Some videogames knock politely; Doom kicks the door off its hinges, stomps in with a shotgun the size of a Buick, and redecorates the foyer in EGA crimson. Is id Software’s 1993 opus bizarre or classical? (Both: picture a Bach fugue scored for chainsaw and MIDI bass.) Underrated or overrated? Ask the “it’s just Wolfenstein in space” […]

Is DinoPark Tycoon an eccentric relic or a straight-laced classic? (Trick question: it’s a lemonade-stand spreadsheet wearing an inflatable T-rex suit.) Underrated or overrated? If you grew up on RollerCoaster Tycoon, it looks downright prehistoric; but for a generation of U.S. school-lab kids who met compound interest courtesy of a smirking cartoon hadrosaur, it’s basically the Rosetta Stone

Right before Doom detonated the rules of first-person carnage, another experiment slipped onto shelves and asked players to swap claws for cunning. ShadowCaster for DOS (October 1993) doesn’t give you a shotgun; it hands you a living wrist crystal and a bloodline of extradimensional forms, then dares you to survive labyrinthine dungeons where identity is your only ammo. Classic

Imagine an Aliens-by-way-of-Gauntlet fever dream rendered in three-quarter isometric pixels and piped into your DOS tower in 1993 by a British studio named for a leather-jacket sub-label. That’s Shadoworlds: four power-suited explorers trudging through a derelict weapons complex where every corridor hums, every door stammers, and every ammo crate feels like your final lifeline. Bizarre or

Cast your memory back to the floppy-fringed winter of 1994. The Mac crowd had already been terraforming pixel valleys for weeks, but for DOS devotees February brought the real event: the first PC boxes of SimCity 2000, a sequel so supersized it made its 1989 predecessor feel like a cardboard model left out in the rain. Classic