Quake

The Good
My God, John Carmack - what more is there to say? While completely underrated (for some reason), this game was simply revolutionary at the time. Unlike Doom it came with a completely, 100% true 3D engine with gouraud-shaded textures and it ran DAMN FAST on any Pentium and adequately on an old 486.

This game completely revolutionized the genre: it was the first to come out-of-the-box with TCP/IP support for internet play (not through TEN or other such services) -- if you had the bandwidth to spare you could simply set up a Quake server and get it on! It was also the first to use the now-common server/client architecture (push the Tilde key and you'll see what I mean) and the first one which doesn't require a seperate module (COMMIT) for multiplayer play.

And most importantly, this game is damn challenging and fun in single player and multiplayer alike!

The Bad
It looks a bit on the brownish side, but we'll let that one pass. The sound effects are a bit annoying too.

The Bottom Line
A wonderful, underrated classic which didn't get the attention it deserved.