Rick, perchance did you mean to ask what were the best KC games of all-time? The answer is Game 6 of the 1985 World Series, of course.
As to the OP, does anybody have the time to do a position by position comparison of the worst team in history candidates? That be interesting, in a perverse way of course.
Game developers, unlike Hollywood producers, tend to have a much better grasp on creating sequels. They better know how to improve the aspects that make an original good while correcting the original’s deficiencies. It’s not perfect (Deus Ex II, Serious Sam 2), but developers do have a better record.
Lemme just say that I find it utterly shocking and dumbfounding that Pirates! made the cut but none of the Myst series made your list. Dumbfounded I tells ya.
(I’m disallowing games I worked on, since that seems like cheating. But someone already mentioned System Shock and Thief, so I’m happy. Now, if one of the 17 people who actually played Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri wants to speak up, it would really make my day! )
Now, Civ 1 was a great game, and gets extra points for original concept…but the franchise owes an incredible amount of its success to the advancement of the GUI that begins with II.
Freedom Force, for doing the, for years, impossible, and putting a superhero game on the PC.
(El Diabloooo!)
Wing Commander: Prophecy may, and only may be better than TIE Fighter.
Sam And Max Hit The Road or Grim Fandango for the best Adventure game… or Day of the Tentacle or Starship Titanic
Zork/Advent/Colossal Caves
Always hard to pick between classics (which defined the genres) and new stuff (which is better in a lot of cases, but rarely groundbreaking). My list, which is pretty obviously skewed towards strategy and RPG games:
Diablo - the sequel was better… but this was the game that was responsible for almost an entire decade of clones at this point… and the sequel might be the ONLY one that was better. On top of that, it foreshadowed a lot of modern internet gaming with the introduction of Blizzard’s battle.net; there had been gaming over the internet before, but this was a HUGE step.
Civilization IV - I thought about I or II here, because they were each groundbreaking in their own way, but IV is nearly a perfect conclusion to what the others started. Once some of the early memory issues and minor bugs were quickly patched… there just isn’t much that this game gets wrong.
Starcraft - I really wanted to put one of the Warcraft games here (either II or III), but SC has one big thing going for it: it introduced three playable sides that were non-symmetrical and well-balanced. Add the international longevity of the game and the myriad player-spawned mods of all shapes and sizes (from gimmicks to RPGs and everything in between), and this gets a slight edge over War3 for the “Blizzard RTS” spot.
Unreal Tournament - Everyone tends to have their own individual preference as to which is the best FPS deathmatch type game. I’ll take my UT (and later UT2004) over your Half-Life, Quake, Doom, etc. any day of the week, but there’s definite room for movement there since they’re all great games. I just love the way UT plays as a multiplayer bonanza.
Heroes of Might and Magic II - This was a sort of hard pick with the number as well. The first was a good enough game to get the series rolling, but the second was a huge step forward and defined everything that game after. III and IV were both great games in their own right - and you’ll hear myriad arguments over which style of play and game is the superior one. So I went with II, which established HoMM as the premier fantasy turn-based strategy game while putting down the foundations for everything that game later in the series.
Neverwinter Nights - On its own, this is a very good game. It shipped with the best and most accessible approach to computer D&D gaming that we’ve seen, IMO, one that even reached out to RPG fans who would normally never go near something D&D based. What really makes NWN shine, though, is the expansions and the community-created modules, which combine to make this one of the rather more ridiculously forever-playable games that we’ve seen.
Everquest - This spot was competition between EQ and WoW, of course. For all that WoW used the Blizzard and Warcraft brands along with ease of entry to expand the reach of MMOs beyond what anyone thought possible… I just think what EQ did in 1999 (and particularly with the first two or three expansions) was at least as impressive with a far stronger aspect of community, especially when EQ was developing a lot of these concepts that WoW would later refine (extremely well). For half a million or more online RPG gamers, their first year or two in EQ is something that will absolutely never be replicated in terms of the feelings of actually being in another world, with vibrant settings and communities.
Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven - This is the “old school PC RPG” spot. A couple more Might and Magics could have gone here, or a few Ultimas, or maybe a Wizardry. None of them have aged especially well… and yet they’re all still fun to go back and play for those of us who remember doing it the first time. Mandate of Heaven was a classic Might and Magic game with a strong story (continuing after the events of HoMM2), entertaining quests, and what were cutting edge graphics at the time (1998). Just a very fun game to play.
That’s all I’m gonna list - keeping in mind that I could extend it to at least 20 just with variations, sequels, and prequels of the eight I’ve put down here.
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