Agree. Metal Gear Solid comes to mind, perhaps Resident Evil 2. Goldeneye (I never played it), but Goldeneye is an iconic piece of 90's culture. One of my personal faviourite games, Vagrant Story also comes to mind, but it is a rather obscure title compared to the others.

Yeah the 90s were such an amazing time for gaming thanks to its bold spirit of innovation and ambition.
It saw 2D games refined to a fine art, and the first exciting steps into the new world of 3D. There were landmark titles that changed gaming forever multiple times per year, the kind of thing you only get a couple of times per decade these days.

Hats off to Ocarina as a worthy winner. It's tough to rise to the top among such a strong crowd.

Vagrant Story is from 2000, no? Yet to play it myself, but looks like another Squaresoft classic :)

Super Mario 64. Just what it meant for the industry: heralded 3d gaming.

It was inevitable I guess - as technology progressed, so has the amount of money needed to invest into making a game. And console market was much sweeter than PC due to much lower piracy, so most of PC devs and publishers moved to consoles. But if we take a look at some of the largest gaming IPs currently, GTA and TES, they both started as PC exclusives in 90s.

But then again, there were lot of great PC exclusives that were born in 00s - Deus Ex, The Sims, Arcanum, Red Faction, Gothic, Battlefield, Mafia, Hitman, Dungeon Siege, No One Lives Forever, Neverwinter Nights, Vietcong, Call of Duty (yep), Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Far Cry, The Witcher, and many more, all the way to 2009/10 and Minecraft. Of course most of them became multi-platform in following years.

And that is not including behemoths like WoW and EVE Online.

i just came back in this thread and saw a big red bar at the bottom and my heart skipped a beat thinking age of empires somehow snaked the win and then i looked more carefully and saw that it is at zero where it belongs.

crisis everted

From the finalists, 6 are in my personal Top 50 (2022 edition)

Chrono Trigger #1

A Link to the Past #5

Final Fantasy VII #6

Super Mario 64 #12

Super Metroid #16

Super Mario World #28

1. Super Mario 64
2. Super Mario World
3. Pokemon Gold
4. Eartbhound
5. Mario Kart 64
6. Super Mario Kart
7. WCW/nWo Revenge
8. Goldeneye
9. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
10. Command & Conquer: Red Alert

The '90s were probably the decade wherein I had the most in common with typical gamers. Notice how three of my top ten faves of the decade also won out in the voting here for their respective years of release, for instance (Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VII). That 3:1 ratio of agreement is unlikely to persist in either the next decades we venture through in these threads, I suspect. I remember starting to feel a real disconnect between the culture of the gaming mags I was reading and other fans I met on the one hand and what interested me the most on the other from I would say 2001 onward.

Much of the '90s I had spent eagerly anticipating the generalized leap to 3D. Now though it's actually more often titles from the late 16-bit era that I wind up revisiting more. There was just something special about that particular moment in time, right at the cusp of the big leap but not quite there yet wherein those two different worlds seemed to almost merge into one in a way that I appreciate more now in retrospect. The Super NES library from 1994 and '95 in particular is among my most expansive and treasured.

The 90s marked the end of an era in console gaming history in particular. Up until the turn of the century, each new console generation had been greeted by a new dominant actor: In the first console generation, it was simply the Magnavox Odyssey, in the second, Atari ruled the roost, in the third, Nintendo, in the fourth, Sega (most of the time anyway), and in the fifth, Sony. After the turn of the century, no more. The cost of entering what we would call the AAA gaming space became too prohibitive and market consolidation really started to take hold. It just didn't feel as wild or interesting to me anymore somehow, despite the industry's best efforts at boundary pushing. Still, I found plenty of games to like; just not all the same ones that most people seemed to. One area of major divergence that I'll highlight right now, for example, is that most of my favorite first-party Nintendo games actually were part of the GameCube era, which was among the big N's least popular systems. Well we'll get to the details in future threads.

LOL, now that voting is closed I noticed that someone finally did vote for Age of Empires II.