For the rage: Gamespy's Top 20 PC Games of the 80s

[Falconeer]

http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/950/950214p1.html

And M.U.L.E. didn't get the top spot? Nonsense! 

20. Populous (1989)
Bullfrog designer Peter Molyneux's 1989 god game helped establish the genre for would-be deities.


19. Prince of Persia (1989)
Jordan Mechner's 1989 adventure melded exploration, puzzles and groundbreaking animation into a classic action game.


18. The Oregon Trail (1985)
Was it a game or a history class? It certainly taught a lot of us what dysentery was.


17. Earl Weaver Baseball (1987)
EA's classic brought deep simulation to arcade sports games.


16. The Seven Cities of Gold (1984)
Step into the role of Conquistador and establish your own legacy in the New World.


15. Archon (1983)
The classic strategy game for those who thought chess was too simple.


14. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981)
D&D style role-playing comes to the PC in one of the first great dungeon crawls.


13. Lode Runner (1983)
A simple action game foreshadowed the modding revolution with its built-in level editor.


12. King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988)
Step into the shoes of Princess Rosella as she attempts to save King Graham.


11. Pool of Radiance (1988)
SSI's Dungeons & Dragons-licensed tactical RPG kicked off the famous "Gold Box" series.


10. The Ancient Art of War (1984)
One of the first real-time strategy games offered depth years ahead of its time.


9. Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 (1982)
The original simulation kicked off a genre and helped establish gaming on the PC.


8. Maniac Mansion (1987)
This B-movie horror parody helped launch LucasArts' prolific run of adventure games.


7. Zork Trilogy (1981-83)
You are standing in an open field west of a white house. The most famous text adventure of all time waits inside.


6. Wasteland (1988)
A post-apocalyptic RPG where you struggle to survive following a nuclear holocaust? Who'd want to play that?


5. Elite (1984)
The gold standard of space trading simulations let us play among the stars. Or at least smuggle contraband.


4. Sid Meier's Pirates! (1987)
Pirates! let you find your fortune as a privateer on the Spanish Main without all the soggy boots.


3. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985)
In the fourth Ultima you weren't just slaying monsters... you were slaying bad habits.


2. M.U.L.E. (1983)
Dani Bunten's multiplayer turn-based strategy game was years ahead of its time.


1. SimCity (1989)
Will Wright's seminal city-planning sim changed strategy games forever.

[schild]

Edited your thread title.

[rattran]

Not nearly as rage inducing as I expected. Sure, I don't agree with the placement of some, but from Gamespy I expected 18 out of 20 to be WRONGWRONGWRONG, instead of just a few 'meh' games.

[Hawkbit]

Yeah, I was stuck with a TI994a so a lot of these I'm not as familiar with.  But Oregon Trail should be much higher and so should Maniac Mansion.  I remember playing that on my friend's C64.... good times. 

[Azazel]

Pretty reasonable list overall. My Amiga knew many of those.

[Bunk]

Could have been worse. On a personal level, I'd toss "Empire" in there, assuming I remember the name of the game correctly. I'd also switch 1 and 2 arround, being the M.U.L.E. advocate that I am.

[Mrbloodworth]

    Populous   

[Tebonas]

All in all not a bad list. I dearly loved some of those.

[HaemishM]

Sim City can go fuck itself. No way was it the best game of the '80's. It sure as shit wasn't better than Wasteland, Elite, or Ancient Art of War. I pissed away so much of my teen years on Ancient Art of War.

[Nebu]

Decent list to be sure, but I agree with Haem about Sim City. 

I think Star Raider should get a nod too, but it was an Atari computer only game.  So many hours of my youth wasted on those games.  SOOOooooo many!

[Salamok]

Not quite sure how they could miss Tetris.

[Mrbloodworth]

I was going to say Dune II, but that was 92.

[Hoth]

Thats a nice list.
I would include Star Flight because it was the game I spend most of my gamingtime in the 80's but maybe Elite represents the whole genre of "Space-exploration-trading".

[Nebu]

Two I forgot.

1) Hardball. 

2) Castle Wolfenstein.

[Stormwaltz]

No Starflight?

NERD RAGE.

[Khaldun]

Ah,yeah, Ancient Art of War. Sigh.

[Ingmar]

Wow, that list is a lot less objectionable than I expected. I would have Archon and Pool of Radiance a lot closer to the top of the list, personally, and I'd be tempted to include The Bard's Tale somewhere towards the bottom.

[Samwise]

I don't think I played a single one of those.  Possibly due to my only gaming machine during that decade being an Atari ST (which was never that popular in the US despite being technically superior to most of the other systems on the market), and most of my games being bargain bin purchases.

[Prospero]

Really? You didn't play Oregon Trail in school? I have it to thank for being good at math; in grade school we were allowed to hop on the computers if we finished our work early.

[Tebonas]

Thanks, Samwise. Now you reminded me that Sundog is missing from the list.

The game I would have made babies with back in the day if I had already been pubescent.

[Rasix]

Really? You didn't play Oregon Trail in school? I have it to thank for being good at math; in grade school we were allowed to hop on the computers if we finished our work early.

Yah, I took every opportunity available to play Oregon Trail and (I think) Otter Pond.  We had a touch typing/programming in BASIC class where I'd finish week long assignments on day 1. Oregon Trail marathons were awesome.

Other than that, I really never had a gaming PC early on.  I played Prince of Persia a few times and games like Frogger, but I really didn't get a gaming PC I could play on until my family got a Pentium 100.  I had my Nintendo systems.   I've maybe played console ports or some of these games on friend's systems, but not enough to really remember them.

[Ingmar]

Most of the games on the list that I played, I played on my trusty Commodore 64.

[Nebu]

Atari 800 then Commodore 64 then Apple IIc was the PC path I followed.  Then I experimented with Amiga before going PC.  I think I may have even owned a mac at some point. 

Played all of these games and loved most of them.  Overall, the list is solid.  The ranking I have issue with, but all personal taste. 

[Montague]

Many a night of my youth were spent with those games instead of chasing females.

Except Ultima IV. Played it for about an hour and I was like:



I was a very bloodthirsty little munchkin at that time.

[stray]

Most of the games on the list that I played, I played on my trusty Commodore 64.

Amiga here.

[WayAbvPar]

Many a night of my youth were spent with those games instead of chasing females.

Except Ultima IV. Played it for about an hour and I was like:



I was a very bloodthirsty little munchkin at that time.

Philistine. That may very well be my favorite game of all time.

I was surprised that there were several games on the list I never played. I would have liked to have seen something from Stuart Smith on there....I loved his stuff. Also- Racing Destruction Set gets bumped by Lode Runner? I never played Lode Runner, but RDS had an editor too. So fun making a track with huge jumps in moon gravity 

Glad to see Elite up there. In many ways EVE reminds me of Elite. At least the docking easier in EVE. My very favorite point in every single game of Elite was when I could afford a docking computer!

[Ingmar]

I would have liked to have seen something from Stuart Smith on there....I loved his stuff.

Oh hell yes. I am pretty sure I spent several hundreds of hours screwing around with Adventure Construction Set all told.

[naum]

Didn't even own a PC until 1990… …no reason to own a computer unless you could get online, 2400 baud modem finally let me take a dip… …though on work computers, we had the Joe Montana football league going on… …and Sim City and MS Flight Simulator were the first 2 games that captured my attention on that platform…

[Samwise]

The only game I remember playing on a school computer in the 80s was Lemonade Stand.  Mostly I played with Logo and BASIC.  The other kids would vie for the privilege of being my partner, because me and whoever I was partnered with got to do whatever cool stuff I could think of while the rest of the class grappled with the finer points of drawing squares.

Thanks, Samwise. Now you reminded me that Sundog is missing from the list.

The game I would have made babies with back in the day if I had already been pubescent.

Funny you should mention this, a while back I found an Atari ST emulator (Steem) and a disk image for Sundog so I could play it again.  Got quite a bit further than I did when I was a kid (having the Internet helps), though I still haven't come close to finishing it.

[Montague]

The only outright omission from my experience would be Lakers vs. Celtics, which might technically be a 90's game but damn was it fun.

[Ingmar]

The only outright omission from my experience would be Lakers vs. Celtics, which might technically be a 90's game but damn was it fun.

Larry Bird vs Dr. J instead?

[Righ]

Not a great list, but then if you focus on a PC in the 80s, you're not going to hit all the highs since it was a poor choice of games machine for most of the decade. Its like looking back from 2030 and picking the best Mac games of the 00s.

[Musashi]

Yea.  That's pretty much it right there.  I love some of the games on that list.  Zork in particular.  But the 80's was all about arcade games.

[Falconeer]

In Italy during the 80s the console predominance was very short, VCS2600 and Intellivision gave up the throne circa 1983. Then it suddenly became Spectrum vs Commodore 64 and later AtariST vs Amiga.

Sure SNES and Sega Megadrive (Genesis) were there but our country was crazy about those Personal Computers. Arcade were popular too, but Commodore ruled everything gamewise in the 80s (in Italy and maybe Europe).

IBM-clones PC were definitely a thing of the 90s as naum said.

[Musashi]

That's pretty interesting.  In the US it was all about arcade until the NES.  I'd say that consoles were popular, and probably a majority of kids had at least one of the generation's iterations - 2600's, 5600's, Commodores, or Intellivisions. 

But the arcade was king.  There were arcade cabinets and pinball machines everywhere.  Every corner store, supermarket, ice/roller rink, pizza joint, bowling alley, mall was wired for Donkey Kong, Burgertime, and the glory of the Gorfian Empire.  Then of course there was the Golfland Arcade.  Pretty much Mecca, if you subscribe to my religion.

In those days the average Joe couldn't afford the kind of tech it would take to put an arcade quality game on a console or a PC even.  The console/PC games scene, while awesome in their own right, just couldn't compare to the arcade games.  It wasn't until NES that the trend started to change.  At least in my neighborhood one of it's biggest selling points was that the NES was the first console (or even PC for that matter) that was a reasonably priced approximation of the kinds of games in the arcade.