The 50 most important PC games of all time

Imagine PC gaming today without Doom. Would we still be playing first-person shooters? Probably. But who knows what they would look like? Without Doom, an entire decade of gaming would've followed a very different path.

Imagine PC gaming today without World of Warcraft. WoW turned Blizzard into a juggernaut. It defined a genre so utterly that MMOs have aped it or struggled to leave its shadow for 10 years since.

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Imagine PC gaming without Minecraft. Without League of Legends. These are today's juggernauts, the games that define the the platform as we know it. But now, imagine the PC without Commander Keen. Without Rogue. Without Pinball Construction Set. Maybe you've haven't heard of all of them, or only know them vaguely. Yet they're some of the most important games in the PC's history.

A few months ago we set out to highlight the 50 most important and influential PC games of all time. Unlike our collection of the Top 100 PC Games, it doesn't matter if these games are still fun (or even possible) to play today. What matters is how they changed the PC gaming landscape. How they established the blueprint of the run-and-gun shooter. Propelled adoption of the compact disc. Changed how millions of people grew and socialized across years and thousands of miles of cables.

The most important PC games of all time changed how we make games. How we play games. And they changed us. To celebrate them, we did something a bit different on the following pages of this feature. We reached out to game designers—look out for Richard Garriott, John Carmack, Sid Meier, Chris Avellone, Jane Jensen, Tim Schafer, Cliff Bleszinski, Warren Spector and more—plus many former PC Gamer editors and a few other writers you may recognize to help celebrate the legacy of the PC. Enjoy!