Master of Magic is a fantastic game!  I had a mistake in my notes.  (I had it listed as 1995.)

1994 another great year with lots of new games, now mostly in 640x480 leaving the old 320x240 resolution behind.

1994 saw the debut of System Shock, first person action adventure


Star Wars: Tie Fighter

Wing Commander also still going strong with Wing Commander III: Heart of the tiger

Still more excellent adventures with Beneath a steal sky, Kings Quest 7, Under a Killing Moon.

1994 got me interested in submarine games with Aces of the Deep


1994 also saw the birth of Need for Speed

It reall captured the feel of driving fast and cars felt like they had proper weight when crashing. The crashes were glorious, and the game would highlight your crashes in short replays after the race. I later got a track editior for it to make some ludicrous roller coaster tracks.

Sid Meier's Colonization was another big hit, kept me and my sister busy for months. Very addictive game play with some excellent new systems introduced.

Little Big Adventure was a personal favorite, such a unique game, still is


Magic Carpet was awesome as well, another game ahead of its time

Magic Carpet had a 3D stereogram mode where you could play the game in 3D after you trained your eyes to see stereograms. It worked and prompted me to make my own version of animated stereograms. Together with my dad we already made a program to produce static magic eye pictures from rendered 3D Studio images (by rendering them with depth information in layers and then converting to a stereogram).
After playing Magic Carpet I made a demo which renders a 3D landscape, hills and valleys with shaded depth information which I then converted to random noise stereograms. The trick I learned from Magic Carpet is to subtly shift all the lines around to avoid seeing the movement patterns too clearly which become distracting. I experimented so much with magic eye pictures in the day that my eyes still jump to see stereograms everywhere, just relaxing my eyes on the keyboard shifts it into a different perspective with keys overlapping, making the keyboard look bigger and further away.

1994 also saw the birth of the 'Theme' games starting with the excellent Theme Park


1994 had the best ever Transport Tycoon game which is still being played today.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1536610/OpenTTD/ still going.
The game was amazing for its time, starting with bus routes, trucks, then trains, boats and airplanes. You could dig your own canals for ships and the train system was a huge upgrade over railroad tycoon. There was also a map editor to make your own maps. Never has another transport game captured the scope of Chris Sawyer's Transport tycoon. So cool to have airplane hubs work together with trains, and trucks with shipping terminals.

Sim Tower was a great twist on the Sim franchise, going vertical

Very addictive game as well, running in Windows 3.1

But I have to give this year to the birth of Warcraft, Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans created the buzz and might very well be responsible for the birth of ESports, put Blizzard on the map and led to the still popular Starcraft and World of Warcraft.

And of course inspiration for the wildly successful Age of Empires series.

Tekken was good for its time but after playing Tekken 3 I have no urge to return to the first installment.

Doom II was not much of an upgrade from the first one, and since it is part of my least liked genre I'll just try to ignore it.

Warcraft is ok, but became great first with the next installment.

Earthbound, X-com, Final fantasy VI and Sonic 3 I have not played enough to make judgement on.

Super Metroid had controls that I never got used to. Aiming the gun with shoulder buttons. Never got into it, but I loved the title screen music.

Voted Donkey Kong Country, a game I liked in a recent playthrough and love the music from. Even if later games in the series might be superior, this game still stands on it own well enough for me to want to return to it, unlike Tekken where I just want to play another later release instead.

Wait a moment, did Transport Tycoon really release in 1994?? I thought it came a few years later.
That game would get my vote instead of DKC.

Ah, System Shock is another one on my entry of 'has to try out games'. Both this and MoM is from this year. Indeed gaming exploded in the early 90s. You have also great mentions of games I know about but didn't play: Little Big Adventure and Transport Tycoon. I know for both are fans around. I meddled a little in OpenTTD, still going strong.

EarthBound is a legendary game and I am so glad it has become more accessible from the Wii U to the present day.

Of the list, FF6 was the best game followed very closely by DKC for me, this said in the knowledge FF6 didn't come out in the UK until it's PS1 release in like 2002, not kidding 8 years later is the first time it officially release... I had obviously played it before then on emulator but still.

That would be Transport Tycoon Deluxe that launched in 1995 with many QOL upgrades, including the map editor and network play
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Tycoon

I see Descent also released in 1994 (only just, December 24 shareware version, full release is 1995), the first true 3D game and 6DOF game.

Doom was essentially still a 2D game with tricks to make it appear 3D. The map was flat with no overlapping sections. Descent was completely 3D with levels folding on themselves. The map was represented as a 3D wire mesh which filled out as you explored along

The goal was the escape the mines while fighting enemies and dodging bullets.

Descent made me fall in love with the 6DOF genre and I'm glad for Cavernous Wastes making a faithful recreation of Descent for PSVR

It's procedural generated levels instead of handmade maps, yet just as deviously interconnected and each play through is unique. Descent roguelike in VR, my dreams came true! Cavernous wastes was a one man project, very niche, but I'm very glad it exists. Bloody awesome game.

6 vs metroid is a flip of the coin. Either one destroys the competition

Excellent game and all my infos say it is a '95 game.