You missed the Mechwarrior series. Too many hours wasted in MW.

Think warcraft 2 belongs in that mix

I played a lot of Sim City 2000. Not so much the others on the list. I played the Duke Nukem demo and thought it was funny.

My favorites that I had and played for hours and hours on end growing up were:

1988:

1989:

1989:

1990:

1992:

1992: ,

1993:

1993:

1993:

1994:

1995:

1996:

1997:

1999:

2000:

I also spent countless hours playing Pokémon Blue on an emulator on a Windows 95 machine.

edit:

I just wanted to add that if you play Alpha Centauri it's worth using "Scient's Unofficial Patch" to get rid of all the bugs in the game:

https://github.com/DrazharLn/scient-unofficial-smacx-patch

From this list hard to pick between Age of Empires and Diablo.

90s PC games outside the list: Worms 2, StarCraft, Betrayal at Krondor, Planescape: Torment, X-COM, Unreal Tournament

Wheres The Oregon Trail at??

Favorite game from the best gaming era? Man, that's a tough one.

Probably Doom/Diablo for the demon-killing itch - everyone probably knows about the former having great mods and ports, but the latter is also very playable with DevilutionX for hassle-free vanilla experience on modern systems, Tchernobog for making it play more like the 2nd game, and The Hell as a massive overhaul type of thing.

Half-Life/Unreal among shooters (with the former having over a hundred campaign mods worth playing, and the latter - not Tournament! is one of the most underrated games out there), System Shock 1/2 of immersive FPSs (Deus Ex is almost there too, if it had been released earlier), OG Baldur's Gate 1 and Fallout 2 of character build driven CRPGs that just give that massive catharsis when your build finally comes together after hours of toil, Mortal Kombat 1/3 of fighters, FF7 of big scale epics, HoMM3 as my Russian national specialty, Dune 2 as my first strategy game, Screamer as my first racing game, OG X-COM because it rocks, and on and on...

But if I had to choose only one favorite? That's gotta be, without a doubt, Planescape Torment.

I've never been much into gaming on any platform, but Scorched Earth was a lot of fun for me. I loved working out the physics to remove the ground under my opponent to have them fall into a hole that would cause them to have blocked shots at me while I rained weapons down on them from above. It was more of a physics simulator for me than a game.

I remember when I got a Wolfenstein disk. We were all blown away. Never played anything like that on home PC.

Ultima Online was my favorite.

Man, when I was little I played alot of console and PC games, when my bigger stronger brother would allow me...

Started on the 64 when my mom remarried a guy who was really really into gaming. Later moved to the PC to play Sonic games (Don't judge, it was a gift, I was young, I had no idea how weird the fanbase would be when I got older.)

We started getting more PC games and ended up with Age of Empires and Sim City. I played alot of both, enjoyed them quite a bit. Age of empires was downloaded to our PC on FLOPPY DISKS. I think it took three to download the whole game. I sucked really bad at the RTS, but I still played it since the early game and map building was fun. My bro saw I wasn't figuring out the game and he had a hard time teaching me so he indulged me by writing down a bunch of cheatcodes for me to use. Of course I didnt count any of those wins as an honest win but it was hugely hilarious to me to build armies of red race car hero armies to fight the enemy. Over time I used less and less cheats but I still couldnt get a natural win.

Sim City was different. It was downloaded from a CD and I learned how to properly play that one. Also, I was older by then. I think? This was all so long ago by now. I think we had a PS2 for a while because I remember playing mech style games and not liking the controls. There was only one game in the whole world I could beat my brother at and it required us to be in an Outer Space level. Was very proud of myself, quite chuffed.

My brother bought the first release of the first Xbox and we stuck to that. I finally bought my first console as an adult, it was a Xbox-1. I didnt invest in a PC until years later when I met my soon to be spouse. He saw me playing alot of SMITE on the console and he downloaded SMITE to his PC so I could feel the difference. Once I got used to the controls, my potential skyrocketed and I got alot better at the game.

Shortly after that I got my own gaming PC and we entered Vanilla WoW when it released a couple years ago. My dad and stepdad were obsessed over the game in the original playthrough, and I became obsessed one summer when visiting my dad to the point I would game until exhaustion and sleep under the desk, so that when I woke up I could play again right away. My now fiance had become a legend in WoW growing up and was able to show me everything I needed to know about the game in any class I desired.

It was awesome, we power leveled to 60 in 9 days played and entered an extremely competitive guild called "Will Fight Anyone" where I really sucked at the game. But, Fiance was so good at the game the guild wanted him, he had defeated several streamers in combat via PVP and friendly duals. The wars between factions were legendary and coordinated. He was main tank and sometimes side tank for the dungeons and performed exceptionally well, so much so that he could carry my dumbass and give me live instruction while he was busy. Seriously some of the most fun I have had gaming was in Vanilla WoW with my fiance.

Now I dont game much anymore... making too many sammiches, and I'm not that great at games anyways.

Lemmings and Civ 2.

Gotta say I loved scorched earth but I can't say it was my favorite. King's quest and dark sun were also quite good.