000 total, all of which are needed to view the game’s best ending. Fortunately, rounding up these tchotchkes is more fun than tedious; players can tackle worlds in any order, and the drip feed of unlockable abilities gives them reason to return to old worlds and look forward to new areas.
Although 3D platformers fell out of vogue relatively quickly, Banjo-Kazooie remains one of the best in the genre.
Sony PlayStation hosted a bountiful harvest of roleplaying games. Squaresoft (now Square Enix) was firing on all cylinders, producing some of the most memorable adventures from Final Fantasy VII through IX and Xenogears, a beloved RPG in an era of beloved RPGs. Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga, a designer and artist at Square, respectively, as well as husband and wife, pitched Xenogears as a proposal for Final Fantasy VII. Square’s higher-ups saw potential for another hit franchise, and gave Takahashi and Saga permission to assemble a team to create it.
Xenogears features a combination of staple RPG mechanics such as Square’s Active Battle System popularized by Chrono Trigger, and a combination of giant mechs called gears. Battling in gears replaces certain stats with mech-specific attributes, such as Action Points in hand-to-hand combat changing to fuel for your mech. The combination of martial arts and giant robots added multiple layers to every battle, keeping fans of the genre experimenting with new ways to defeat foes.
Both a critical and commercial hit, Xenogears emerged as one of Square’s most popular titles during a time when the RPG developer turned out blockbuster after blockbuster. Many critics bestowed upon it their coveted Game of the Year honor, making a sequel inevitable. Despite dated graphics—a product of 3D tech developing rapidly over the 1990s—Xenogears’ plethora of gameplay options and engaging characters and story make it worth playing for those who missed out in 1998.
Computer RPGs (CRPGs) were considered dead and buried for most of the 1990s. Compared to shiny new genres like the first-person shooter, the CRPG’s graphics were outmoded and their gameplay was slow and stodgy. Blizzard North’s Diablo livened things up, but was a hack-and-slash fest with little thought given to story and character development. BioWare, a new studio shepherded by game publishing veterans within Interplay’s Black Isle RPG division, changed that with Baldur’s Gate.
If Diablo could be considered one side of the CRPG coin—fast, frenetic, and delightfully mindless—Baldur’s Gate is the other: tactical, rich in story, and driven as much by your choice of dialogue as by your ability to blast monsters with spells or brain them with weapons. Baldur’s Gate made excellent use of the Dungeons & Dragons license by presenting a familiar set of rules for tabletop afficionados, yet still accessible to newcomers who had never laid hands on a 20-sided die. Party members could specialize in one type of action (healing, melee combat, spells) or, in some cases, dabble in a little of this and a little of that. Combat was “real-time with pause,” meaning you were able to pause the action, assign commands, and then unpause to watch everything play out, and yet another way the game made new players feel welcome. BioWare carried the system into other RPGs such as 2009’s Dragon Age.
Baldur’s Gate story unfolded over eight chapters and included features such as a reputation system that tracked your moral choices. That, coupled with systems such as the passage of time and having to rest to recover after a full day of travel or combat, lent a verisimilitude absent in more casual CRPGs such as Diablo.
Although pundits estimated low sales, Baldur’s Gate sold through its initial printing of 50,000 copies in record time. Supply shortages forced manufacturers and retailers to scramble. Critics heaped praise upon it, with PC Gamer saying it set “new standards” for every RPG that followed. The Infinity Engine technology became a staple for follow-ups such as the inevitable Baldur’s Gate II and Icewind Dale, and served as the inspiration for Pillars of Eternity, a series of CRPGs by Obsidian Entertainment. (Read about the making of Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Pillars of Eternity, and more in Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of CRPGs, a long read available for free on Shacknews and in paperback and digital formats.)
Created by long-time Sony collaborator (and, as of 2019, Sony-owned) Insomniac Games, Spyro the Dragon’s sprawling exploration, platforming, and combat gave the PlayStation an additional mascot to take on the likes of Mario and Sonic. The game’s hub-style method of organizing worlds was become a growing standard, but each world’s open-ended levels encouraged players to explore to their heart’s content. Finding every hidden collectible opened up a secret world to continue the adventure.
Whereas Mario and Sonic were confined to the ground, at least without the aid of power-ups, Spyro’s wings let players fly and swoop over enemies and terrain. The character’s fluid movement was easy to pick up and a joy to control. It also played to each world’s open-ended design: Players could, for instance, glide the entire span of a level without touching the ground, further distinguishing Spy from more linear 3D platformers. A stirring score composed by former The Police drummer Stewart Copeland added to the impression of playing rather than merely watching an animated film by Disney or Pixar.
Offering gameplay deep enough to appeal to older games and a family-friendly aesthetic that captured the imaginations of children, Spyro the Dragon became one of PlayStation’s must-have titles, especially for fans of competing 3D platformers such as Super Mario 64, Tomb Raider, and Banjo-Kazooie.
Crafted by the developer that wrought System Shock and System Shock 2, Thief: The Dark Project continued Looking Glass Studios’ experiments in “immersive sims,” a genre agnostic design that leans into player choice through creative use of game systems. Where the System Shock games were set in a dystopian future, Thief took place in a medieval setting where players had to favor stealth over action.
Thief’s first-person perspective was an intentional choice: Looking Glass wanted to challenge the idea popularized by FPS titles that first-person games must hinge on action instead of careful planning and sneakiness. As with the studio’s previous immersive sims, the goal of Thief was to provide players with abilities that encouraged them to devise their own solutions to problems. For instance, arrows with wet tips could be used to douse torches and clean bloodstains, while rope arrows let players climb to higher vantage points.
Instead of arming players with loads of deadly weapons, Looking Glass designers gave them tools to evade rather than confront enemies, such as by sticking to shadows instead of running pell-mell through brightly lit regions. In fact, Thief was the first game to feature light and dark as part of a stealth-focused design. The game’s audio landscape enhanced the atmosphere. Players could listen in on conversations to learn intel, stick to grass to dampen their movement, and determine how close or far enemies were from their location based on the loudness or softness of their footsteps.
Looking Glass’s dark fantasy masterpiece was met with widespread acclaim. Critics from Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer recommended it as a deep and engaging alternative to the litany of Doom clones on retail shelves. Other editors pointed to the considerable challenge of bypassing fights rather than charging toward them as a welcome change of pace from the shooting gallery style of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D.
One of the late 90s countless memorable gaming offerings was a little point-and-click franchise called Pajama Sam. Kicking off with 1996's Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside, the series offered a unique, challenging, and educational take on the genre that made it a mainstay in so many homes and libraries of the era. Not only did the first Pajama Sam game help kids confront their fears of the dark, it also taught them about history, math, and other important subjects.
With the second Pajama Sam game, Humongous Entertainment tackled another common fear among children: thunder and lightning. Pajama Sam 2: Thunder and Lightning Aren't so Frightening was released in 1998 and took the caped protagonist to the skies, where he visited World Wide Weather, the factory where thunder and lightning are produced.
Just like its predecessor, Pajama Sam 2 helped children face their fears by pulling back the curtain and showing them that there was nothing inherently dangerous or evil about the things that kept them up at night. It once again doubled as an education tool, this time with a focus on cloud formations, storms, and other types of extreme weather.
Long before Barbie was the star of the year's highest-grossing film, she led multiple video game adaptations, wearing countless hats and taking on just about any profession you can imagine. This included 1998's Detective Barbie: Mystery of the Carnival Caper, in which the titular doll had to discover what happened to Ken after he vanished at a carnival.
As the 14th game in the Barbie series, Mystery of the Carnival Caper was the first to not depict Barbie as a model, hair stylist, fashion designer, or another stereotypical job for women at the time. It was one of the first pieces of Barbie media that showed the character, and the young girls who looked up to her, could do and be anything they wanted, regardless of any gender norms typically enforced in society.
After Capcom pit the rosters of Marvel's X-Men and its own Street Fighter Alpha series against one another, the publisher's next big step would be to go even further. While popular mainstays like Ryu and Wolverine would remain playable, Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes would feature popular characters from across Capcom and Marvel Comics.
What sets Clash of Super Heroes apart from other entries in the popular Vs. series is its usage of a Special Partner assist selected at random on the character select screen. This meant that players would not only have to master their own characters, but also use their third partner's assists effectively. It also allowed Capcom to squeeze in some faces who couldn't quite make the main roster cut at the time like Michelle Heart from Legendary Wings and Thor.
It's also remembered for the Variable Cross double team attack where both members of a player's team could be controlled simultaneously. It was a novel idea at the time and further pushed the boundaries of what the Vs. formula could achieve. Many still hold this first Marvel vs. Capcom game highly. For some, it's the formula, for others it's the peak of the series' comic book art style, and still for others it's the final battle against Onslaught that would munch thousands of quarters at arcades around the world. While the series would, astonishingly, get even better, Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes is marvelous in its own right.
If WCW vs. nWo: World Tour helped lay the foundation for pro wrestling video games in the late 90s, WCW/nWo Revenge took a big step towards perfecting it. With the hunger for more of everything that World Tour provided, the teams at THQ and Asmik Ace Entertainment delivered with a more fleshed-out presentation, dozens more wrestlers, new match types, and an improved grappling system.
While the formula laid out by the WCW/nWo games would arguably go on to greater heights with the eventual WWF No Mercy, many still hold Revenge up as the series' peak. It has become a time capsule into what pro wrestling was in the late 90s, featuring some of WCW's most recognizable PPV layouts and arenas. Whether you led the WCW charge as Goldberg, took over with the nWo as "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan, or sat in your own little corner as Raven with his Flock, Revenge still holds up as one of the best wrestling games ever made.
With so many entries in the Tekken series, it's hard to point to one as a key entry in the franchise, but Tekken 3 was most certainly that for the PS1 era. The original Tekken and Tekken 2 were great, but Tekken 3 was the one every PlayStation owner and fighting game fan had to have. It was also one of the most desirable arcade games of its time.
Tekken 3 was among the games that redefined our expectations of 3D fighting games. Where similar games like Battle Arena Toshinden aged poorly due to their sluggish performance, Tekken 3 was fast-paced and smooth. We were running circles around each other, memorizing huge move lists, and trying not to get hit by health bar-destroying death punches. More than that, this game featured a huge roster with plenty of characters to unlock. It was always interesting in the arcades to see if someone had done the legwork to crack all the characters or if there were a few you'd have to collect yourself.
And many of Tekken's most integral characters got their start here. Jin Kazama's first appearance was in Tekken 3, as was that of Bryan Fury, Eddie Gordo, Ling Xiaoyu, and Hwaorang - characters that many fans now consider staples of the series. All of these things and more made Tekken 3 an easy PS1 Greatest Hits game, a best-selling arcade game, and a much-welcome entry to the 2023 class of the Shacknews Hall of Fame.
It’s a little wild to think about, but up until 1998, console players had not had a proper Star Wars cockpit experience. PC had the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games, and even arcades had Atari’s Star Wars. However, games like Super Star Wars only featured brief air and space combat segments, and they were arguably not what you went to those games for. Flash forward to the Nintendo 64 era where Factor 5 began work with LucasArts to properly adapt the exhilaration of piloting X-Wings, A-Wings, and more through a variety of missions set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.
Rogue Squadron was something incredible. It was a bit arcade-like, allowing you to have a third person view of the action, but you were still flying beautiful-looking Rebel ships as Luke Skywalker in missions against the Empire. There was so much to do here, whether you were doing dog fights against TIE Fighters and Interceptors in the X- or A-Wing, making bombing runs with the Y-Wing, snaring AT-ATs with tow cables in the Snowspeeder, or, in the last few missions, piloting the mighty and arguably overpowered V-Wing designed specifically for this game.
There were also tons of unlocks to be had in Rogue Squadron, since each mission had Bronze, Silver, and Gold medal challenges. It also had a code system. If you could ace each mission or you were in the know about some cheat codes, you could unlock everything from the playable Millenium Falcon and TIE Interceptor to races through Beggar’s Canyon and the impeccable Trench Run through the Death Star.
Rogue Squadron was so packed full of goodies that Factor 5 made an appeal to Nintendo to release its then-newly developed Expansion Pak for the N64. Thankfully, Nintendo agreed and it allowed Rogue Squadron to be played in a better resolution with better performance. This was about as packed as a Star Wars N64 game about flying sorties against the Empire could be, and that’s more than enough to be in our Shacknews Hall of Fame.
There are no lack of simple ideas that have turned into giant money-makers or widespread success stories, especially among mobile gaming. However, perhaps one of the earliest examples of such an idea turning into an iconic trend was that of Nokia’s version of the Snake game in 1998.
Back in those days, mobile gaming was still in its very early stages, but the concept of Snake wasn’t entirely new. This game saw its first notable iterations with the 1976 title Blockade from Gremlin Industries. Players navigated a line around a square space, picking up dots that not only added to your score, but made the line longer. The more your line grew, the more you’d have to navigate around yourself to get to the score dots. Running into the walls or your own line meant game over.
This concept was applied to numerous games over the course of the next decade, including the Light Cycle minigame in 1982’s Tron arcade cabinet. However, it was in 1997 that Nokia Design Engineer Taneli Armanto was tasked with programming entertainment for the upcoming Nokia 6110 mobile phone. When the phone came out in 1998, Snake became a near-instant hit for its addicting gameplay loop and score-chasing delight.
From there on, Snake and games like it were on the map. It was programmed into nearly every Nokia mobile phone that came after and Snake-like games became popular with copycats coming out at a dime a dozen on various other platforms, both mobile and otherwise. A version of the game was even put on Nokia’s 3310 phone that came out in 2017, and also came packed into the 2017 builds of Facebook Messenger.
If you’ve picked up a cellular phone at any point in the last three decades, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Snake in some form or another. It was an early example of a simple idea that caught fire and became a must-have for a lot of commercial users. While it’s a little harder to say that Snake was a killer app selling mobile phones or anything like that, it’s undeniable just how many hours the world has spend on trying to get just one more score dot and grow the already immense line just a little longer without running into itself.
There are no lack of fighting games that have tried to achieve the success of franchises like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter throughout history. However, many of them would be accused of being too copycat, or simply broken. Making a good and balanced fighting game is hard after all. However, in 1998, Arc System Works lead designer Daisuke Ishiwatari made a pass at it. His twist: An anime-style weapon fighter inspired almost entirely by the greatest hits of the heavy metal he was so fond of. It was Guilty Gear: The Missing Link.
It was pretty clear just how much Ishiwatari and the team at Arc System Works poured their musical tastes into Guilty Gear. Sol Badguy was an avid lover of Queen, Ky’s Ride the Lightning super is based off the Metallica song of the same name, and Chipp Zanuff was very much designed to look just like Billy Idol in his first appearance, just to name a few. However, the game was far more than just music references.
Trading out the slow and methodical nature of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, Guilty Gear was all about speed. This was a combo-heavy slugfest in which having fast reflexes was as important as hitting your attacks. It was also a test bed for a lot of ideas that would see refinement in later entries, such as an instant kill move that any character could use at any time to end the match if successfully hit. They weren’t all zingers, but this game was foundational in giving players an extremely out-of-the-ordinary offering in the fighting game genre, all accentuated by a heavy metal-inspired soundtrack that would become just as much of the identity of the series as its gameplay.
Going back to Guilty Gear: The Missing Link now is like seeing the prototype to future masterpieces. Many years later, entries like Guilty Gear Xrd and Guilty Gear Strive are pushing the boundaries of fighting game design just as much as Street Fighter itself, and Arc System Works is even helping to publish other fighting games nowadays. It arguably couldn’t have happened if Guilty Gear didn’t strike the fires of something incredible in its initial attempts.
Out of all of the mascot-centric side-scrolling platforms that have ever come out, few would probably call Bonk’s Adventure to mind first, but we’d challenge that you’re missing out if you’ve never given one of these games a go. Bonk is a giant-headed caveboy with a temper to match his destructive noggin, and under the publishing of Hudson Soft and NEC Home Electronics, it would go on to have a wealth of entries, each generally zanier than the last.
Bonk’s Adventure first came out in 1989 in Japan and 1990 in North America, originally launching on the PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16. In fact, Kobuta Aoki originally designed Bonk to be a mascot of the PC Engine. His name in Japan is PC Genjin and he would appear in the Gekkan PC-Engine magazine in Japan to promote the console. In North America, we didn’t quite have the deep-dive lore of the console and the character’s funny backstory in alignment with it, so we just knew him as Bonk.
That said, Bonk is a fitting name because this little caveboy sure did a lot of it in each of his games. Generally speaking, Bonk is set in prehistoric times and has the player navigating levels full of dinosaurs, volcanoes, and other dangers, mostly by bashing the bejeezus out of them with Bonk’s bald head. He could also get meat as a power-up to get larger, do different attacks, and even become temporarily invulnerable. Future games in the series got even more ridiculous by giving Bonk power-ups like the ability to blow fire and use his tongue to strike enemies or become a Godzilla-like monster.
Bonk wouldn’t be confined to the prehistoric either. Throughout the series, the funny little caveboy would jump time to bring his hilarious brand of destruction to big cities, downtown districts, and more weird levels as he chased after his archnemesis King Drool and the dastardly dino’s captive, Princess Za.
Bonk remained a staple of the Hudson Soft lineup up until the company was acquired by Konami in 2012, but Bonk still had plenty of appearances in places like the Nintendo DS via the Virtual Console. There’s always the chance we could see more Bonk, but even if it’s not a franchise with the star power of Mario or Sonic, Bonk’s destructive dome will always have a special place in our hearts for the sheer silliness the character’s platformers brought to the table.
In the early 1990s, Konami lost out on quite the opportunity. A team of developers at the company wanted to create a new and exciting side-scrolling arcade shooter, but they couldn’t get the greenlight under Konami’s management at the time. Convinced they had a good idea on their hands, they left Konami to form a new studio known as Treasure and continue development of the project. That project would eventually become Gunstar Heroes, an incredible run-and-gun action platformer with a vibrant and comical art style that put Treasure on the map.
When Treasure couldn’t find any support for Gunstar Heroes at Konami, they took the project to Sega, who also initially refused the pitch. Treasure wanted to put Gunstar Heroes on the Genesis because they felt the console packed the power they needed to make the game as vibrant and action-packed as they wanted. Fortunately, they greased the wheels with Sega by committing to the development of McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure. That got Treasure’s foot in the door, and by 1993, it was able to release Gunstar Heroes on the Sega Genesis.
The game really was like nothing else at the time. One of Gunstar Heroes key elements was that you could take any of the four main weapons and combine two of them to get unique effects such as a machine gun that chased foes or a rapid-fire laser that pierced multiple targets. It also let you take on stages in the order you wanted, much like Mega Man. Between fun and exciting enemies and bosses, the mixed weapon system, and two-player options, Gunstar came about as close to a quality arcade shooter as we got back then.
Gunstar Heroes would be formative for Treasure as well. After that initial success, the company would go on to become known for schmups, producing incredible titles such as Ikaruga, Sin & Punishment, and Radiant Silvergun. The company hasn’t done much since 2014, but with Gunstar Heroes leading what was an impeccable lineup for the company across decades, the studio certainly made its mark.
