The Very Important List of PC Games, Part 5

The fifth and final part of Rock Paper Shotgun’s most important/best/the ones we like best games is penned by former RPS regular Kieron Gillen. Amongst the features games are Guild Wars (importanceness: Importantitudity), Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (The gentleman’s definition thereof), Dwarf Fortress (If You Have To ASCII, You’ll Never Know).

It’s easy to play alternative histories. Looking Glass Studios working under their maiden name of Blue Sky Productions started here, and laid out their manifesto. It took Ion Storm a decade later to call it (The Immersive Sim), but back then, they were just making games the way they thought games should work. This was a simulation-lead dungeon-based game, which sits at the head of a tree which gave us at least five of the solid-gold classics in these lists. Texture mapping, multi-level dungeons all the good stuff started herein. And it was a success. For the time, on the PC, an enormous 500K one. And then Doom came along, and changed all the rules. I often think of Doom as the Christ figure in PC Gaming. In a real way, anything before it is Old Testament and everything after it is the new one. Which leaves Ultima Underworld as the John the Baptist figure if John the Baptist was kind of literary and chin-stroking, and Jesus was more into masturbating over his mighty chaingun. The future of games started here, and then took a sharp turn right. As such, it’s the sort of game that makes a certain sort get all sniffly. We probably classify them as (The Older RPS Readers).