Top 5 First Person Shooter PC Games of the 90's According to a Gaming Addict

Here is my list of the top 5 games that happily I spent years of my life playing. You will see why when you read the #1 pick.

5. Wolfenstein 3D: The game that started the genre, ok some of you will say Spear of Destiny came out first. I would agree but it didn't have the same feel and re-playability as Wolf3D did. Wolf3D defined the feel of a FPS for the first time. It had sound blaster sound support. I played it for hours on the free download version and the purchased the 2nd and 3rd levels to keep playing. It was a good start.

4. Doom: With Doom came the influx of level design. The elevators, the caves, and space feel. It had layers of levels with stairs and buildings that were more than 1 story tall. Doom set the bar with level design as its own art form. The big kicker to Doom was the multiplayer support. You could hook in with 9600 baud phone line modems and blast your buddy across the world. Then with a patch you could download they added tcpip and ipx support giving Doom the ability to play on a network with many players. Remember this was before the internet so you had to go to AOL or CompuServe to get the patch. Schools had to ban the use of Doom on their network, and Novell servers had scripts on them that network administrators had to run to clean up the ipx broadcast traffic that could bring the network to its knees. It was awesome fun.

3. Quake 1: With the release of Quake 1 the multiplayer niche was opened up to all players. With the internet boom in full swing Quake took advantage of it and became playable online. Visually Quake was not too much better than doom, but it did come out with 3D rendering support via Opengl, which was a huge advance in technology. Also with Quake came modding support. Programmers could mod the Quake engine to make certain changes and different maps to play and host their own servers on the internet for anyone to connect to. Companies came out with software just to find Quake servers to ease your search for a server to play on, like GameSpy. This led to the online gaming boom in the mid 90's. Quake-world comes to mind as the mod of choice and later spawned off its own series of games that were known as the Team Fortress Series.

2. Unreal Tournament: This game came out and made it ok for a game to look REAL. Not only was the game fast paced and full of furious maiming headshots, it looked awesome too. The engine this game was built on was such a huge step forward in looks and playability that it won Game of the Year from many of the gaming magazines. The multiplayer in Unreal Tournament was the core of the game. There were many different gaming styles to choose from like capture the flag and assault. Had it not been for the next game on my list I probably would still be playing UT as it still has a huge online gaming community.

1. Counter-Strike: CS was a free downloadable mod for Half-Life that came out around May of 1999. I got in on the beta version probably 1 week after its release because everyone was talking about it in the GameSpy chat forums. I was hooked from the word Go, Go, Go. Since Half-Life was built on a modded Quake2 engine, CS didn't look as good as Unreal Tournament, but the game play was addicting. The hit boxes and player movement was smooth even on older computers. It had round based play and if you died you could chat with the other players until the next round started. This gave the game a chat room like quality that spawned gaming groups and tournaments all over the world. People got to know the people they were playing against and form friendships. I still play CS to this day, even coming up on the tenth anniversary of the initial beta release. The main reason Counter-Strike is my #1 pick for game of the 90's is that I met my wife playing CS in 2002, and yes we are still married. It is still fun to talk about the old tournaments we used to play and sometimes win.