11 games that came out before I was born and still blew me away

4 days ago 1

Games from the nineties that blew me away.

I was 2 years old when, in the year 2000, right at the turn of the century, my father brought home a brand-new, state-of-the-art HP Brio desktop. That PC became my lifeline, especially since I both discovered and fostered a love for all things gaming on that little PC with all of 64 MB of RAM and an Intel Pentium III CPU.

Over the years, most of the games I played on it were outdated and actually from the previous century, so to speak. Fast-forward to today, when I've played even more games that came out before December 1998, my own birth, thanks to emulators that allow me to experience titles from platforms I had no way of playing back in the early 2000's.

I may have played some of them this year, a couple of years ago, or even two decades ago, but these games continue to hold up as solid experiences from start to finish. Looking back, these games don't cease to amaze me, making me wonder what kind of magic the devs had been casting to make such amazing games all the way back in the '90s.

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11 Super Tennis (SNES) — 1991

The best sports game on the SNES, hands down

Super Tennis on the Super Nintendo is 34 years old today, and yet, it remains one of the best tennis games I have ever had the pleasure of playing. I grew up playing Virtua Tennis and the occasional Top Spin game, but after the disappointment that was TopSpin 2K25, I went all the way back to 1991, to emulate Super Tennis through RetroArch.

It's baffling just how great a tennis game this was — the spins during serves, rallies, slices, and topspin hits were all accurate, the hitbox isn't unforgiving, but you still have to nail the timing, and there's a full-fledged roster of twenty playable characters, all with their own strengths and drawbacks. The game lets you choose between all three kinds of courts, and your movement speeds and shots actually vary as per the court. All that in a 1991 game? That's why Super Tennis remains one of my favorite games of all time, and at the time of writing this, I have three separate saved states of the game — one on my iPhone, one on my laptop through Snes9x, and one on my PC's RetroArch.

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10 Wolfenstein 3D (MS-DOS) — 1992

My first-ever first-person-shooter

Around 2006, my friends around the entire block I lived in used to come over to use my PC, and we all played Wolfenstein 3D — one life per player. At the time, the idea of opening doors, shooting big enemies, and level-based progression were all so novel to us, that nothing else in the day mattered except our time with the game.

Today, it's one of the first games I made my girlfriend play after introducing her to gaming, during a sort of crash course of games that are royalty. I still remember the first time I pressed up against a wall, spamming the spacebar until I found my first secret area in the game, loaded with medkits, treasure, and a Tommy gun. 33 years later, Wolfenstein 3D continues to amaze me, and it's no wonder that the game became one of the foundational titles behind the first-person-shooter genre as we know it today.

Wolfenstein 3D

Released May 5, 1992

ESRB m

Developer(s) id Software

Engine id tech

Franchise Wolfenstein

9 Top Gear 2 (SNES) — 1993

One of the best racing games on the SNES

I had the pleasure of playing both the Top Gear games from the SNES-era on a clone console during summer break, when I was only ten years old. The game — which I discovered with a friend during an internet blackout — instantly had me hooked. Years later, revisiting Top Gear 2 through RetroArch feels surreal, because I know I have all eyes on me and my phone as I merrily race along the Las Vegas strip.

In Top Gear 2, you could switch out engines, tune your transmission, decide your gearbox, figure out the tires you wanted on your car, and so much more. During a race, it wasn't just about holding down a button to go fast — you still have to manage fuel, engine RPMs, and car damage. All of these features and mechanics may be commonplace in racing games today, but for a 32-year-old game, these features, along with a solid and immensely rewarding gameplay loop, meant that it would forever be known as one of the greatest SNES racing games of all time.

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8 Mario Kart 64 (N64) — 1996

A screenshot of gameplay from Mario Kart 64.

Source: Nintendo

I have never had a Nintendo N64. Heck, I didn't even know the console existed until well into the 2000's, and by then, I was firmly a PC and Xbox 360 player, before switching over to Sony's PlayStation. It was the bane of my existence that I was never able to play Mario Kart with my friends like I knew half the world did, simply because none of us had Nintendo consoles in the first place.

Still, going back to reclaim a childhood I never had, I went through all the Nintendo emulators I could. There, replaying Mario Kart 64 through Project64 was perhaps my greatest discovery and pleasure. To this day, it's a blast to play, with its vibrant tracks, iconic characters, and fantastic drifting mechanics that genuinely seem just a few years old instead of three decades old. It blows my mind how Nintendo managed to deliver all that silky-smooth, split-screen mayhem all the way back in '96, and it will continue to do so.

Mario Kart 64

Systems

Released December 14, 1996

ESRB e

Developer(s) Nintendo EAD

Engine miyomoto

Multiplayer Local Multiplayer

Franchise Mario Kart

7 Grand Theft Auto (Windows) — 1997

"What? We can really just get into any car we want?" This is what I had asked my brother, baffled, as I played Grand Theft Auto for the first time at perhaps three or four years old. The insanely-paced crime sim that paved the way for perhaps the most prolific gaming series the industry has ever known, Grand Theft Auto had you going from point A to point B, stealing cars, picking up people, and crashing into anything that moved.

For my four-year-old self, this was something I'd never seen before (although, to be honest, that list was pretty long at that age). I revisited the original GTA, quite recently, in fact, since it's also on the list of games I had my partner play. The sudden motion and the struggle to control the car is something all of us had to master, and so would she. Still, it really did blow my mind back then. Looking back, the game was quite barebones, and the controls felt tanky. Still, I remember just how much of a mind-blowing moment playing the original GTA was for little ol' me, and it rightly deserves a place on this list.

Grand Theft Auto

Released November 28, 1997

ESRB m

Developer(s) Rockstar North

Publisher(s) BMG Interactive

Engine RAGE

Multiplayer Local Multiplayer

Franchise Grand Theft Auto

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6 Tekken 3 (PlayStation) — 1997

Connectix Virtual Game Station — that was the emulator I used to play Tekken 3 on my Windows desktop, and I must have played that game for five years straight. Between 2004 and 2009, this was the game for me. Heck, it's one of the only two games I was ever able to make my dad play, the other one being DX-Ball.

Every single time I had friends over, or any of my cousins dropped by, Tekken 3 was the only game we'd play, mashing buttons together and figuring out super moves. There was even a local arcade I visited every time I had to go to the doctor's, where I still remember demolishing the kid who called himself the champion of that arcade. All I did was spam Yoshimitsu's sword thrust to keep winning, and nothing could wipe the smile off my face.

I still play Tekken 3 during breaks between work, and especially on flights. Since I never travel without my PS5, I always have two controllers in tow, and all it took was one impromptu 1v1 match on my phone with the person next to me on a delayed flight for me to realize just how much this game still holds up today, nearly three decades later.

Tekken 3

Systems

Released March 20, 1997

ESRB T For Teen // Animated Violence

Developer(s) Namco

Publisher(s) Namco

Engine Unreal Engine

Multiplayer Local Multiplayer

Franchise Tekken

5 Need for Speed II (Windows) — 1997

Another fantastic game that I played growing up, and made my partner play to make her get the hang of racing games, is Need for Speed II. I particularly grew up with the Special Edition, which had the bonus FZR 2000 car and a few other tracks. Of course, for me, it was all about the secret 'Hollywood' track, Monolithic Studios, where I drove around as a friggin' dinosaur.

Still, making my partner play this game (which she still does, from time to time) made me realize just how insanely polished games had become by 1997. The Outback track, where you race along the seashore and then a dusty highway, actually features particle effects that impede your view when you're going too fast, and that alone left me amazed at just how splendidly this game has aged over the years.

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4 Blood (MS-DOS) — 1997

Blood is actually the latest game on this list that I've had the pleasure of playing. Of course, as someone with a Windows PC in the early 2000's, I didn't actually interact with honest-to-goodness DOS-era games, only ports. However, having studied and talked about them at length, I realized just how great the era was. One of the very best examples of the DOS-era was inarguably Blood, which was made on the Build Engine. Sure, at the end of the day, it was a Doom/Quake clone, but it had so much personality that I still find myself playing its remaster whenever I have the time.

Heck, the original DOS version is still the first game I play on RetroArch on my iPhone during flights and cab rides, and thanks to the occasional bout of terrible traffic, I've gotten deep into the fourth episode by now. What amazes me the most about Blood is just how much charm it has, from the screaming corpses and giggling zombies, to the one-liner-spewing player character and the immense amount of diversity in its levels and locales. It's funny, self-aware, and extremely enjoyable throughout, making it one of the best games of the '90s. Its modern remaster is an absolute thing of beauty, I'll say.

Blood: Fresh Supply

Systems

Released May 9, 2019

ESRB m

Developer(s) NightDive Studios

Publisher(s) NightDive Studios

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3 The House of the Dead (Windows) — 1998

The opening mission in The House of the Dead game.

I played The House of the Dead in 2021, when a friend mentioned it as the only game they'd ever played as a kid. Thirty minutes later, I had the game downloaded, and the next thing I knew, I was shooting at zombies, gargoyles, and all sorts of strange creatures. Heck, the game even had branching paths and fantastic level design, and none of my initial runs were the same, with entire areas blocked off depending on split-second decisions you make during gameplay.

It's no wonder that the game's arcade version took the world by storm, and the PC version only added to the fun with an extra mode and more playable characters with unique weapons. I've even played the 2022 remake, which, for the most part, I'm quite fond of, but there's just nothing like the original. This was a game that I played at the age of 23, and it still managed to blow me away with just how well-designed and tight the gameplay was.

The House of the Dead: Remake

Released April 28, 2022

ESRB m

Engine unity

Franchise The House of the Dead

Number of Players 1-2

Split Screen Orientation N/A (Shared Screen)

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Metal Gear Solid came out just a few months before I did, and I discovered it entirely by accident. After playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and falling in love with its quiet, methodical gameplay, I read a review in a local gaming magazine that compared it to MGS, calling the latter the bar. One deep dive later, and I was firing up CVGS to experience this PlayStation game. Next thing I knew, I was completely hooked. It wasn't MGS' stealth or the gunplay that blew me away — it was the presentation, the ambition, and the sheer cinematic scale of it all.

What floored me was just how tightly designed everything was, from start to finish. In MGS, there were no wasted moments. Every cutscene, every Codex call, and every weird fourth-wall break was intentional, polished, and unforgettable. Three decades later, it still holds up as a masterclass in game design, proving that when a developer leaves nothing to chance, their work truly becomes ageless.