Black Falcon Games

I have no excuse for why I didn’t publish anything here in August or September, I just didn’t get to writing anything.  However, this month I have been very busy indeed, writing, researching online, watching video, and playing games for this two-part article on one of gaming’s greatest moments.  This will be a two-part series.  This is part one, and the second part is almost complete.  I could have posted both now, but it’s probably better broken up.  I have put a lot of work into this all month long and before, but there is always more I could add so expect edits as I think of things that should be added.  Because of how long I have been working on this for, I know I repeat myself sometimes, when I write similar things and then want to keep all of them.  Sorry about that.

For sources, other than the many facts I just know by now, I mostly used Wikipedia lists and GameFAQs for release date and factual reference, with Youtube for gameplay videos.  Facts, I will state and not link a source for unless one is particularly important.  Articles sources I will link where I use them in this article.  I will add a references section to the second article for some potentially useful or interesting links.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Categories: The Types of Electronic Gaming Platforms
• The Eras of Gaming
• Change Happens, but What is Lost?
• The Peak Years
• 1982
• The Gaming World of 1998 – Platforms and Hardware
• 1998’s Best Games
• Other Peak Games
• Gaming Hardware of 1998
• Genre Weak Points for 1998
• What Happened Next?
• Is There a Modern 1982 or 1998?
• How Will 1998’s Memory Last?  Or, PC Gamer’s 2025 Best Games Ever List
• Conclusion: On why 1998 is the Greatest Year in Gaming
• Addendum: The Dead and Dying Platforms of 1998

 

Introduction

What is greatness?  Thinking about it, I think that I would agree with those who say that the core of it is contrast.  This idea is not my invention, but I fully agree with the concept.  Greatness stands out because of the difference between the best times, or the most successful people, and the average or bad.  When times are good and everything is fine, greatness can be harder to discern.  It is easy to take how good things are for granted and not realize just what a special time it is.  But when times get harder, discerning the great from the mediocre or awful becomes more clear.

This will be an article about videogames, but to start with a historical analogy I saw mentioned online, Alexander the Great isn’t great just because he was a prince who inherited a nation with the strongest army in the world.  He was great because he did the greatest of things with that opportunity.  Almost all people would fail in that place, or at best be average, but he wasn’t and became a legend for it. I am mediocre at best at most things, but I am decent at writing (I should do it more often, huh?) and historical knowledge, as well as a few other things (building Lego sets by following the instructions, for instance).  But anyway, we really see Alexander’s greatness if we contrast him with other people who inherited great empires.  How many of them managed things in an acceptably average way?  Plenty, but generally not the memorable ones.  How many squandered it, losing empires with their incompetence or evil? Some, such as Caligula or the English King John.  How many were brilliant successes, leading their nation to glory? Very, very few.  Anyone can inherit the building blocks of great things, but the greatest do amazing things with those blocks that others don’t even think of.

But unfortunately, the good times never last for as long as we would like.  Alexander died young and his empire rapidly crumbled.  The ’empire’ of videogames is not a perfect analogy for this, but I am sure many looked back later and said, we did great things.  Why did we let it go?  Between getting older and looking at the seeming decline of the videogame industry, it has led me to look back at better times and say, what were the things that made that time special?  And what happened after?

I must note, I’m not a financial analyst.  Most of what I say I do think is backed up by facts, but don’t expect charts and numbers here.  I have looked at some articles that do have them, though, and I think they are saying the same basic message I am.

But to return to analogies, how about we look at a more recent example, the state of American democracy today.  I would like to think that now that our democracy is under such severe threat from Trump and his fascist allies that some people may look back and recognize just how amazing the existence of American democracy has been, that at its best moments America is the shining city on the hill, the first nation in the world governed by its people.  Unfortunately, we are far from that hilltop today.  To any who disagree with my politics, I will not return to this subject in this article.  I just had to say something.

At the time, the way The Matrix treated the year 2000 as the peak of humanity seemed silly, something just chosen because that was the current day then.  Of course, I’m sure that was exactly why it was chosen, but… it kind of was true, wasn’t it.  We actually kind of were at a peak that we now have fallen off of. A lot of the problems the world has now, including escalating global warming, rising fascism, microplastics and related health crises, and more, had started well before 2000, but at that point the system was working in a way that it now really isn’t.  (As an aside, I’m no big The Matrix fan.  I saw the original movie once and reasonably enjoyed it, and saw and The Animatrix also, but wasn’t interested enough to watch any of the other sequels and still haven’t seen them.  It just does seem that it happened to be right about our civilization’s peak, or so it seems today.)

When you are on the peak of the mountain, everything seems great… but if you move, the only way to go from there on foot is down.  To that point everything was uphill, but unless you are on a high ridgeline, a descent is in your near future.  That is happening to our world this milennium, and it happened to gaming at around that same time as well, though to less disastrous consequences overall.

But I should get to the point: Why is 1998 nearly universally acclaimed as gaming’s best year?  I think that the core of it is because multiple incredibly important events happened at the same time, and they all stand out because of major changes in the industry that happened during and after 1998 which radically changed gaming.  In the same year, 3d console games fully found their way with the new technology of polygons; the arcade business was still in good shape, before its collapse a few years later; and the PC business saw its best games ever before starting to fail the next year.  It was near the end of the period that lasted from the ’70s to the end of the ’90s where those three platforms, PC, console, and arcade, dominated electronic gaming, and all three saw all-timers release… only for two to collapse within years.  Once arcade and PC games had started falling off that mountain the slide just picked up speed year after year.

So, all of these things happened at the same time, and then things changed.  Naturally, later on this led people of all kinds to look back at 1998 and think, wow, that year had the best library ever! Without all of those things happening at once, you probably would not see the year reach the heights of popularity that it has.  With only the great PC games but not the console ones, for instance, the year definitely wouldn’t have the mythological status that it has; a lot of people today sadly do not play old computer games as they do old console games.  But, all of those things did happen in the same year, and so 1998 stuck in peoples’ memories as no other year before or since has.  One of the major eras of gaming was ending, and 1998 showed its games at their peak, just before everything changed.

Categories: The Types of Electronic Gaming Platforms

 

The basic breakdown in gaming from the ’70s to late ’90s was this: there were several different types of games.  These types still exist today, with some changes.

– Arcade Games – Arcade games focus on fast action. During this period arcade games had significantly better graphics than anything on a home platform, but the games need to be something fast and fun, and that will get the player to keep spending money at a steady rate into the machine.  In this way good arcade game design has some similarities with modern mobile design — if the player isn’t spending money, isn’t being coerced into it somehow by the game, then the publisher won’t be making money. [Today arcade games no longer have graphics better than home games.]

– Computer Games – Computers cost more than consoles and have faster processors, but until the later ’90s did not have dedicated graphics hardware to make console-style graphics possible.  As a result of this computers dominated in strategy games, simulations, flight games, and other kinds of games which benefit from having a mouse and keyboard and fast processor, but struggled at platformers, shmups, and other fast action games like that compared to consoles.  Computer games were dominant among post-1984 crash Western game developers.  There were a few console game publishers and developers in the West, but the vast majority of studios, and most of the best talent, worked on computer games.  Only a very few of those computer games ever released on consoles.  Meanwhile, in Japan computer games were a small market mostly dominated by a few genres like computer RPGs and visual novels.  [Today the PC is in the best place it’s been in a long time, but computer-focused games generally have smaller budgets than console ones.]

– Console Games – Console games during this period focused on faster action than computer games.  Slower-paced games existed on consoles as well, of course, but they did not have instant advantages over computer games like the more action-focused games did. Faster-paced action and shooting games are far better on consoles, though, and it isn’t close.  The pre-crash console industry was huge both in the US and Japan, but after the crash the American console publisher and developer market mostly dissolved, leaving Japan dominant in the field.  There were a few great Western console developers and publishers during this era, but it was a distinct few compared to the many on computers. [Today the console market has stalled in size of console install base, while development times and costs increase. Things look bad for the future.]

– Handheld Games – The handhelds of the ’70s to ’90s were often single-game electronic platforms, not actual full platforms. The first successful full platform handhelds released in 1989. After that, handhelds were basically the same as consoles, except portable.  This market was a subset of the console market mostly dominated by easier or shorter-form games that work well in a portable setting.  As with console games it was heavily dominated by Japanese studios.  However, starting in the ’00s this market would shrink, and that shrinkage would destroy it in the ’10s.  There are no actual dedicated handhelds, anymore, only dual-purpose machines such as the Switch or Steam Deck and the massive, but gameplay-vapid, world of cellphone games and their omnipresent gatcha mechanics and absence of gameplay worth caring about.  Very sad stuff.

Something important to remember about the categories above is that before the 21st century, a lot of games stayed exclusive to their format. Computer games rarely were ported to consoles.  It happened once in a while, but it was uncommon, only for the most popular games. Arcade games sometimes got home ports on computers or consoles, these ports were more common than PC to console ports or vice versa, but it was never a guarantee.  Console games occasionally got computer ports, but it was quite infrequent, again mostly only for the most successful games.  Now, up until the early to mid ’90s many computer games got released on multiple different computer formats, it is true.  Also, sometimes a successful console game would get ported to other consoles or would release on several systems at the same time.  As an aside, this was much more common for Western console games than Japanese ones; if a Japanese game was multiplatform it was more likely to be a late port of a successful games to other formats, instead of releasing simultaneously for multiple systems as Western studios were more likely to do. But there are of course exceptions to this in both directions.

Today the console, arcade, and computer markets all still exist, though as I said dedicated handhelds are dead now in favor of the cellphone and dual-purpose console or PC machine markets instead.  Cellphone games are a race to the bottom dominated by “games” that are effectively digital gambling.  The arcade market is very small now, with arcade games being mostly smaller budget affairs this century, a far cry from the high-priced affairs of the ’80s or ’90s.  The computer market has significantly recovered, but a lot of that is because of small indie developers who mostly make little to no money off of their games; most major studios remain focused on console games, or on games releasing on both PCs and consoles. And consoles, consoles are slipping now due to cost and time increases.  The strains in the industry are showing.

The Eras of Gaming

 

Video game consoles can be broken up into generations.  There are some controversies over the boundaries, but regardless of that, there have been nine console generations since the industry’s founding in 1972.  Ten, if you call the new Switch 2 a next-generation platform, but I don’t think anyone would; it’s just a late 9th generation one, I would say.   Anyway, thinking about it, I think we can break gaming up into three or four eras, each separated by a transition.

The first era is the platforms of the 1960s to the early ’80s, up to the crash of the American market in 1983 — the ‘Atari’ era. This era set the four kinds of electronic gaming in stone, and we have seen variations on these four ever since; more on those soon.  Following this was a transition, with the crash. The second era goes from 1985 to 1998, and covers the peak of the industry for people my age and a little younger — the ‘Nintendo’ or ‘PC golden age’ era.  These first two eras are different, but similar.  Despite the shifts in platforms, I think that there is a clear continuity between them of game design styles.  The real major break came around the turn of the millennium. Again there was continuity between the eras, but most of the industry today is much more like the industry of the early ’00s than it is the industry of the late ’90s; the differences are stark.

Anyway, following this was another transition, which I would say lasted from 1998 until the later ’00s.  It was probably long enough to call it an era of its own, the third era.  This is the ‘early modern’ period, perhaps, of rising console dominance at the expense of other platforms.  Following this, at some point in the mid or later ’00s, the fourth, modern era began.  This new way would dominate through the ’10s.  However, this decade, that era has begun to break down, as the same cost and time problems which ended the second era now are affecting the whole industry.  And so, we probably are in a third transition now, but what the next era will be we do not know yet.  Perhaps it is the resurgence of the PC as the dominant platform?  Things may be trending that way, but it remains to be seen.

For the first two of those eras, in the last year before things started to turn, many of the best, most defining games of their era and style released.  I do not think that has happened for the third era; perhaps development times are just too long now for one year to hold that many relevant releases.

The story of electronic gaming is one of constant change.  Technology evolves rapidly, the number of transistors on a chip doubled every year for many decades as per ‘Moore’s Law’, the guideline Intel tried to stick to, and electronic games react to that change by always having more power available than older platforms did.  More power leads to more opportunities to do more with your game, but it also leads to more challenges, as game development takes longer over time and the number of people required to make a game increases steadily as well.  Development of a ‘AAA’ game in the ’70s took one or two people a few months.  Today, a ‘AAA’ game costs hundreds of millions of dollars, as hundreds or thousands of people work for years, sometimes as long as a decade, on their game before it finally releases.  Are these costs sustainable?  Sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes, adaptations happen and the industry continues to grow.  Other times, costs go above revenues, and major change happens as a result.

Yes, sometimes storms brew in the game development mountains.  We live in a capitalist society, and that is fine; I am no Communist, those kinds of societal controls do not work.  Stifling human ingenuity and not rewarding greatness hurts society.  However, our capitalist system does require something, and that is money.  In order to fund the production of a game, a studio or their publisher need to put down a lot of money up front, hoping to make that money back on sales of the game later.  Movie studios have similarly front-laden costs, which is why we ended up with so few major studios; companies need to be large in order to withstand the costs of a big project failing to make back the money spent on it.

In game development, during each era things seemed great for a while, only for the eventual correction to send some out of the industry.  That happened in the first era up until the crash, as a huge number of American studios entered the industry in ’81 and ’82 only for most to shut down or move to computers just a few years later.  After that, the second era, defined by Western computer games and Japanese console games, lasted up until 1998.  Up to the late ’90s, sales were always enough to keep this system working for all branches of gaming.  But how long could the ‘numbers always go up’ system keep working?  At what point would costs go above revenues, and something would need to drastically change in order for studios to survive, if they could at all?

Well, for computer gaming in North America, its first home region as this is where almost all platforms of the first era were created, that crossover point was reached in 1998. That year is when computer games started to descend off of that mountain, forever altering the industry.  The decline would take five to ten years to bottom out, but once the decline began it would not be reversed for many years.  As a result 1998 is the key year, the last days of PC gaming’s golden age.  Sure 1997 and 1999 also had fantastic libraries, but ’97’s best look up at ’98, while in ’99 you could start to see the changes in the industry as console games gained a larger place in Western game studios’ libraries.  PC Gamer (US) Magazine saw its thickest issues ever in late 1997, with only slight declines each of the next few years before it became very visibly thinner by 2001.  This fits with ’98 being the peak for releases, but not profits. PC-focused game development would be sustained much longer in Europe than the US, as fewer people there had consoles.  Still, even there over time many studios would branch out into more console games.

And for arcade games, that descent off the mountain came just a year or two later. In America the peak of arcades was the early ’80s, but the early ’90s had a second peak.  After that things slowly went downhill until in ’99 or ’00 all major players abandoned arcade game development.  In Japan arcades lasted much longer due to the dense population, and indeed they still have a place there, but even there, over the course of the “early modern” period, arcades lost their place of dominance in the industry.  By the mid ’00s arcades were no longer a place for highly expensive experiences that would get ported to home platforms; instead those games started on consoles.  After this arcades became something more familiar to what they are today, a place for crane games, arcade-only experiences like racing games with fancy seat setups, and the like.

Meanwhile, console games benefited from the decline of their competitors.  Developers in other fields saw the higher sales of console games and said, we want in on that!  And for a good fifteen years, despite some troubles, things for the industry overall were good… until the 2020s, when rising development times and costs led to new troubles for the industry. Today console install bases have flatlined, while costs continue going nowhere but up.   This is clearly not a good trend line, and developers are coping by branching out and ending “buy my platform to play my games” exclusivity in favor of releasing PC versions of most games, Nintendo excepted.  And this is why the PC is, as I said, today in the best place it’s been in decades: it’s an omnipresent platform that anyone either watching other people play games on the internet on platforms like Youtube or Twitch knows about.  I think that there is still a place for consoles and I hope that they continue existing, but there is no denying the way things are going.

Change Happens, but What is Lost?

 

Now, you might be thinking, this has been a long article, but you’ve only infrequently been discussing your theoretical main subject, 1998!  Well, I think that the full history of gaming is key to understanding why 1998 is so beloved.  Without understanding the eras, that 1998 saw perhaps the most important dividing line in the industry’s’ history, I don’t think people will properly understand why 1998 is remembered as it is.

I know I have said most of this already in this article, but I want to repeat myself because it is important.  I mentioned capitalism earlier, and that games cost money to develop.  This requires enough money coming in to keep making the games as they had been up to that point.  Sales of each game needed to either be better than the sales of the last game, or prices had to go up.  As Moore’s Law progressed over time and chips got denser and denser in transistors development team sizes needed to increase steadily, and the length of time to make a game slowly went up from weeks to months to years.  Thanks to this, every year games got more expensive to make than they were the previous year.  This process has continued steadily from electronic gaming’s founding to today.

Change happens steadily over time, with formats and eras overlapping; it is not like a prince like Alexander inheriting the throne and suddenly changing policies, but like a steady flow of change, like a river… but along that flow certain points stick out.  In the late ’90s, as I said, an era began to end.  A very strong set of rapids hit the industry as costs got too high for game companies, and particularly Western computer game companies, to continue affording to make games as they had before.  The solution was to go multiplatform, to stop making most games for computers only or console only but instead to make games for all formats.  This new reality slowly phased in over about a decade, from the late ’90s to late ’00s, it was not immediate, and again it happened in the US first, and Europe later.

Once the transition was done, however, the PC market as we had known it was gone. I wrote a long forum thread in about 2010 mourning the death of PC gaming.  I never posted it on my site, but I probably should for historical reasons.  It’s partially right and partially wrong but I think it is a look at an important moment in time.  Fortunately, things would not stay down forever; PC gaming would be resurrected digitally some years later on a smaller, more boutique lower-budget scale, and that is fantastic, but a modern equivalent of the old heights may never be reached again.

The Peak Years

 

List wars are somewhat tricky because you can make a list of games from any year after the later ’70s that contains many all-time greats.  Even so, reminding people of the games that were released has at least some relevance, I think.

As I have said, I think electronic gaming can be separated into two to four major eras: 1960s to 1983, 1984 to 1998, 1998 to uh like 2009 or so, and 2010 to sometime in the 2020s.  That fourth era is likely ending now but as it is current we don’t know where the dividing line will fall.  I would like to discuss each of the first two mountain-peak years here and look at which games made that year stand out so much and showed developers mastering the art of development for their era of gaming.  For the two newer eras I am having a much harder time seeing one particular standout peak year, most of those kinds of games just aren’t ones I know as much about outside of Nintendo and some PC games.  I would like to have clear years here for each era but I just don’t know, sorry.

1982

 

As I said, 1982 was the peak year because just after that the industry started to crash, but that year many all-time classics released.  I am not going to get into the causes of the American market crash, that is beyond the scope of this article.  In the US, arcades were the number one place for gaming.  At home, the Atari 2600 was by far the lead gaming platform.  That year two new consoles released, the Atari 5200 (a North America-exclusive machine) and Colecovision. The Colecovision would be particularly significant due to it inspiring Nintendo to enter the video game industry.  Meanwhile, the rise of home computers was noticed by most everyone, and every console maker had plans to branch out into computer-console hybrids.  One very noteworthy computer released as well, the Commodore 64, which was to sell many millions in the US and especially Europe.

In Japan, few people had a home console or computer yet, but arcades were very popular and they had a booming arcade game development industry.  The next year would be when the first popular home consoles released in Japan, from Nintendo and Sega.  Meanwhile in Europe consoles never were especially popular until the PlayStation 1, and Europe never had much of an arcade game development business based there though arcades with American and Japanese games did exist, but in ’82 the rise of home computers in Europe started with the release of the ZX Spectrum.  Cheaply made games for home microcomputers would dominate the European game development industry into the early ’90s.

When I think of the top games of the pre-crash and crash era — that is, 1972-1984, primarily — for American games I think of, for arcade and console games, Pong, Combat, Breakout, Asteroids, Missile Command, Defender, Joust, Robotron 2084, Centipede, Pitfall, Ms. Pac-Man, and perhaps Tempest and Yar’s Revenge.  On the computer side, Zork I, Wizardry, Ultima, The Oregon Trail, Lode Runner, Rogue, Miner 2049er, and Adventure (Colossal Cave) are probably the key titles.  For Japanese games, and these are all arcade games because Japan’s console market didn’t get started until after America’s and few had a computer at home there then, Space Invaders, Space Panic, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong / Donkey Kong Jr., Galaxian / Galaga, and Xevious are probably the key titles.

As for Europe, its gaming market was slower to develop.  By the late ’70s there were a few European games, but Europe never really got much of an arcade game development scene, just home computer games. but I am not too well versed in older European games, almost none of them released here other than the one developer I need to mention, Jeff Minter.  He released one of his most popular early titles in ’82, Gridrunner (for A8, VIC-20, and Spectrum), and it did release in the US.  His ’83 game Hovver Bovver is also noteworthy.  Otherwise, as I said, the ZX Spectrum and C64 both released in ’82.  One of the most popular early Spectrum games was ’83’s Manic Miner, a title inspired by Miner 2049er.  I don’t think any games for either one were nearly as noteworthy as the arcade and American computer games I’ve mentioned above, but a British person’s input would be needed to get a better answer to that question.

Of those, which released in 1982?  Combining regions, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Jr., Yar’s Revenge, Xevious, Wizardry II, Ultima II, Zork III, Pitfall, Millipede, Joust, Robotron 2084, Gridrunner, Miner 2049er, and more.  Yeah, it’s a very good lineup, a bunch of games that built on and improved on pre-existing formulas, before everything began to change — you see this with the Pac-Man, Wizardry, Donkey Kong, Zork, and Ultima sequels.  Meanwhile, Pitfall, Robotron 2084, and Xevious are games which would prove to be very important and influential, bringing new ideas that would be copied many times over the decades.  Personally I don’t like Xevious all that much but cannot deny its influence, all three are among their respective genres’ most important early titles.  Miner 2049er is somewhat forgotten today, but at the time had a massive impact.  Pitfall is more famous today, but it’s Miner 2049er that most of the major Western platformers of ’83 would be inspired by — Manic Miner, Jumpman, Lode Runner, and more all clearly are based off of this game.  And last but not least, Yar’s Revenge is one of the most popular games on that era’s most successful gaming platform. 1982 is no match for 1998 but it is worth mentioning here for sure as the peak year of its era.

However, in the US in particular, that massive explosion of game releases was a problem.   Yes, many interesting games were releasing, but so were many uninteresting ones.  1982 is the year when the total number of games releasing absolutely exploded into an unsustainable bubble.  At this point there was no way for a hardware maker to make money off of third party game sales, and all games had to be released physically in a box, so the ensuing glut of forgettable, very low-budget shovelware games was not just slop you can ignore on the Steam storefront page, but an increasingly large number of boxes sitting on store shelves and not selling.  Within a year this would help take down the industry here.

As I said previously, Japanese console games and American (and sometimes European) computer games would fill in the void.  But let us skip to the next peak year before an era ended, 1998.

The Gaming World of 1998 – Platforms and Hardware

 

Obviously, the most important thing for the future is, what games released in a year?  The events that happened that year also matter, but when looking back it is the lasting products that matter the most.  But regardless, I probably should discuss the events of the year first, for any who do not know them.

In 1998, arcades, consoles, computers, and handhelds were all popular.  Cellphone games were not a thing yet, thankfully.  Some people still played on older consoles, but many were switching over to the current generation by this point.

Across most platforms gamers preferred polygonal 3d games, but the transition to 3d had not completed yet in 1998.  The two-dimensional, hand-drawn or computer-rendered, game was in one of its last years of significant relevance in ’98.  That year, many noteworthy 2d games released on just about every format.  Some genres, such as strategy and building simulation games, were still primarily 2d on all platforms.  However, over the next few years, one genre after another would go 3d.  For strategy games, 1999’s Warzone 2100 showed that you could make a good polygonal 3d real-time strategy title.  Age of Empires II that same year is a beautiful 2d game, but its developers’ next game would be polygonal.  In fighting games, after 2001 the 2d fighter declined, in favor of 2.5d and 3d ones.  In platformers, ’98 is one of the last years for a long time where significant 2d, not polygonal titles in the genre released on non-handheld platforms.  After ’98, the 2d platformer receded to something for handhelds or, later, indie developers only.  Baldur’s Gate’s engine would be used to make beautiful 2d RPGs until 2002, but after that D&D RPGs went polygonal with Neverwinter Nights.  And so it continued.  The 2d game never entirely went away, but for a while in the ’00s it seemed like it was about to.  In 1998, however, the preference of 2d or 3d depended on which genre someone was interested in.  3d was used for the kinds of games that benefited from it the most, like first-person games, racing games, or vehicular titles, and 2d from the games that benefited from it.  In this respect I think that ’98  was a more varied world than what we saw in the ’00s.

The lead console was the Sony PlayStation.  It had released in 1994 in Japan and ’95 in the West, and despite low expectations from a lot of people used to big electronics companies flopping in gaming, the system took off and would end up dominating the industry.  Decisions previous leaders Sega and Nintendo made helped make Sony’s victory easier, but Sony also made some good choices, most notably in the PS1 (also known as the PSX)’s easy development compared to its peers and powerful and yet affordable to manufacture hardware.  Sony also focused on the European market in a way nobody had done before, exploding that market’s sales from maybe 8 or 9 million combined SNES and Genesis systems to over 40 million PS1s.  The PS1 has a mixture of 2d and 3d games, though Sony at times restricted the release of 2d games in the West.

The second place console was the powerful Nintendo 64, the fastest console of its generation, which did well in the US, selling a similar number of consoles to the SNES in North America, over 20 million.  The N64 was one of several consoles released over the years which sold about two thirds of their worldwide sales total in North America.  The Sega Genesis the previous generation is another.  By ’98 it was clear that the N64 wasn’t going to match the Playstation in sales, but it was selling well enough in the US to get strong software support from developers wanting to make games for the most powerful console hardware.  The Nintendo 64 had the best 3d performance of all consoles of its generation and most of its games are 3d.

And in third place, Sega’s Saturn was in its death throes.  The Saturn has great 2d hardware and okay 3d hardware, but it was fatally undermined by 1998.  Sega of America CEO Bernie Stolar had essentially killed his own console back in early to mid ’97, and while the Saturn had some of its best games release in 1998 as the system faded out, the games either didn’t release in the US or released in minimal quantities.  It’s very sad stuff.  Remember, there was no digital distribution back then on consoles.  Games could only sell what was produced.  At the end of the year, in  Japan Sega released their new console, the Dreamcast.  However, the company was running low on money and produced very few systems early on.  It wasn’t until September 1999 that they had enough produced to release it in the West.  The Dreamcast is impressive, but would end up having as short a lifespan as the Saturn due to Sega running low on money.

In the handheld side, Nintendo was absolutely dominant.  The massive hit game Pokemon had revitalized the handheld market, first in Japan then in ’98 in the US as well, and Europe was soon to see the same.  Nintendo didn’t have much competition, either.  Sega had given up on handhelds back in ’97, and while Bandai and SNK were developing new handhelds — SNK’s first would release in Japan in late ’98, and Bandai’s in early ’99 — neither one was much of a threat to Nintendo’s dominance.  Nintendo released a new handheld in ’98, finally, the Game Boy Color.  It was a dated but functional design.  More on that later.

On the PC front, the PC, with Windows as its operating system and Intel or Intel-compatible x86 processors as its CPUs, had finally become the primary computer platform worldwide in the mid ’90s.  In the US the PC became the lead platform back in the mid ’80s, but it wasn’t until the mid ’90s that Japan and Europe finally went to Wintel instead of their previous preferred platforms like the Amiga (it’s actually American, I know), NEC PC-98, or ZX Spectrum.  PCs had fast CPUs which could be measured in hundreds of megahertz, hard drives large enough to install plenty of games to, and more.  And with the explosion of the 3d accelerator card market in 1996 and later, PCs had graphics better than any console, if you had the cash to buy a good new 3d graphics card for your PC.  Yes, computers were expensive, but prices had come down significantly over the course of the decade and many people who could not have afforded a computer back at the beginning of the ’90s now found machines available for low enough prices that people in lower income brackets were getting modern PCs in the later ’90s.  All kinds of games were made for PCs, including ports of some console and arcade games, 2d games, 3d games, and everything else.  However, game sales weren’t increasing by as much as development costs were and most PC games sold much less than console games did, so despite the massive increase in hardware sales, the PC game industry was in trouble.

As for Apple, the company had been in bad shape through most of the ’90s.  The problems had gotten worse and worse, but 1998 began their turnaround with the release of the iMac computer.  These cute-looking computers proved very popular, and Apple was saved to go on to release the iPhone and be the incredibly wealthy corporation they are now.  However, while very popular, the iMac isn’t much of a gaming machine.  There were some games on Mac, but not many.  I won’t be mentioning here which games of ’98 have Mac versions, sorry classic Mac fans.  I’ll just say that Starcraft did get a Mac release later in ’98, so at least there’s that!  Blizzard supported the Mac better than most.

In the arcades, arcades were still reasonably popular across all regions.  The industry had signs of trouble, particularly in the US, but for the moment arcade games were still releasing regularly.  So, those games.  What were some of the key games that make this year stand out over any others?

1998’s Best Games

It is hard to even know where to begin for 1998. I have a long list of games written, but that won’t fit here; the list will have its own article, coming soon.  The best place to start, though, is at the top. Here are the top highlights of 1998’s game library:

– The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64) – The most popular ‘best game ever’ on most lists, Nintendo’s all-time action-adventure classic is my favorite console game ever as well.  I wrote an opinion summary about this game years ago, look it up.  This epic adventure is an incomparable masterpiece which defined 3d game combat with its lock-on mechanic and has some of the best dungeon and puzzle design of any game.  The story is decently good, too, with an interesting theme of time, how quickly time passes, and the sadness we feel when we see how quickly time has gone by…  but while the story is interesting and mostly well done, it is the gameplay that is the core of why this game is so highly regarded.  Nintendo has always, correctly, been a gameplay-first company, and this game shows the brilliance of that focus as much as anything has.  From the controls to the world to the dungeons to the music and towns and everything else, this game is just about perfect.  There had been nothing even remotely at Ocarina’s level before its release, and it still stands as one of gamings’ greatest works after all these years.  This game deservedly has its place as the game with the highest review average ever.  If you look up the list Game of the Year award winners from ’98, almost every console award that wasn’t for a Sony-only publication went to Ocarina of Time.

– Starcraft: Brood War (PC) – My favorite game ever, Blizzard’s real-time strategy game Starcraft is an exceptionally brilliant game.  This sci-fi RTS is kind of Southern Hicks in Space meets Warhammer 40,000.  It is both funny and hopelessly dark and depressing, sometimes at the same time, and it’s a brilliant combination that works perfectly. The soundtrack is one of the greatest ever, as well; the Terran themes particularly are truly exceptional. The single player campaign is epic and very well written, something I would not say about anything Blizzard made after Warcraft III.  It is one of the best single player campaigns ever, but it is here not just for that, but also for its online multiplayer. PLayed through Blizzard’s Battle.net system, the online play has been there since launch and it’s still being played by thousands of people today, in both amateur and professional divisions.  The pro scene is centered in South Korea, and they are impressively good at the game. I still play Starcraft regularly online.  Am I any good?  No.  But I play anyway because it is amazing.  Starcraft is one of the most challenging competitive games ever designed, but it is that near-infinite skill ceiling that is part of what makes it so brilliant.  The very well done balance that keeps the game vaguely fair despite no balance patches since 2001 is also genius.  Starcraft is still without question the greatest thing ever produced in the history of gaming, and it isn’t close.  In gameplay, control, design, story, visuals, music, and everything else, Starcraft is the greatest.  If we were sending something out into space to show other civilizations our greatest achievements, the one I would pick for electronic gaming is Starcraft. Oh, and Starcraft fan modders invented the tower defense genre, as well, so Starcraft is responsible for that fantastically fun game style.

– Half-Life (PC) – Valve’s first game was the first title PC Gamer US ever gave a 98% score to.  The game was a major hit that would set its developer up for success.  This would later lead to developer Valve setting up what became PC gaming’s primary digital marketplace, Steam.  The game itself is a pretty fantastic FPS loaded with interesting set-pieces and in-game scripted sequences.  The games’ multiplayer was initially just standard deathmatch, outclassed by older titles like Quake, but given its massive success it should be unsurprising that modding the game became hugely popular.  This led to Half-Life: Counter-Strike, released in 2000, a multiplayer team shooter addon for Half-Life which revolutionized first-person shooters and is one of the most enduringly popular games ever. The only real thing holding Half-Life back is that its sequel often gets mentioned in ‘best games ever’ lists instead of the first one.  After all many lists like to only list one game per series, at least per era, and the second Half-Life usually gets the edge over the first, even though they scored equally high and the first probably won more awards — almost all major PC publications gave Half-Life their Game of the Year awards.  PC Gamer US gave it a 98% score, tying for their highest ever, and Game of the Year, for instance.  Despite Half-Life 2, the first Half-Life is still a very noteworthy and well made game.  Half-Life isn’t a game I personally have as much of an attachment to as the two games above, but I certainly recognize its impact and like the game.

– The First US Releases of These Incredibly Important Titles Released in Japan or Europe in 1996 or 1997 Happened in 1998 Here: Pokemon Red & Blue (GB), Grand Theft Auto (PC/PS1), Gran Turismo (PS1).  Pokemon’s influence particularly is incredibly massive and ongoing. It is 1998 when Pokemania hit the world, dramatically changing gaming forever.  Gran Turismo and GTA are also, obviously, extremely significant releases which would have major industry impact.  GTA and its single open world would eventually change gaming once it went fully 3d, and Gran Turismo is Sony’s longest-lasting and most successful franchise and by far the most successful realistic racing franchise ever.

Other Peak Games

 

– Panzer Dragoon Saga (Saturn) – This Japanese RPG from Sega is short, but in its length it is so interesting and unique that those who have played it still regard it as one of gaming’s greatest masterpieces.  It is a highly cinematic work with a tragic but compelling story and interesting gameplay.  The dragon-based turn-based battles are unique and quite interesting. The soundtrack is, typically for a Panzer Dragoon game, one of gaming’s best, and the art design is exceptional.  The story of the games’ creation is also tragic, as the developer Team Andromeda overworked themselves for years to complete the game. At least one person died before it released.  What they made, though, is an all-timer for the few who can afford to play it.

– Radiant Silvergun (Arcade/Saturn) (Japan-only release) – Developed by Treasure, a fan-favorite developer if there ever was one, this shmup (shoot ’em up)  is many peoples’ pick for the best game ever in its genre.  I prefer its Dreamcast sequel Ikaruga, myself, but RS’s influence cannot be denied.  The graphics, gameplay, music, and controls are all masterfully done and brilliant; this game is legendary for good reasons.  The game has a somewhat high learning curve due to having 6 weapons each mapped to a different button, but it’s worth learning.  In somewhat typical Treasure fashion the game centers around bossfights; it is not entirely a boss rush, but they are a large part of the game.  Every one is unique and interesting.  From its stunning art design its finely-tuned enemy patterns this game is one of the best.  I know that I consider Ikaruga the best shmup ever, but I would never deny Radiant Silvergun its originality, popularity, reputation, or importance.

– Falcon 4.0 (PC) – This flight combat simulation from Microprose is an uncompromising game which tries to be a realistic depiction of the F-16, and succeeds at that about as closely as a computer game could.  The game came in a binder full of 700 pages of information about how to operate the plane.  There is no HUD other than what there would be in the real plane, and everything works as close to real as is possible.  No game since has matched its vision and uncompromising attention to realistic detail.  And that’s not all; the game also has a full dynamic campaign, with a land war happening on the ground while you fly your missions, with a great number of vehicles on the ground doing their thing as you play.  No other flight simulator has a campaign that is its equal — the campaign may be the thing that actually makes Falcon 4.0 stand out the most, if its exceptionally accurate flight modeling doesn’t.  Flight simulators after this would not be made with this kind of budget.  There are modern updates from the community for this game.  The latest version is Falcon 4.38 BMS.  BMS is almost certainly the most realistic flight simulation on the market, certainly for the F-16 but probably generally.  Genre leader DCS is also complex but not quite as much as Falcon BMS.  The graphics are pretty nice too, though of course they don’t compare to a modern game like DCS or Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

– Grand Prix Legends (PC) – The racing game counterpart to the above title, sort of, Sierra and Papyrus’s masterpiece GP Legends is an extremely realistic take on the 1966 Formula One season, with physics and design as accurate to the real thing as is possible.  There is no HUD here, and no voice over a radio.  It’s just you and the car, and a little board held out as you go through each lap telling you how many laps remain and how far ahead and behind the closest racers are.  No game since matches its ambition and scope compared to the budgets of the time; generally even racing simulators want people to actually be able to easily enjoy the game.  Papyrus wasn’t trying to do that here, they were trying for realism.  They succeeded.  Can you drive in a straight line and not crash?  It won’t be easy.  Despite being the pinnacle of the genre GPL didn’t get as many awards as you might expect, probably because of how difficult control is.  Those who learned how to play it well love it, though.  This game also has modern updates which make it look amazing.  Even fans of other classic sim racers like Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix admit that Grand Prix Legends is the best older sim racing game.  I need to mention, the games’ developer Papyrus’s staff would later leave to found iRacing, the number one name in online simulation racing.  iRacing is built on Papyrus’ engine, and they have a modern Grand Prix Legends mode in iRacing that is essentially a sequel to this classic with their modern engine and tracks. That is very cool.

– Banjo-Kazooie (N64) – This game was Rare’s first 3d platformer, and it was a very important title for the genre.  This game would help define what 3d platformers would become: not just platforming-focused games where you do one objective at a time as you do in Mario 64, but item collection and combat-focused games that have a platform-jumping component but also have minigames, free exploration of large open spaces looking for things to collect, and more.  This game started out as a completely different title for the Super Nintendo called Dream, but ended up like Mario 64 but with the ability to stay in the level as long as you want, collecting stuff and doing mini-missions. You unlock abilities as you go through the game.  The game has a few rough points, most notably that in its Nintendo 64 release it doesn’t save your notes, the basic coin-style collectible, so it’s not worth getting any of them until you have all the powers.  Some later re-releases fix this issue. Even so, BK is a fantastic game.  It is not my personal favorite Rare 3d platformer, I’m sorry but I love Donkey Kong 64, but BK’s humor, visuals, level design, and general greatness are obvious to those who play it.  The games’ influence and quality cannot be denied.  No collectathon-style 3d platformer has been as popular as this one since its release; BK is surely still the leader in that field.  It nails the balance between having a lot of things to collect, but not having so many that people get overwhelmed.

– Grim Fandango (PC) – This adventure game is widely regarded, including by me, as being the greatest adventure game ever made.  The Mexican Day of the Dead theme is really interesting and unique, and the story and puzzles are second to none. If it seemed like adventure games couldn’t get better after this… well, they couldn’t.  The genre faded in popularity significantly almost immediately afterwards.  Gamespot, then as now one of the biggest electronic gaming websites, actually gave the Best Game of 1998 award to Grim Fandango, making it one of the few places to not award Half-Life with the Best PC Game of ’98 moniker.  The game did not sell very well but should have with how exceptionally well written and drawn and designed it is.  Grim Fandango is a classic adventure game except you directly control main character Manny Calavera, instead of a cursor, so I remember playing it with a gamepad. Despite this it is pure graphic adventure goodness, and is all about story and figuring out complex inventory puzzles. It’s great stuff.

– Baldur’s Gate (PC) – This RPG from BioWare would define the PC RPG to me and many other people from its release on.  Baldur’s Gate is a depiction of 2nd edition AD&D rules, adapted into a pauseable real-time engine, was done so brilliantly that I’d argue that it still is the best RPG game engine ever designed.  The story is fine enough, it sets up the series well and is well written. When I went back to play the game again I was impressed at the subtle hints early on about things that wouldn’t fully realize until the second game. Even so, not everyone finds its initial focus on an iron quality crisis interesting.  Additionally, the game is somewhat open-ended and has many large, fairly empty areas.  Even so, that just means you have more opportunities for combat, and the combat here is the best ever in any RPG other than maybe Baldur’s Gate II.  Indeed, it’s the gameplay and strategic combat that really carry this game to the top.  If you like fantasy RPGs or strategic battles Baldur’s Gate is one of the best games ever.  Fortunately I care more about gameplay than story, and as far as gameplay goes in an RPG, Baldur’s Gate is second to none other than maybe its sequel.  The second games’ high-level combat has great strategic depth and complexity and more focused zones with less empty space, but the first game is more innovative and I love its relative simplicity.  It has some of the most memorable voice lines ever in a game, as well. “Ohh, I’m so tired…”

– Thief: The Dark Project (PC) – The first true stealth simulator, this first-person masterpiece essentially invented the stealth game as we know it.  1998 is the key year in the stealth genre’s evolution, thanks to Thief, Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu, and Commandos, but of the four, Thief is the most important thanks to its highly interesting, detailed stealth modeling.  Those other three are important but have fairly simple steath mechanics, but that is not the case here.  You will need to watch guard patterns and your sound, pay attention to surfaces, and use your items carefully as you try to get your prizes.  Developer Looking Glass was brilliantly talented at innovative first-person game design, as you see in System Shock, Thief, and more, and you see that here.  They weren’t sure how well stealth-only gameplay would do with the public so there are also some missions where you have to fight undead in caves and such, levels where stealth is limited, but even so player character Garrett isn’t much of a fighter.  Avoiding foes or taking them out from the shadows is usually the better approach if you wish to live.  Later stealth games like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell or Dishonored would not exist without Thief.

– Metal Gear Solid (PS1, later PC) – Hideo Kojima’s ultra-popular cinematic action game would become one of gaming’s most popular series for a while. I don’t like this game at all but have to admit its massive success and popularity.  The stealth here is much simpler than Thief’s, with an overhead-isometric viewpoint most of the time and gameplay quite reminisent of the NES or MSX Metal Gear games, but it did advance things beyond them in stealth and particularly in action and boss-fights.  Particularly, though, the games’ cinematic presentation and increasingly crazy story made it an iconic hit.

– Xenogears (PS1) – This Japanese RPG is one of the more important ones that isn’t a Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game, as it not only started a long-running series that still exists and is now owned by Nintendo, the Xeno (Gears, Saga, Blade) games, but also is a beloved classic with what is perhaps the most highly regarded story ever in an RPG.  Xenogears and its epic, tragic tale probably has the best story of any game of 1998.  ’98 may not have a new Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game, but it has this and I am sure many RPG fans would say it is just as good a year for it.  The soundtrack is absolutely top tier, as well.  I particularly love the ending theme.

– Unreal (PC) – Unreal, the game, is a good first person shooter.  it is a single player game going through a classic, Quake-styled shooter campaign, and was id rival Epic’s entry into the FPS craze.  The game wasn’t the best or more acclaimed game of the year, but it was a quality title.  In the crowd of shooters released in ’98, Unreal did stand out in one respect though, its graphics.  Unreal probably had the best graphics of any PC game released in 1998.  Epic would leverage that graphics tech over the years to transition from being exclusively a game developer to a studio as focused on selling their Unreal Engine to game developers wanting a good 3d engine for their games as on making its own games.  The Unreal Engine remains probably the most popular nonfree 3d engine to this day.

Selected Other Noteworthy Console Games: F-Zero X (N64), Spyro the Dragon (PS1), Crash Bandicoot: Warped (PS1), Wario Land 2 (GB), Super Tempo (SAT) (J), Stellar Assault SS (SAT), Colony Wars: Vengeance (PS1), R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1), Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (PC/N64), Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA (N64), Tenchu: Stealth Assassins (PS1), Resident Evil 2 (PS1), Sonic Adventure (DC) (JP release), Burning Rangers (SAT), Wipeout 64 (N64), 1080 Degrees Snowboarding (N64), The Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit (PC/PS1), Moto Racer 2 (PC/PS1), Rockman & Forte (SNES) (JP release), Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (N64/PC), R-Type Delta (PS1) (JP release), Shadow Tower (PS1) (JP release), the first home ports of previously released arcade games like NFL Blitz (PS1/N64/PC), Tekken 3 (PS1), Mortal Kombat 4 (PS1/N64), and Virtua Fighter 3tb (DC, JP release), etc, etc.

Selected Noteworthy PC Games: Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Worms 2, Quest for Glory V, The Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit (PC/PS1), Moto Racer 2 (PC/PS1), Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D (PC/N64), Motocross Madness, Vangers, Star Wars: Jedi Knight – Mysteries of the Sith (Expansion Pack), Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, Starsiege: Tribes, Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six (also later on PS1/N64 in downgraded form), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, Sanitarium, Caesar III, Battlezone (1998), NFL Blitz (PS1/N64/PC), etc, etc.

Key Arcade Games from 1998: Radiant Silvergun, The Last Blade 2, Metal Slug 2, The King of Fighters ’98, Daytona USA 2: Battle on the Edge, Sega Rally 2, ESP.Ra-De, Blazing Star, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Marvel vs. Capcom, Armed Police Batrider, The House of the Dead 2, Gauntlet Legends, Dance Dance Revolution, etc.

Any game from these three lists could reasonably deserve a paragraph explaining its greatness or importance here, but this is long enough already so read part two for some of that.

Here’s a fun challenge: make a top 5 in some genre.  Make it all games from 1998. How many games into the list can you get before someone reading the list, without the years mentioned, would realize what you are doing?  I think it’s often quite far.  I will have  genre lists, with thoughts about many of the games, in the next article.  There will be some overlap from this article but that’s okay, I’m sure some people will read only one or the other.

Gaming Hardware of 1998

 

(Why do I have both this section and the above hardware and current platforms section?  I don’t know.  First I wrote this one a few days ago, then I wrote that one above later, then I kept both.  I think the current platforms section was a good addition, and this has some things that one does not, so both have a function, but I know they overlap.  Sorry about that.)

In hardware, 1998 was a pretty great, and significant, year.  I mentioned most of these earlier, but here are going to focus on the gaming hardware only.  On the PC side, while the consumer had many options for 3d graphics cards, most of them at least partially incompatible, 3dfx was the best one by far, and they had an amazing new card this year.  The 3dfx Voodoo2 graphics card released in ’98.  While the original Voodoo from several years earlier is probably the most important graphics card release ever, the Voodoo2 was a hugely big deal.  However, 3dfx’s rival NVidia had a great card that year also, the Riva TNT, and in some ways it was just as good as a Voodoo2, apart from it not supporting the 3dfx-exclusive Glide graphics mode that so many games of that era looked best with.  In retrospect, it was all downhill for 3dfx after this, as NVidia pushed tech, releasing a new card every six months.  This would bury 3dfx and their one year or more per card cycle.  ’99’s Voodoo3 was a good card, but later that same year NVidia released the GeForce 256 and just kept going from there, and combined with other 3dfx mistakes they were done soon after, shut down and with their rights bought by ascendant NVidia.  It’s such a shame, because 3dfx cards were special!  The Voodoo2, particularly, was an unbelievable thing.  It was a massive upgrade over any consumer 3d graphics card available before and was significantly more powerful than any console of the day.  I got a Voodoo2 in late ’98 and absolutely loved it.  I have been using NVidia cards since the GeForce 256, but I will never love an NVidia card like I did that Voodoo.

Also, this is technically software, but Windows 98 released this year.  This evolution of Windows 95 significantly improved a lot of things and made development easier.  Most probably would still pick it as their favorite of the three Win9x releases.  This is relevant for gaming because a great many games eventually moved to supporting not Win9x in general, but Win98 or above only.

On the console side, three new platforms released and one accessory, though two only released in Japan at this point.  First, the addon.  The Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak released late in 1998, supported by a handful of games such as Star Wars Rogue Squadron and Turok 2.  This 4MB RAMBUS RAM upgrade doubles the system memory in the console, allowing games to store a lot more data than they could before.  It allowed for higher resolutions or areas denser with things going on.  Only a few games require the Expansion Pak, but a good number support it.

The next few platforms are handhelds.  In the fall, the Nintendo Game Boy Color released nationwide.  This release, shortly following on Pokemon’s North American release a few months earlier, absolutely exploded in sales due to the phenomenon that was Pokemon. Sure, Pokemon was not a color game and ran just fine on an original Game Boy, but the GBC was cheap and millions of kids wanted Pokemon, and many of them got a GBC to play it on.  I had little interest in Pokemon myself, but did get a GBC for Christmas along with one game, Pocket Bomberman.  The GBC is underpowered, being basically an original Game Boy with twice the clock speed, but it’s got a very high quality game library. The GBC would have a short 2 1/2 year primary life, but still it got a lot of impressive games while it lasted.  Its big launch title was Tetris DX.

The other two systems only released in Japan, both late in the year: the Sega Dreamcast and SNK Neo-Geo Pocket.  The latter never released outside of Japan, as less than six months later SNK upgraded it to the Neo-Geo Pocket Color; that colorized model is the one released internationally. The NGPC is in many ways the best handheld of its era, with the best-feeling buttons and best action and fighting games of any handheld of that time or before.  The original NGP is similar to the color model, but doesn’t have, well, color, or compatibility with a lot of the later titles.  I don’t have a NGP because there is little reason to get one for anyone who has a NGPC, but still, SNK’s entry into the handheld market may have been doomed but it was fun while it lasted.  The few B&W-only games play just as well as the color ones, and many games are also B&W compatible along with Color.

And last but definitely not least, Sega released their last console, the Dreamcast, in November.  There is a lot in common between the NGP/C and DC, as both were released by struggling companies on their last legs, had amazing games release for them, then died tragically young, leaving fans remembering them and wishing for more ever since.  The Dreamcast didn’t release internationally until September 1999, and the initial Japanese launch was of far too few systems to meet demand, but for those few people who got one, they saw the future: one of the most beautiful hardware designs ever; 480p progressive scan video output, the first time a console could output a signal above the resolution that a standard definition television can display; online connectivity, later on, once the modem (it was not packed in in Japan at first, unlike the West) and online games released; top tier graphics close to on par with what the Voodoo2 could do though at lower maximum resolutions than it could output; and, available in late 1998, Sonic the Hedgehog’s noteworthy return in his classic Sonic Adventure.  Sonic Adventure’s level design would set the tone for the rest of the Sonic series going forward and is a pretty important moment in 3d platforming.  The Dreamcast is fascinating because it both the beginning and the end.  It is the very last console designed with accurate ports of arcade games being central to its design ethos.  It is the last console where those arcade ports were significantly important.  But at the same time, as I said above, it was the first console of a new generation, and brought new advances in graphical output and online connectivity.  I don’t think that there is any other console that so perfectly captures the ethoses of two different eras of gaming at the same time as the Dreamcast does.

Weaknesses of 1998’s Game Library

 

However, no year is perfect.  While 1998 had some of the best games ever in many categories, there were a few types of games that either are very important now, or were then, which missed out that year, for various reasons.  Some were genres still rapidly improving, which would have their breakout hits the next year but weren’t quite ready for the big time in 1998.  Others simply skipped the year because of development timing.  Developers were slowing down support for some genres due to declining sales versus costs, but most genres got major titles this year anyway.  A few did not.

RPG (MMORPG) – The MMORPG genre was young in ’98, but it did exist.  However, when it comes to new releases, all this genre really had for a finished game taht released in 1998 was the first Unreal Online expansion pack.  UO released in ’97 and Everquest in ’99.  Online RPGs would be the top PC genre of the next decade, but in ’98 with only UO and Meridian59 out there for graphical MMORPGs, the genre was on a big upswing thanks to UO, but was still waiting for its big breakout moment.  In ’98, text-based MUDs were mostly outdated, but the 3d, third-person MMO was a thing people wanted but that had not been perfected yet.  I would probably put that big breakout moment in ’99 with the release of EverQuest.  For the dedicated EverQuest entered beta in ’98, however, so some people were playing the future of gaming that year.  For that reason perhaps MMORPGs shouldn’t be on this list, as EQ is one of the more important releases in gaming history, and it was first played by people outside of its development team in 1998.  It’s no surprise that the EverQuest betas were mentioned as one of the best online RPGs of ’98 in some awards, there wasn’t much finished releasing that year in the field and the game was clearly special.  Other than the EQ beta the only new MMO release of ’98 was a UO expansion pack, though, so based on that I am putting it here.

Simulation (Mech) – There wasn’t a first or third person mech sim game this year, surprisingly.  Not any at all that I can find.  There were some pretty good real-world tank sims such as M1 Tank Platoon II and iM1A2 Abrams, and some good mech games in other genres, such as the strategy games MechCommander and Cyberstorm 2 and the action game Future Cop L.A.P.D., but no first or third person mech sims.  And this isn’t a regional thing, there were no mech sims releasing in ’98 in Japan either.  Armored Core (PS1) is another one of those series that bookended ’98, with releases in ’97 and ’00, and there weren’t any others either.  Mech games were popular in the ’90s, but while there still were big mech games in development, 1999 would bring Starsiege and MechWarrior 3’s releases on PC and I mentioned Armored Core already, none released in ’98.

4X Grand Strategy – This is another genre that perhaps shouldn’t be on this list, because there were two somewhat noteworthy 4X games released in 1998, but I decided to include it.  Both are quality games with dedicated fans.  However, both are also somewhat niche titles that general audiences, even general audiences of people who like 4X games, mostly rejected.  Those games are Deadlock II: Shrine Wars and Star Wars: Rebellion.  The only other 4X game was a niche little Europe-only title called Galax Empires.  Deadlock and Rebellion are both very dense, menu-heavy titles.  The main focus of both titles is on managing numerous systems, mostly controlled with menus.  4X games can be dense, but these aren’t economics-systems-heavy Eurogames, or approachable Civilization-style games, they are more for people who want that kind of menu-heavy game.  For the people who like that, ’98 is a decent year for 4X.  But for people wanting the greatest of 4X games, they’d have to wait a few months until early ’99’s Alpha Centauri, or continue playing older classics like Master of Orion II or Civilization II.  The rise of dense, systems and menu-heavy strategy games that managed to succeed at interesting the kind of audience that Rebellion mostly failed to get to really happened in 2000, when the European studio Paradox released its first game, Europa Universalis.  Paradox still dominates that subgenre today.  If you look online though you will find a few Rebellion fans out there.

4th Generation TV Console Games – I say TV because the Game Boy had a good year, but in North America, Super Nintendo (SNES) and Sega Genesis were on their last legs and the TurboGrafx CD was long dead.  Both SNES and Genesis saw their last American release in 1998… Frogger.  It is A straight port of the then over 15 year old arcade game.  And that’s it for the year.  Uh, yeah.  It is fine but not exactly a thrilling end to either one of those amazing consoles.  In Japan the Genesis (Megadrive) was long dead and the PC Engine CD (TurboGrafx CD) nearly gone, but the SNES (Super Famicom) was still alive, and with some quality game releases too — Super Famicom Wars, Rockman & Forte, Wrecking Crew ’98, and a few more.  Also, Kirby Star Stacker’s SNES version released this year, albeit as a download service-only release; the physical cartridge version released in ’99.  But even there, looking at those games, while it is fun, Rockman & Forte is probably the weakest of the five SNES Mega Man platformers.  Wrecking Crew ’98 might actually be the best SNES game of the year, it’s a decent puzzle-platformer.  If it’s not that it’d be Kirby Star Stacker, a nice SNES edition of the Game Boy puzzler.  It’s a really fun but easy game, a good intro to block-dropping puzzle games.  However, most would rather have the 1999 cart release than a Nintendo Power (JP download service) flash-cart version.  Super Famicom Wars is fine but nowhere near Advance Wars’ greatness, and the other games of ’98 were few and far between.  The thin libraries here make sense given that it’s at the very end of the lives of all systems of the generation, but 1998 has a weaker 4th gen TV console lineup than any year since the generation started.

Genres in Development: Is This a Weakness?

There are a few more genres I must discuss in this ‘weaknesses’ section.  For, while key developments were made in both of these fields, not having these genres in significant fashion IS a weakness when you compare 1998 to a newer year.  Many of the most popular harder-core games of the last 15 years or so are one or both of these genres.

Soulslikes – The Soulslike genre of very difficult, slow-paced third person open-world hack and slash action games with precise timing required to stay live did not exist yet in 1998, so it, obviously, did not have the best year… except it kind of did.  You see, without 1998 the Soulslike may never HAVE existed, because two releases this year showed FromSoft the way forward towards their seminal hit of the mid ’00s, Demon’s Souls, and the creation of the genre.  Demon’s Souls is effectively one part King’s Field, and one part The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.  Or, to mention two 1998 games, Demon’s Souls is a hybrid of Shadow Tower (PS1) (JP release; US ’99) and Ocarina of Time. Shadow Tower is a darker, more horror-styled take on King’s Field, a slow, deliberate, and very difficult first-person action-RPG that is as divisive as any other title in its somewhat unpopular franchise.  King’s Field and Shadow Tower may be Dark Souls’ predecessor franchise in style and aesthetic, but Ocarina of Time changed gaming forever, and nowehre is that more apparent than when you compare Shadow Tower to Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls.  The Souls game formula essentially takes a much more challenging version of Ocarina of Time’s lock-on combat system and combat and pairs it with Shadow Tower’s grim aesthetic, brutal difficulty, single open map, and slower pace.

I shouldn’t even need to say it, but The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time does hold up well.   People who play the game for the first time now like it, I have seen enough such impressions to know that.  However, its moderate-at-best difficulty isn’t what a soulslike fan is really looking for.  And on the other hand, Shadow Tower is a well-made King’s Field game, but few of even the most dedicated Dark Souls fans enjoy the King’s Field or Shadow Tower games; the combat is just so slow and simple.  Sure, they may love the style and aesthetic, but the gameplay?  Without the Zelda influence people like it less.  And so, Soulslikes are in this category.  What do you, the reader, think?

Open World Action or Driving Games – Open-world RPGs were in a good place in 1998.   Open-world is not a genre of its own, but a descriptor for a type of game within some other genre, and in the gaming world of the ’80s and ’90s, most “open-world” games were RPGs.  They were the games most likely to allow you to explore a large world freely.  Some examples of RPGs from 1998 with extensive open worlds to explore include Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, which is the 1998 RPG with the largest world to explore, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate, and perhaps also Shadow Tower.  However, the open-world action game was still in its infancy, and the open-world racing game really did not exist.  There were a few open-world car combat games, but not pure driving games with large worlds.

In other kinds of games, generally either you followed a linear path, played for score in a game which doesn’t change, or explored around a space looking for items which would allow you to find your way forward in a space of limited size.  However, even though RPGs are usually open, or perhaps because they always have been open, the term “open-world game” is often just assumed with some kinds of RPGs and may not even be mentioned.  Instead, it is more often a descriptor for third person action games, or vehicular combat games, or driving games, or action-adventures or platformers, or other kinds of games like that, to note that this one is open.

Anyway, there are multiple types of open worlds.  Some games have one gigantic connected world for you to explore.  There may be separated out areas within that space for dungeons or such, but most of the world is one place.  It may be one connected world or may be broken up into zones for loading purposes, but it is one place.  For example, Grand Theft Auto games are like this, among many others.  It is an extremely popular design style this century.  Some other games, however, are more of a hybrid, semi-open games with free exploration within each map but some kind of linear-ish progression system and maps that are clearly separated from eachother with more than just loading zones.  For example, Super Mario 64 is like this.  It has open levels, but is also somewhat linear, and each map is its own thing you tackle once at a a time.

So, what was there in 1998 for open-world games that weren’t RPGs?  First I would like to mention a few action-adventure games with RPG elements.  Most obviously, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time as a semi-open structure, with large-ish maps to explore and plenty of exploration along the way.  You do mostly follow a linear story in the game, though.  A game more open than that is The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (PC).  This game has a small world for an Elder Scrolls game, but the game has plenty of puzzles and interseting design elements.  A remake with bug fixes and modernized controls would do that game wonders.  Another must-mention title is the first-person action game Jurassic Park: Trespasser (PC).  It does not have an open world, just large open levels you progress through in order, but its exploration of large open levels and physics-based gameplay puzzles would be incredibly important for the future of gaming; modern open-world games often have a physics-manipulation component, and Trespasser did that first.  It is an important milestone in game physics.  I could mention Shadow Tower here as well, perhaps, for its open design, typical to all King’s Field and Soulslike games.

However, if you want a straight action game with open-world elements, of the style that would become exceptionally popular in the ’00s or beyond, 1998 doesn’t have much.  Tech, and game development, wasn’t there yet.  On-foot-only open-world games just weren’t quite a thing yet.  For car-focused games, first I must mention Grand Theft Auto, that seminal action/driving game that released in Europe in late ’97 and the rest of the world in ’98.  Beyond that, probably the closest thing would be a few more games with separate open maps that you go through in order, Body Harvest and Vangers.  Body Harvest, like Trespasser, is a linear game with extensive exploration allowed in each level along the way.  It is a major advance in third-person action games, as it has car combat and is from the same developers as Grand Theft Auto and was their first close-in third person game; recall, GTAs 1 and 2 have an overhead camera.  It must be mentioned here.  However, is Body Harvest open-world?  Not really.  Vangers is closer.  The title is an utterly bizarre overhead-perspective car combat, adventure, and trading game with an open world that is broken up into separate maps.  You can freely travel between those maps, though, so Vangers is a very highly open-ended game with minimal guidance.  It is a crazy but fascinating fever-dream of a game well worth a look, though expect to be confused.

As for driving games that don’t have weapons, the major advances in open-city driving games would come the next year, with 1999’s Driver and Midtown Madness.  Neither of those games has a full open world to drive around in beyond their city maps, though; that kind of design would take more years to develop.  The best ’98 has are probably Motocross Madness or Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now for the PC.  Those two and their large, but entirely disconnected, maps are probably as big as racing game maps got in ’98, if we aren’t counting Vangers.  Midtown Madness has large but mostly barren maps, and Carmageddon moderate-sized cities to drive around and wreck the other cars in.  There are plenty of other racing games released in ’98, but they all have track-based or very small map designs, not large open spaces to drive around in.  This is a clear difference between the racing games of ’98 and those of  the 2020s.

So yeah, open-world RPGs, yes, but open-world third-person action or driving games, not quite apart from maybe Vangers and Body Harvest.  1999 would be the major turning point for the genre as mentioned, with 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III (PS2, PC/Xbox later) bringing the genre into a peak of prominence that it has remained in ever since.  As for open-world action-adventure games outside of RPGs, that genre would develop over the next decade.  Some key titles include Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (2005), Assassin’s Creed (2007), and Minecraft and Demon’s Souls (both 2009).  After that the transitional era of the ’00s was over and the modern one, dominated by open world games like those, had begun.

What Happened Next?

 

First, as I said earlier, the 2d game would rapidly decline after 1998.  Between the mid ’90s and mid ’00s, developer after developer, genre after genre, abandoned 2d for 2.5d — that is, polygonal graphics with two-dimensional gameplay — or fully polygonal 3d engines, until almost nothing was left in 2d by the early ’00s other than handheld games and some indie titles or low budget PC wargames and RPGs.  Adventure games, RPGs, building sims, real-time strategy, turn-based strategy, everything went polygonal.  This transition made sense, as polygons are much easier to animate and cheaper to develop, and with high enough fidelity models can look pretty good, but for a while it led to games that I have always thought looked worse than their 2d predecessors.  For instance, compare Warcraft III to Starcraft or Warcraft II; Age of Empires III or Age of Mythology to Age of Empires II; Neverwinter Nights to Icewind Dale II; The King of Fighters XIV or newer to any before that; SimCity 3000 to SimCity 4; or many other examples.  Polygons and sprites both should have their place in gaming.  In 1998 that was still the case, for a moment.

Despite the beginnings of decline, for the next two years after ’98, things were still pretty good for American PC game releases.  A lot of amazing PC games released in ’99 and ’00.  After that, however, the number per year dropped off significantly, as the market cooled and increasing numbers of developers moved over to focusing on console games each year. ’98 is the consensus greatest year, but ’99 and ’00 were also pretty great.  Personally I would probably put them below ’96 and ’97, and maybe also ’95, but that whole period was the peak of the American PC game business.  All of those years are great, and the ’00s still had the occasional great game releasing, particularly if you liked FPSes or MMOs.  On the arcade side, the decline was more rapid; after ’00 American arcades crashed hard.  In other regions arcades lasted longer, of course, but even in Japan by ’02 you see fewer significant arcade games.

However, in 1999 there were some important signs of the coming changes.  First, Sierra, one of the largest and most important PC studios of the ’80s and ’90s, collapsed, and most staff were fired in February ’99.  Sierra had been in decline for several years, due to external and internal reasons, but for their staff the end came  that February.  At the corporate level, a major cause of this was their new owner (as of 1996), CUC/Cendant.  First, divisions in the merged company led to both Davidson and Sierra’s founders leaving.  When comparing the two studios, though, Blizzard was lean, together, with it, making games people wanted to buy, and organized, while Sierra was large, disorganized, and struggling to come up with software the market still wanted.  Then, worse, it was revealed that Cendant was involved with a major financial scam, and invented hundreds of millions of dollars of “revenues”.  This scandal broke in mid ’98, significantly damaging the company and eventually leading to several people serving over a decade in prison.  As a side effect of the financial scam being revealed, Cendant sold off its gaming division in November ’98 to French company Havas (Vivendi) for a billion dollars, half that what it had paid for the two companies just a few years earlier.  Havas took the axe to Sierra just months later, while Blizzard was unaffected as they continued to work on their still years-away Warcraft projects.  Why?  Blizzard was more profitable and organized, Sierra wasn’t.  In 2000, Sierra and fellow adventure game company Lucasarts both released their last adventure games ever.  After that both abandoned that genre.  PC adventure games mostly stopped being made in the US after that, moving over to Europe as I said previously.  Sources:  For more on the tragic collapse of Sierra, see https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-story-sierra-online-death-cuc-cendant-fraud/ and https://www.filfre.net/2025/04/the-end-of-sierra-as-we-knew-it-part-2-the-scandal/.

Second, later in ’99, Williams Electronics left the arcade business by shutting down their pinball division.  Chicago-based Williams had been the number one name in pinball for decades, so this was a significant move showing the rapid decline of the American arcade business.  Williams would switch over to a focus entirely on casino gambling machines, a business where their successor company is still successful.  In June 2001, Midway Games, the largest American arcade game publisher and a company closely tied to Williams for a long time, followed Williams out of the arcade business.  After that, all that was left for American arcade companies were some smaller ones such as Stern for pinball and Raw Thrills for arcade games, a company set up in the early ’00s by former Midway staff.  Midway would last another decade, but eventually it would go bankrupt in 2010, the company declining from being a top five third party to bankrupt over that time due to being unable to manage the transition from arcade-focused studio to home console studio well enough.  Midway’s remains would be bought by Warner Bros., and its only surviving studio is the one that makes the Mortal Kombat games, now home console exclusives.

And third, in 2001, Microsoft, the company that makes the operating systems PCs run on and a significant publisher of PC games between 1995 and 2000, released their first videogame console, the Xbox, and shifted over their primary development focus over to console games. You might think that they would have released everything also on PC, but for a long time they did not.  Instead they only focused strongly on Xbox, with PC as an afterthought for a long time.  And they pushed other developers to follow them and release their games on Xbox, and other consoles, as well.  American developers responded both to Microsoft and to the market forces pushing consoles over PCs, that despite the PC’s huge install base console games sold better than PC games did due to everyone who bought a console being a gamer, and American games became much more console-focused.  The genre that remaining PC developers focused on were primarily massively-multiplayer online RPGs.  MMOs remained a key genre for developers, the genre was almost entirely focused on the PC, and many American studios worked on them.  The genre would fade as all do, but it remains a significant genre today.

First-person shooters of course were also hugely popular, but unlike MMOs they would not stay PC-dominant.  Some shooters released on both PC and console and others consoles only, with only a few staying focused on the PC, such as simmish ARMA.  Over the course of the ’00s, the change in platform led to changes in game design as well.  Compare the first Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six to Rainbow Six: Vegas for a good example of this; the first was PC-first with the console ports as an afterthought, the other the other way around, and it showed both times.  FPSes went towards more streamlined, linear designs with a lot of cinematic moments, less exploration, fewer key or switch hunts, and only letting the player hold a very limited numbers of weapons at a time.  Level design-wise this was perhaps happening anyway — Half-Life, the FPS genre’s biggest hit of ’98 by far, shows a move towards this direction, as opposed to the huge, exploration-based levels of many earlier shooters — but the change accelerated on consoles.  The change in weapons was caused by the success of 2001’s Xbox hit Halo and its two weapons at a time limit.  I have never liked that system myself, but it was the way the genre went.

Meanwhile, in Japan, Sega left the console market in 2002 thanks to the failure of every platform they had released since their hit system the Genesis and their own poor financial management.  Sony and Nintendo continued on, with Sony in a dominant position due to convincing many developers to move over to its platform in the mid ’90s away from Nintendo, either because of lower development and game production charges, because studios wanted the larger space of a CD while Nintendo went with smaller cartridges, or because of Sony paying certain developers to not release Sega versions of some games.  Sega was a smaller company than its competitors, though, and was never good at makinga profit, so the end result was probably sadly inevitable all along regardless of the details along the way.  Sega leaving home consoles was another change that happened during the early modern era.

As for Sony, they did one important thing for the industry.  As mentioned previously, Sony won the home console race particularly thanks to their success at finally figuring out how to succeed in the previously smallish European console market.  The Sony PlayStation probably sold more than all consoles had in that region in the previous few generations all combined. Europe would remain Sony-dominant to this day on the console front.  As far as game development goes Europe finally entering the console market in a big way would have a delayed impact, as European studios continued being more focused on PC games than console ones through the ’00s and to some extent still are today, but it is a very important event.

As for Nintendo, they would go up and down over the years, down in the early ’00s, then up significantly, then down, then up again.  Currently, they are doing quite well.  Nintendo and Sony are both profitable companies today, somewhat at the expense of Microsoft’s fading console hopes, but Sony is doing that while making more of their games also on PC and in a few cases even Xbox in order to boost revenues, while Nintendo is sticking to true exclusivity to only their own consoles.  For the two main console makers the main problem with the console business today isn’t revenues, it is that the install base has stalled and is not increasing, while development costs go up every year and development time continues to increase.  For third place Microsoft it is revenues, as the Xbox business has never been profitable.

The Industry Today: Is There a Modern 1982 or 1998?

 

The higher sales of console games allowed the industry to succeed with a console focus for the ’00s and ’10s, but as mentioned, now, in the 2020s, we are seeing costs get too high for console game development as well.  On consoles I would say that it is this current decade where the late ’90s to late ’00s PC game crisis is now hitting all of gaming: costs are too high.  Development times are too long. The size of the console market is no longer expanding, it is static.  With a static userbase and ever-increasing costs, the problems for publishers are escalating, and probably will eventually become impossible.  I don’t know what the end result of this will be, but I think most will agree that it is happening.  Here is an example of a recent article about the gaming industry’s troubles: https://www.wired.com/story/2024-was-the-year-the-bottom-fell-out-of-the-games-industry/

Is there a modern peak year, the analog of 1998 or for the pre-crash era probably 1982, a year where we see the conclusion of a process of refinement lead to a year loaded with all-time-great hits that show both why their era was so amazing and what knowledgeable developers could do with that technology?  If there is I’m not sure what it is, offhand; games take so long to develop now that I’m not sure that one single year could possibly hold so many key titles as it used to.  Regardless of that, the cost inflection point either has already been passed again, or will be soon.  We cannot simultaneously have a situation where hardware sales are flat and costs are increasing, that is not tenable.  And yet, that is the industry today.  Who knows, maybe Playstation/Nintendo/PC will be enough to keep the AAA(A) industry going, even if Xbox declines.  We will see.

I would like to try to answer the question on if there is a modern peak year before decline set in, but I’m just not sure. Have we seen this peak yet, or is it still to come?  I think someone who likes the early modern and modern eras more than me would need to say; I checked out on modern gaming for about a dozen years between 2005 and 2017 thanks to how little interest I had in most modern games over that era, before being brought back in by mostly endless online games like Starcraft Remastered, Overwatch, and Super Mario Maker.  Anyway, it probably is more likely that we are now in the decline and that the peak has already been passed, in terms of business.  In terms of game release quality, though… for that I just don’t know.  My favorite modern games are all from different years, there isn’t one clear dominant one — GeoGuessr, Super Mario Maker 1, and Splatoon are from 2015, Starcraft Remastered and Overwatch from 2017, Super Mario Maker 2 and Dead or Alive 6 from 2019,  Diablo IV from 2023, Mario Kart World from 2025… and as for gaming outside of my prime interests, I haven’t done the research yet to say.  I think the answer would be that finding a single year with as many top tier hits as ’82 or ’98 in the modern day would be impossible because given how long game development cycles are and with how successful games often run endlessly with new content additions being released for the same base game, finding a single year with a clear best library is not likely.  Huge numbers of games release every year, but the most significant ones don’t all release in the same year.

But regardless of that, the sheer number of articles you can easily find about the industry’s decline, such as the one I linked earlier — on how the industry as a whole shrank in ’24 for the first time in a very long time, on how the number of developers being fired — over 10,000 a year in each of the last few years — or studios shut down is increasing, on how exploitative monetization practices are only increasing ever more year on year, and more — are all over the place for a reason: things are not healthy in video game land.

 

How Will 1998’s Memory Last?  Or, PC Gamer’s 2025 Best Games Ever List

 

Memory is a tricky thing; what things are remembered, and which are not, is hard to predict.  Some things are rapidly forgotten. Some last while the people involved are alive, but fade afterwards.  And some, particularly ones important to a nation or religious group’s story about itself, endure in memory for centuries or millennia.  Many younger gamers today weren’t born yet in 1998, and naturally people have the most nostalgia for things they remember. So, if 1998 is relying on nostalgia for its place at the top of the list of gaming’s best years, its days there are numbered. Right now, admittedly, 1998 is remembered the strongest by those of us old enough to have been playing games then.  Fortunately though, its place does not entirely rely on nostalgia, but on key advancements in game design and on being the peak of a very important era in gaming. So, even if younger gamers do not fully realize the full scope of all the reasons why 1998 was so important, they surely know at least a few of its games. The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time is surely 1998’s peak shining light in terms of enduring popularity, probably followed by still-popular RTS Starcraft, which is still one of South Korea’s top games. However, most people only focus on the one thing from 1998 that interests them, and not the full picture of the year. In these articles I have tried to provide more context for why it was such an important year, why it rightfully deserves its place as gaming’s greatest year, and, hopefully, why it will keep its place in the future.

Here is an example of the lack of attention to the importance of 1998’s games that you see from even the gaming media these days. I started gaming in the early ’90s on the PC, but that PC gaming industry is mostly gone now, and has been for a long time. The ’00s collapse was nearly total. Despite that, PC-focused gamers are still around, and some mostly play newer games. PC Gamer’s current editors are clearly such people, largely uninterested in older games, no matter their importance and enduring quality.

For example, to focus on the thing that has been lost that is closest to me from my younger years, PC gaming as it was before the early ’00s collapse, look at this, PC Gamer’s latest, 2025 list of their current staff’s 100 favorite PC games: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/the-top-100-pc-games-2025/  I will post the full list of all the games by the year they were created in the second article; it just doesn’t fit well in this one.  I recommend skimming through their article regardless, it’s interesting to look at.  Only one game on the list is from before 1998, 1993’s Doom. PC Gamer US did choose Doom as the best game ever in their very first list back in 1994.  PCG did not have Best Games Ever lists in ’95 or ’96, but in their next list, in May 1997, chose Star Wars: TIE Fighter as number one, with Doom in second.  I’d have put it second behind Civilization II, but it is a fantastic choice indeed.   It is also an interesting choice, being a several year old game; these lists always have recency bias, but in ’97 they picked a three year old game for first.  I repurchased the PCG US issues with their ’97, ’98, and ’99 Best Games Ever lists, since sadly I lost most of my original PCG issues in a move back in the mid 2000s and cannot find scans of all three online, and will have more about those three lists in another article.  But anyway, looking at their 2025 list, somehow TIE Fighter doesn’t make this list at all, and almost no older PC games do.  Only one flight game is on their latest list, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.  1994, 1995, 1996, and 1997 somehow all have zero games on this list each despite being the peak of PC gaming’s golden era.

PC Gamer US’s Number 1 titles from the October 1998 and November 1999 Best Games Ever lists, Star Wars: Jedi Knight – Dark Forces II and Half-Life respectively, don’t make the 2025 list either, somehow, though both should have.  (As an aside, I remembered correctly what the #1 titles in the ’97 and ’99 issues were, but forgot that JKII won in ’98.  Seeing that in the issue was a nice surprise!  What an exceptional game.)  Instead, the next newest game on the 2025 list after Doom is 1998’s Thief: The Dark Project.  It’s an interesting and understandable inclusion, as the game is the origin of the stealth genre as a serious enterprise.  Multiple newer stealth games make the list and Thief is where realistic stealth games started.  None of 1998’s other top hits make the list though, shamefully.  This is a significant mistake. From 1999 appear three games, Planescape: Torment, Alpha Centauri, and listed as its 2025 remaster System Shock 2. I entirely agree with all three of these, they are all-time greats. 2000 gets three games also: Deus Ex, Diablo II (Remastered), and Baldur’s Gate II (Remastered).  All have modern updates, but the originals are pretty similar. Again all three of these are richly deserved.  I don’t like this list much, but I do agree that including Diablo II is the right representative of its genre.  I like and play Diablo IV, but II is better.  And with 2000 you reach the end of the time of the PC being high on the mountain; it had started falling down the cliff at increasing speed after that, with only MMOs and European studios surviving.

And you see this decline reflected on the list. Somehow they still have games listed for almost every year after ’00, unlike the better years of the ’90s, probably exclusively because of recency bias, but you can see the decline of PC gaming in the ’00s on that list.  The list goes from 3 games a year in both ’99 and ’00 to just one or zero every year from ’01 to ’10, other than ’04, when three games make the list (one of those a console port), and ’06, when it’s two freeware titles/mods representing the year.  After that things slowly start getting back to a better state thanks to the growth and development of Steam, as much as anything, along with slowly increasing levels of developer interest as console audience sizes stall out, and the number of titles increases.

There are several notable things about PCG’s article.  First, it is very heavily modern game-centric, far beyond any sense in my opinion.  I strongly disagree with the overall ‘the last ten years are where most of the best PC games released’ take of those who made that list.  I also strongly disagree with the genre variety, which is very heavy on console games and RPGs and very light on the other genres traditionally strong on the PC — simulators, turn-based, realtime, or wargame strategy games, first person shooters, graphic adventure games, and such.  A PC gaming top 100 list which contains Final Fantasy X but not even one single real-time strategy game or even MOBA is kind of a joke of a list, I’m sorry. Yes, other kinds of strategy games are on the list, but still, it’s inexcusable.  Genres like those mostly appear on the list very sparsely, and wargames are entirely excluded.  Most of the classic hits in those genres are left off entirely.  I think that proves this point: things change.  Tastes change.  The memory of 1998 will last, but it will fade over time to being ‘that year of the peak games of its time, a style of game the average gamer today is mostly not interested in revisiting’.

It’s sad to say this but, don’t we already see this happening with things like that PC Gamer list?  Yes, some games of 1998 have dedicated fanbases, and not entirely of people old enough to remember the original releases; plenty of people playing Falcon 4.38 BMS or Starcraft Remastered, to name a few still with active fan communities, weren’t born yet in 1998.  But a dedicated small fanbase is a different from general market recognition.  You see this perhaps the most strongly in the wargame genre.  Wargames are military strategy simulations, and are usually turn-based.  They vary in complexity from approachable to very complicated, and were a major genre on PCs through the ’80s and ’90s.  The genre faded in importance around the turn of the century, but unlike flight or racing simulators, because they can be easily done with simple graphics, wargames did not retreat to just a couple of titles.  The wargame genre has been active all along, releasing new games every year. If you look up a modern ‘best wargames’ list, most of the games are modern titles that nobody outside of that niche have heard of.  The top wargames of the ’90s, from entry-level basic ones like Panzer General to the top serious wargame of the decade, probably 1998’s Norm Koger’s The Operational Art of War, Volume I, probably don’t make the list, despite being probably better known in general than the newer games released after that genre declined in popularity.  Wargames get so much less attention than they used to, so even when a game is great at what it does most people never even hear of them.  The same thing happened to the wargaming board game genre, which similarly has declined somewhat in popularity from its  Tastes change over time.  This was reflected in the pages of PC Gamer US, which had a wargaming-specific column that ran for at least a decade from the mid ’90s into the mid or later ’00s, The Desktop General.  They did not have columns for every genre!  That showed wargaming’s importance.  And now the same publication can’t be bothered to put even one game in that genre on their top 100?  And no, I don’t think FTL, Dwarf Fortress, Crusader Kings 3, or Total War Warhammer 3 count.  Those are complex strategy or simulation games, yes, but not wargames.  Of those Total War’s battles are the closest to a wargame, but are on the simple end of the genre.  How the mighty have fallen.

So, while the PC is on the upswing today as consoles stall out, it is a new PC that is resurgent.  The old top genres are mostly still as niche as they have been for most of the past 25 years.  Instead, the new PC is a mixture of some classically PC games with a lot of console-first titles.  Most people probably do mostly play newer games, as you see reflected in that list, and a lot of people playing on PCs now are indeed playing games designed for consoles first but also released on PC to help sell more copies.  That is probably a reasonable list for what a lot of mainstream PC gamers are playing today.  It is much more RPG-heavy than some peoples’ lists would be, but is a reasonable picture of peoples’ interests.  It is, however, a bad list for representing the best PC games ever overall.

So, the resurgence of the PC won’t, I think, help bring the memory of 1998’s PC games back, any more than the resurgence of specialty arcades like Dave & Buster’s or Round 1 haven’t really helped make big budget, top of the graphics heap arcade games a thing again either.  The platforms still exist but in a new form for the new world. The new world of the PC is a mixture of the old PC and a console.  The world of gaming is less separated and more merged together.  We are no longer in a world where PC gamers play traditionally PC games and console gamers play traditionally console games, not all platforms have all kinds of games.  Even popular mobile games often have PC versions.  That doesn’t make their content any different.  Today’s PC is a much broader platform than it was in the ’90s, a platform for people who want to play all kinds of games other than first party Nintendo content.

There are always new lists of the best games ever, you can find innumerable lists across the internet.  I am focusing on this list because I think it is somewhat representative of gaming today.  Another noteworthy list just released, this time an IGN and Nintendo Life collaboration about their top 100 favorite games released on Nintendo platforms.  The article is here: https://www.ign.com/articles/the-100-best-nintendo-games-of-all-time I could complain at length about some aspects of this list, most notably how much I dislike their top two games — and I really do, I’m sorry to the games’ many fans — but when contrasted to PC Gamer’s top 100, IGN’s appears reasonable.  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time finishes sixth, a high spot.  Is that high enough for me, no, but it is a reasonably high finish for a beloved classic.  The top ten also includes quite a few other classic games as well: Tetris, Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past are all in the top 10.  I counted, 31 of their top 100 are games from the ’80s or ’90s.  That is a dramatically higher percentage than PC Gamer’s, even though I would say both have equally many great classics to remember.  Nintendo journalists seem to be doing a better job of remembering their platforms’ greatest past games than PC journalists are.

Nintendo gamers remember past titles better than anyone else as well, as anyone who watches the older game resale market knows — there’s usually a sizable price increase for a Nintendo format version of a game than one for another format.  Whether this is good or bad depends on your opinion, but it is certainly true.  Nintendo’s top hits need less remembering since they are less forgotten.  Older PC games, in contrast, are clearly forgotten too much these days.  I hope at some point that changes.

And as for Sony, the stereotype of Sony fans are people who mostly want to play modern games and spend less time interested in older games.  You saw this for example when, during the mini-consoles craze of a few years ago, the PlayStation Mini was a disastrous failure, while Nintendo’s NES and SNES Mini consoles sold well.  Still, when IGN made what is their most recent Top 100 Playstation Games list, in December 2024, they included 19 games from the ’90s on the list, a pretty solid number considering that Sony has about eleven fewer years of console hardware to cover than Nintendo.  They were clearly trying to represent older titles on their list; I am sure many PlayStation fans today would include fewer older games than that. IGN did a better job than PC Gamer in representing older titles, for sure.  https://www.ign.com/articles/the-100-best-playstation-games-of-all-time

Conclusion: On why 1998 is the Greatest Year in Gaming

 

1998’s greatness is widely recognized. Most lists of how great the games of each year are put 1998 in first place, or at worst second to the author’s favorite year if it isn’t 1998. However, while writing this I have realized that I think a lot of people miss exactly WHY that year reached the peak that it did. People recognize the great games from 1998 in the subset of electronic gaming that they pay attention to, but may not know about the underlying industry changes that led gaming on a new path shortly afterwards. Without understanding of that portion of the story, about how the industry changed so dramatically immediately afterwards, people miss one of the key reasons behind 1998 standing out so much. The kinds of games we saw in 1998, particularly on the PC and arcade sides, did not continue to be made for much longer, and never were again at the budget and general market attention levels that they were after sometime between 1998 and 2000, depending on platform. The world was changing and budgets were no longer large enough to fund PC-only game development or big-budget arcade games, so the kinds of games studios made changed to focus almost entirely on console games instead of splitting between all three pillars of the old system.

That coincidence is, again, the key, I think, of why 1998 is gaming’s greatest year. In the same year, console developers finally figured out 3d to a greater extent than before and some of the best console games ever released; the PC market peaked in the US and, after releasing some of the greatest games ever, began its decade-long slide into near irrelevance (before recovering somewhat after that); and arcades only had a year or two of life left in them, leading to some great titles in that field as well.  There would never be another year where all three pillars of the 1970s to ’90s gaming industry would all be in as good shape as they were in ’98.

But again, I know I focus on it because I was a PC-focused gamer in the ’90s, but 1998 isn’t only great because of it being the mountaintop of PC gaming after which decline would be rapid.  It is also great because at the same time, console gaming also had some of its greatest and most important games release.  Developers finally started to understand how to make 3d game control work better, and many genres had new best ever releases.  The collective knowledge of 15+ years combined to make 1998 the perfect storm across all formats electronic games released on, a time when budgets allowed for anything possible with the day’s technology and developers with enough knowledge to actually start executing on that.  ’97, ’99, and ’00 also saw some of that peak, but all three years have more drawbacks to their release list libraries than ’98 does.

To repeat my main point here, all of these factors had to occur at the same time for 1998 to be remembered as the greatest.  This coincidence, or alignment, is central to why the year is so universally beloved.  If it was only the best year in classic PC gaming but just an average console year, I have no doubt that 1998 would rank much, much lower on ‘best of’ lists; a lot of people only play console games, not PC ones.  The same is true if it was only a peak arcade game year.  But all three things did both happen at the same time, and so gaming’s greatest year entered the history books.  I hope that it can keep that spot in the future, even as those of us who were there playing games at the time get older.   Every year has good games released in it, and advances in the medium of electronic entertainment, but no one year anymore contains as high a volume of both high quality titles and advances key to the development of electronic games.  Games today take too long to develop for such things to all come together in any one single year.  Younger gamers should spend some serious time with the top games of 1998, to better understand the industry and an era of gaming at its peak.

In the next article, list wars!  The second part of this 1998 retrospective will be a long list of many of the major games of 1998, broken down in multiple ways — by platform, genre, and more.  I like lists.  I hope some of you do as well. The list is basically done and will post soon.

 

Addendum: The Dead and Dying Platforms of 1998

 

I wasn’t sure what to do with this section, as it doesn’t quite fit in the article above but I want to include it, so I tacked it on at the end as an addendum.  In 1998, the Windows 9x PC, Macintosh, Game Boy (Color), Sony PlayStation, and Nintendo 64 markets were ongoing and doing fine.  But what about the other systems still on the market in 1998, the ones nearing their ends?  It was the end of an era for both NEC and Atari, among others, as both had consoles see their last official releases this year.  Computer platforms were not spared either.

Consoles

 

DIED (US) / DYING (WORLD): Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.  First, as I said elsewhere, in the US the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis both had their last game release in 1998. Both did have game releases in other regions after this year, though, with the SNES in Japan and the Genesis in Brazil, so they were not dead worldwide quite yet. However, they did both die in North America this year. Worth mentioning. The SNES would last until 2000 in Japan, and the Genesis until 2002 in Brazil, with new games.

UNDEAD: NEC PC Engine CD (TurboGrafx-16 CD) – This aging system had died in the US back in ’94, but in Japan it was still kind of clinging to its last moments of life. There were no games released for the PCECD in ’98, but there was one last release in ’99 so technically it wasn’t dead yet.

DIED: NEC PC-FX – This thing, though, did die in 1998. NEC’s last console, which was only ever released in Japan, focused on anime FMV and visual novels, to the expense of anything else. It has near-zero 3d capabilities and lacking sprite manipulation power compared to the other consoles of its generation (it can’t scale sprites, only do Mode 7 style effects!), but can do nice video. It bombed hard, but got over 3 1/2 years of support anyway, ending in mid ’98. So yeah, the PC-FX died this year, little-mourned. If you look at the release list you will see that ’98 brought the system four visual novels, a nongame compilation, an RPG, and a 2d platformer action-adventure game. That last one is probably the most interesting, Ruruli ra Rura. Its graphics are very simplistic and the combat is extremely basic, but the animated cutscenes are nice. Despite the very dated visuals I’d like to get a copy, though it’s pretty expensive.

DIED: Atari Jaguar – The Jaguar had been discontinued back in early 1996, when Atari sold itself to a hard drive manufacturer. However, some games continued to release from Telegames, companies dedicated to releasing finished but unpublished Jaguar games. Most of the bigger-name ones of those released in ’96 and ’97, but the last officially licensed title was in 1998, Worms, a port of the first Worms computer game, releasing the same year as Worms 2, a game which dramatically improved Worms graphics. Yeah. Still, it’s something. The next year, Atari would change ownership, being sold to Hasbro. Hasbro made the platform open source in 1999, setting the Jag off for its very successful life as one of the most popular homebrew platforms. The first homebrew game released that year.

UNDEAD: Sega Game Gear – As I said, the Game Gear was effectively dead at this point, and had no game releases. Sega had released their last games for it in ’97 and dropped it. However, it would be resussitated for a short revival from Majesco in 2000, and one new game was released then, so perhaps I should mention it.

DIED (US) / DYING (JP) – Sega Saturn – The Saturn saw its final US releases in 1998. In Japan, Sega ended first-party support at the end of 1998, as well. In Japan the system did have a full year of support, but that would not continue into ’99. Third parties did release a small number of games in 1999 and early 2000 in Japan only, so the system wasn’t quite dead, but with no first party support or international releases the writing was on the wall.

DYING (EU): Philips CD-i – The CD-i, a system with some similarities to the PC-FX in that it is very good at video playback but struggles at traditional videogames, but released in 1991, years before the PC-FX, so it is more impressive from a tech front than that system, had died out in the US in 1994-1995.  In Europe, or rather in Philips’ home country of the Netherlands, however, the CD-i lasted several more years.  A couple of titles released for the CD-i in 1998, one of them a game.  It would see one final release in ’99, which is also a game, when the system finally died, so in ’98 it was on its last legs in the Netherlands. Of those two last games, though, the one from ’99 also released on PC, while the game from ’98, the FMV rollercoaster shooter The Lost Ride, is a CD-i exclusive, so 1998 was the last year with an exclusive release on CD-i.

Video game consoles sure do have short lives, don’t they.  They are born with so much hope and promise, only for them to be old and dying somewhere around, on average, five years later.  Console lifespans vary between one and about twelve years on the lower and upper ends.  You barely get to know them and they are already on the way out!  Fortunately, homebrew developers have brought many of these systems back to life, so they can get the fuller lifespans that they deserve.  How much homebrew support a system gets varies depending on several factors, including how easy it is to release unlicensed games on the system and how large the fan community is for the platform, but it is always fantastic to see when it happens.

Computers

 

DIED: NEC PC-98 – That’s right, NEC didn’t have one platform with its last game releases in 1998, it actually had two.  The NEC PC-98 line of computers had been the most dominant computer format in Japan in the ’80s and up to the mid ’90s, but the release of Windows 95 basically ended NEC’s hold on the Japanese market.  In 1997 NEC admitted defeat and switched from making its own proprietary computers to making PC clones with Windows 95.  The early ones also supported a classic PC-98 mode, but Win95 was the main feature, and the few Japanese computer game developers mostly switched over to Windows eventually.  However, some homebrew developers continued releasing games for the PC-98 into 1998.  Checking Mobygames and Wikipedia, both list that the last year any games released for the PC-98 was 1998, so if that is accurate it was the end of the line for the format.  After that Japanese PC games were on Windows 95.  The most famous by far of the small handful of PC-98 games from ’98 are the fourth and fifth Touhou games, Lotus Land Story and Mystic Square.  The series had started the previous year, when Zun released the first three.  Both are really good-looking bullet-hell shmups.  It’s easy to see why the series would become so legendary.  After them the developer, Zun, would take four years off before moving the series over to Windows 9x.

The death of the PC-98 is quite significant since it was the last non-Windows/Intel gaming computer format, following the deaths of the Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns, Spectrum, IBM OS/2, and other minor ones in the years previously.  With its departure, only Windows, its never-gaming-focused rival of sorts Apple Macintosh, and the alternate PC operating system Linux were left.  And of those three, even today, only one is a serious gaming platform: Windows.  I’m sorry for Linux fans, but anyone with Steam can see how few games have Linux versions available.  Linux gamers rely heavily on Windows emulation to play most games.  Fortunately Linux does have good Windows game emulation through a program called Wine.

DYING: Microsoft MS-DOS – After the release of Windows 95 in fall of 1995, MS-DOS, the previous primary gaming platform for PC games for the previous 14 years, was doomed. MS-DOS had survived during the Windows 3.1 and earlier era because Win3 and earlier have much higher overhead and limited advantages over DOS, so a game that wanted to get the most out of its hardware had to be a DOS game. Windows 3 just used up too much system resources.  Windows 95 was a revolution because it finally made Windows a great gaming platform, and it eventually made running games a lot easier, too.  The number of games releasing for DOS steadily decreased in each year after 1995, from almost all major titles in ’95, to most games in ’96, to a small number of titles in ’97, to very few in ’98.  But after 1998, DOS largely disappeared as a platform for retail computer games.  Small homebrew indie developers continued making mostly freeware DOS games here and there after that, so the platform never entirely disappeared in that sense, and collections or re-releases or expansions of or for DOS games released after 1998, but if you want retail PC games, for DOS, ’98 was almost the end of the line.  In ’98, of the games I have mentioned in this article series, The Elder Scrolls: Redguard and Descent to Undermountain are actually DOS games.  There are five or six other more minor DOS games from ’98 as well, some of them European-exclusive titles.  There would be two final retail PC games running on DOS in ’99, one of which got a US release — WWII GI. The other is a European exclusive called Horde: The Northern Wind, an RTS from Russia.  Thanks to this thread on VOGONS for doing the research: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=100191 though I went through the list on MobyGames myself as well and agree with that thread’s conclusions, those are the last retail DOS games. So, DOS as a retail gaming platform wasn’t quite dead yet in 1998, but it was very close, and the end would come the next year.

How does this number of dead or dying platforms compare to the previous peak year of 1982?  Well, 1982 was not a big year for anyone getting out of the industry.  That time, the pile of dead platforms would be in ’83 and ’84.  Those years did have a lot of platforms going away, though, surely more in total than ’98 considering just how many little-selling console and computer platforms existed at that time.  But there, the peak year for game releases was before this contraction, not at the same time as it.  Also, of course every time a new generation starts eventually the platforms from the previous generation end support, and that is some of what you see here, but a year where not only several of the consoles of that year’s most recent generation were dying out but also most of the platforms of the generation before that and also multiple computer formats, all fading out at the same time?  1998 was, indeed, a major transition point, a time when things were changing significantly in the game industry.  Change can be good or bad.  The changes ongoing in 1998 were both, depending on what platform you favor or what kinds of gaming you prefer.