was PONG

Everything that followed was just an upgrade.

Why is there no Interstate'76?
That was the best ever computer game! I loved it...

Willy: I could nae have shot Burns! If ye'll check me medical records, I've got a cripplin' arthritis in me index fingers! I got it from Space Invaders, back in 1975. Wiggum: Yeah, that was a pretty addictive video game. Willy: Video game?

Without a doubt, I'd have to say that the game I've had the most fun with is Mario Kart. Both the super- and 64- editions. Multiplayer so you can rock out with the roommates, but simple enough so you can play on a beer or two really late at night. And no guts splashing all over the place like UT.

Go mario!

I'm glad the dance dance revolution choice was intrinsically tied to the equally ridiculous cowboy neal option. That game has got to the the funniest thing I've ever seen. (The hardcore 300 lb. Dance Dance Revolutioun kids at the local arcade bring gatorade and towels..)

I was expecting to see Doom on there, Quake's granddaddy. I remember trying to get Doom to work on a 286 with a 60 mb hard drive. Those were sad times. And don't even get me started on the hours wasted playing Wolfenstein 3D... (Doom's granpappy.)

Hello? Slashdot? Are you there?

Civilization
Civilization 2
Civilization 3
-all by Sid Meier and all ranked with the highest scores ever in almost every gaming magazine ever published. The dude who posted this poll must've seriously had a limited gaming viewpoint... especially considering barely anything pre-1990 wasn't considered (and even then only Wing Commander was the 'coolest' of that era).

Warcraft, the original.

A revolutionary game that I have spent countless hours on and still return to. I just hope that the upcoming Warcraft 3 is as promising as Blizzard makes it sound.

Oh, and whether or not what Blizzard is doing about oppressing the open source folks or whatnot, they still make damn good games.

What about C&C or StarCraft or Civ1 or one of my favorites, Pirates! on the C-64.

What about Ultima?

I know it's just bitching about options, and the Best Games have been covered here before, but it's Spring Break and I'm at work, so I'm going to whine.

who's going to vote for EverQuest? All those folks are off actually playing it.

:-)

Well, let me count the ways...
1.Breakthrough technology It was a very good true 3d game, which made all those before it look kinda 2 demensional.
2. Music Done by Nine Inch Nails. Needless to say, love them or hate them, the music was extreme.
3. Monsters Sure, the monsters were cool, but they were also scary. I love running around at 3:00am and behind the next corner---- AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!! sorry, that was a flashback. :)
4.Mods Sure, all you had to start was multiplayer and co-op, but as it is now, there are 10 times as much space taken up by the mods and maps then there is the actual game!
3.Clans Use your own skins to fight against others who have their own special tags! I still have fond memories of playing Team Fortress with 32 people, 30 of which I knew by first name, and favorite weapon.

Ultima (especially 4+) was a great series. Required you to think (especially before the 'net made walkthroughs easy to find). It was (one of?) the first games to have consequences for the "good guy" (the player) killing off random people, and generally being a "bad guy".

EverQuest ruined my life.

I used to be a semi-normal college geek, but sometime during my freshman year, someone introduced me to EQ, and I feel in love. I had played MUDs in the past, and even had a few Imms on some.

But EverQuest was like nothing I had ever played. It was so immersive, partly due to the graphics, partly due to the social friends I made on the game, that I became _very_ addictive.

If you talk to EQ addicts, most of them will always mention a friend of theres that is worse of an addict than them. It's the same with heroin users and alcholics. Well, I have no one else to point to. I was the most addicted person I know.

It started out harmlessly of course, with me playing 6 or so hours a night, but pretty soon, as I got high in level, the game forced me to stay on longer and longer periods of time.

For those of you that don't play everquest, once you get passed Level 25, it becomes harder and harder to level, but the amount of expierance you gain (XP) goes up exponentially with the number of hours you spend online/active in one sitting.

I had periods where I didn't log out for over fifty hours of play. I skipped classes, stopped showering, and broke up with my girlfriend. My roommate moved out (he couldn't handle the late night typing of my gameplaying).

One weekend our campus network went out, and after four hours sitting on my ass without EQ, I had to play. So I installed it on a local Kinko's computers and gamed that way. I spent over $700 that weekend.

That cost is nothing compared to what I spent on E-bay. I spent well over $5000 dollars, which I stole from my parent's tuition checks.

That's right, I dropped out, collected the checks, and forged Grade Reports back. My parent's didn't know until they called the school to deal with some financial aid, and they heard I had dropped out. They called my roommate, and got the whole retched story from him.

Needless to say I shaped up pretty quickly. Part of my punishment was not being allowed to have a windows partition, so at least I'm learning a little bit of Linux from this all, but it's really sickening, now, to look back on those months (realtime) that I spent on that damn game.

So obviously I voted for EverQuest.

Come on! The groovy soundtrack, the auctions, the wheelin' and dealin' of plot sales and what about the casino where you always win money ...

This game is awesome. It's like Asteroids on steroids. You play in a large arena, flying a ship from a "top down" view, and try and kill everyone else playing at the time.

VIE dropped it do to lack of interest, which I feel is just because there was no "3D" FPS appeal. Anyone who plays this gets addicted. Now that VIE has dropped it, you can find it many places for free under the release name of "Continuum".

Go Here [subspacehq.com] to check it out.

NetHack?

After all, there were lots of people saying how cool no graphics were the other day.. surely that makes it cooler than pong?

How many other games of the time allowed you to shoot civillian cars and motorcycles? The best part was coming up with new and interesting ways to blow up civillian cars.

Tailgate a motorcycle for a second, that just tap him from behind...*BAM*, one motorcycle going across the hood of your car.

Pull along side a car on the bridge. Cut the wheel as far right as possible and watch them fly into the water.

My fave was to pull in front of a car and tap the oil slick. Then just watch it wobble out of control off the road. Fun bonus points you can swerve to their other side and stop them from veering off the road. That was amusing cause they'd be going straight but continue out of control.

Dark Castle ruled completely. When I was 5 years old, there was nothing I liked better than that game. I wasn't very good at it, but the animations were so fluid, and the sounds were so hilarious that there will never be another video game for me.

And if we're voting based on joy of game play, I think that Super Mario Bros for SNES beats the hell out of everything. The physics feel so right that it makes me feel like I should be able to jump and switch directions midair IRL.

I played Myst once, and beat it. Then it was just a bunch of pretty pictures on a CD.

Yes, I did think it was a nice puzzle game. But I (for one) never understood why it was so popular. Pretty, yes. But it had zero replayability value. All these other games have some sort of response to the user. Myst (in my opinion) doesn't even qualify as interactive.

For its time, it was gorgeous. But I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that more people today play Doom than Myst.

Now that was an awesome game.

I also liked the Ultima series, some of the Final Fantasy Series, Warcraft II, and Quake 1 when I feel like mindlessly shooting stuff. Anything else is just Quake 1 with a lower framerate :)

On console gaming, the Lunar series kicks some serious butt, and DDR is fun too. And of course who can forget Chrono Trigger. I know FF is console too, but I felt like listing it first :)

The game industry produces a lot of crap, but there is the occasional golden gem in the tons of mediocrity...

It is a crime that the best video game EVER MADE isn't on this list:
Star Control 2
It had great gameplay, fantastic plot, and most of all it was fun and addictive. I have met few people that played it that don't think it was the best game ever made.

In general I do not like computer games. (Or any sort of games, actually.) I find them tedious. All the FPSs I've played (granted, not very many lately) are all the same. They're all Wolf3D with beefed up graphics. (This was my main motivation for trying to write my own game engine a few years ago: maybe I could make something different. The project was a little ambitious for one person though.) Anyway. I saw Descent, and just loved it. Now it's STILL a game, and it still gets horribly boring after not long. But at least it is different. I love the level of control. It took 12 keys on the keyboard to fly your ship well, but when you mastered it, it was amazing what you could do. Take your basic circle-strafing in Quake, and add a third dimension, plus all sorts of rolls and stuff. It was just cool. But I never was a gamer, and have no intention of becoming one, so all you more qualified than me, feel free to flame away.

Doom was years ahead of its time. I remember downloading kali( ancient novel emulator that works over the web to fool doom to think its an ipx network) just to play a network frag over the net. It was 3d engine in a world where it ran on 386 and 486 pc's with video cards with only 2 megs of ram and it had great sound. All tge top hackers at the time thought it was impossible to due this with pc hardware but Carmack and Romeo showed them wrong. Its asbsolutely amazing how they even got the thing to run. Its like early versions of the games we have today because it was just so far ahead. At the time of release all the other games were 2 day and really sucked with blocky graphics. Think gauntlet, super mario brothers, etc. Doom was also the first game where the opponets bodies would stay after you killed them. In the other games they would just dissapear and it looked real fake. Not to mention the atmoshphere and the music totally kicked ass!

Quake I am aware of was the first totally and truly real 3d engine and world but lacked alot of detail and was alot uglier in my opinion. The gameplay wasn't as good. I only used it for mutliplayer. Just try running it without a 3d card and take a peak at the graphics with a circa 1996 machine. yuck. With doom you had a non polygon game engine wich would allow more detail for things like body guts, blood, moving textures, dead bodies, etc. The game today looks dated of course but back in 92 and 93 it was totally unreal and was very well done.

I sure hope the upcomming doom3 will rock as hard. Its rumoured that it will only run well on a geforce3 and will run even better with smp! It will be gory eye candy. Mmmm

Also I would vote for UT as my second favorite the bots are better as well as the graphics eninge.

How could this line possibly be left out?
Civilization, Freeciv, CivNet, Civilization II, Civilization III.
NOTHING else compares.
btw, FreeCiv is free software [freeciv.org] and works under Linux and Windows among others.

Only one comment that mentions the greatest game of all time?! That's just wrong... I think taco was high when he drafted up this poll. No teris, and no half life... heh. Sure, quake's cool, I even still play it every so often, but there's only been two games I'd miss if I ever gave up gaming... and they are Tetris and Half Life.

Man o man did this list of games miss so many good ones. Yes, I'm about to geek out, but for sheer greatest/coolest games ever, I can't believe Civilization and all of its clones didn't make it.
What could be cooler than starting off as a civilization that didn't make it today, rising up, and taking over the world? Is it just me, or is it great fun to have the Romans go a bit further than the 5th Century AD in the West and go on to build tanks, nukes, and a spaceship to Alpha Centauri?
And then there's all the other games Microprose has made over the years. Darklands (Role-playing in Medieval Germany / Holy Roman Empire), Pirates Gold! (Plunder the Spanish Main!), Alpha Centauri, and so on.
Then again - this is the Slashdot opinion poll, so I shouldn't be commenting on what was left out, and I should probably get back to work...or playing Civ III.

It's a shame Bungie's Marathon Trilogy isn't on here. I consider them to the best first person shooters, which goes back to 1995. This was when Doom was out. Marathon was so much better. In Doom you couldn't look up or down, in Marathon you could. The physics were awesome for its time. You could grenade hop onto platforms! I remember the times when my friend and I played it until 4am. He had his LCIII, and I had my Powermac 6100. Those were the days. He jumped off a platform spraying me with his AR-75 machine gun, and before he landed, I got him with my SPNKR rocket launcher, which propelled him toward the ceiling. We were laughing so hard from that one that mom woke up and she yelled at us.

Bobs were unique to Marathon also. The closest definition would have been "noncombatant bots with speech capabilities". In Marathon 2 and 3 they were given weapons. The key phrase they said which caught on was "They're everywhere!", which a person at Bungie did the voice for. There were also simulacrums, which were bobs with explosives in them. Great days in Bungie and 1st person shooter history, I tell you.

And the reason it's better than Doom, Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and most certainly the upcoming Unreal...it had a plot. I'm sure this is an unheard of thing to most of you guys since you weren't using macs, but there was a time when first person shooters had a plot.

It's a good thing to see Bungie still hasn't lost their ways. I played the demo of Oni, and it's revolutionary. A plot, some REALLY neat weapons, hand to hand combat (the best part, IMO), and a hot animeish chick! How much better can you get?! I haven't tried Halo, but from what I've seen, it looks fun.

I would have to say that my peak video gaming happened when I was about 11-14 years old. At that time, my whole life was centered around video games and nothing was cooler then the real arcade version of Donkey Kong. Sure, I played them all and others have come and gone but DK was it for me. I can still remember what 7-11's, firehall lounges, hotel's, local game rooms, pizza shops, and other ma and pa places in my hometown had what games and what time frame they had them. My friends and I were like drifters riding our BMX bikes around in a 5 square mile area visting different places on different days just to play different games. My main source of income was a paper route and I got extra cash by hitting up local gas stations for money we "lost" in the soda machines, returning already returned bottles to the grocery store (they stored them in the back and we could cycle them through) and the trickiest one was buying pre recorded audio cassette tapes on clerance at one store and returning them across the street at another store for more money or a store credit for our income. I still love gaming now and play quite a lot but I would never go through what I did back then just to play the games.

Of course, everyone's gonna complain, 'Hey, isn't there!'

My friend Bryan always claimed that Doom was basically Asteroids anyway... that a lot of games basically reduced to other games... In the end, it doesn't matter that much. As with drama, there are probably only a dozen or so true video game elements that get mixed-and-matched.

This is not to say that every game can be described like 'Quake + Timothy Leary - Drugs' or 'Like Tomb Raider but with a guy in dredlocks'. Nor is it to say that those games all suck. After all, a lot of Hong Kong action movies have pretty basic plots, and are still fun to watch. It's frequently interesting to retell the same tale a different way, if the retelling is original enough.

Even so, when you come down to it, Bryan's right. A lot of games ARE 'just Asteroids'. Or Space War. Or Frogger. Or... whatever. Doom, Quake, and Castle Wolfenstein 3d (old and new) are all more or less the same game, just like Chess and Checkers are almost the same game.

If that's so, what are the 'eigengames', that you can mix and match to describe other games? What are the 'basic plots' of the video game world? How often does a truly new game actually get invented?

Real 'gameness' isn't something that's pushed by new technology. We don't have really new games because this year's new GeForce can pump out twice the polygons for second of the previous year (or whatever). Maybe we had new games the first time someone made a 'first person' . After that, it's all just a better illusion. Maybe one day we won't be able to tell the difference anymore, and that will be another kind of game, the game of seperating fantasy from reality. Although... perhaps that's the OLDEST of the eigengames.

Perhaps the subject of eigengames would be a good 'Ask Slashdot' topic, followed by another poll to determine which of those games are the ones that people enjoy the most.