By Tyler F.M. Edwards

PPC games have come a long way. Not so long ago, they were considered the sole domain of nerds and basement-dwellers. But no longer! PC games have exploded in popularity and are now a mainstream entertainment medium, rivalling Hollywood’s greatest blockbusters. This list will cover the games whose brilliance allowed the medium to explode onto the world stage, and the games that continue to push the boundaries of what computer gaming can achieve. In short, the Top Ten PC games of all time.

10: Call of Duty
Genre: First-person shooter

Call of Duty is a testament to the power of taking something simple and doing it well. The idea of a shooter set in World War II was nothing new, but Call of Duty stood apart from all the others through its sheer intensity and overwhelming bombast. Everything about this game – from the sound effects to the intense gameplay – felt so much like being in a real war you could almost get PTSD by playing it. Charging up the hill in Stalingrad with no weapon while dodging stuka strafing runs, sniper fire, and artillery shells is not an experience many gamers are likely to forget.

9: Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings
Genre: Real-time strategy

Age of Kings was simply an excellent example of the real time strategy genre. Allowing players to command an entire civilization through the Dark Ages up to the Renaissance, it provided deep gameplay with numerous potential strategies while avoiding needless complication. But what was really special about this game was its loyalty to its medieval setting. While a real historian could probably find plenty of inaccuracies, for a video game, Age of Kings showed a great commitment to its source material, even down to each civilization’s units speaking in that society’s language. Plenty of games claim to make learning fun, but Age of Kings actually did it.

8: Doom
Genre: First-person shooter

Doom is the game that made the world fall in love with shooters. It introduced an entire generation to the joy of random, meaningless violence. Plot? Logic? A point? Who needs those when you’ve got a minigun and an army of demons waiting to be slaughtered? Subsequent games have improved on Doom in every quantifiable way, but none have surpassed the pleasure of its simple-minded bloodlust.

7: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Role-playing

If there’s one thing gamers like – other than killing zombies and collecting loot – it’s freedom. Freedom is something that Skyrim, the fifth installment of the acclaimed Elder Scrolls series, provided in spades. It gave players a massive open world filled with the potential for exploration and a freeform progression system that let them design exactly the character they wanted. This was a game with a million things to do, and a million ways to do them. While Skyrimprovided plenty of epic combat against everything from dragons to vampires, it is perhaps the freedom of exploration and immense detail of the world – from the way characters would go to bed at night to the background conversations between townsfolk – that players will remember the most.

6: Mass Effect 2
Genre: Role-playing

Mass Effect was universally acclaimed for its brilliant writing, its deep characters, and the intense and meaningful choices it granted the player. But it was a console port and thus not eligible for this list, so its falls to Mass Effect 2, which was intended to be a PC game from the start. ME2 took everything that made the first game great and enhanced it. Once again placing players aboard the starship Normandy as Commander Shepard, ME2 provided the same great story-telling as the original with new twists and memorable new characters such as Thane Krios, the hitman with the soul of a poet, and Miranda Lawson, a woman whose perfection is her flaw.

5: World of Warcraft
Genre: Massively multiplayer role-playing

World of Warcraft is a juggernaut. A smash hit of epic proportions, it maintains an unassailable stranglehold on the massively multiplayer genre even years after its release. No one can seem to agree on what it made such a success – its approachability, its scale, its polish, or something else – but everyone has an opinion. Half the gaming community says it redefined massively multiplayer games for the better by cutting down on the repetitive gameplay and harsh difficulty of past MMOs, and the other half says it ruined the genre by catering to lazy players, but everyone agrees it changed the gaming world forever.

4: Half-Life 2
Genre: First-person shooter

If you’re looking for a game that hit the ball out of the park in pretty much every way imaginable, Half-Life 2 is for you. Critics and fans alike have heaped praise on every single aspect of Valve’s FPS opus: its story, its sound, its realistic physics engine, its exciting gameplay. And that still wasn’t enough to convince Valve they could rest on their laurels, because they then followed it with two equally brilliant expansions, Episodes One and Two. This led to a fever of anticipation for Episode Three so intense that its five years – and counting – of delays have led fans to start petitions and mail crowbars to Valve to protest its non-existence.

3: Starcraft
Genre: Real-time strategy

Blizzard Entertainment is the virtuoso of the real-time strategy genre. Any of their RTS games would be deserving of a spot on this list, but if there is one that is more noteworthy than the others, it is Starcraft. This is a game that redefined the RTS world. Whereas its predecessors featured factions whose only differences were cosmetic, Starcraft gave us three utterly different yet still equally powerful races to play with. Its single-player campaign offered one of the era’s best video game stories, and its multiplayer was so strong it helped to create the world of E-sports.

2: No One Lives Forever: The Operative
Genre: First-person shooter

A groovy romp through the world of 1960s super spies, No One Lives Forever is a game that seems to have been somewhat forgotten by history, and that’s a tragedy. This was a game whose developers clearly had fun. Every aspect of the game oozed love and passion: its delightfully witty dialogue, its countless Easter eggs, and its mind-blowing level design. Any game where the player falls out of an exploding plane and must steal a parachute from an enemy trooper while in mid-air is worthy of respect.

1: Portal 2
Genre: Puzzle-platform

Portal 2 is probably as close to a perfect game as we’re ever going to see. Some games might boast more epic plots or more addictive gameplay, but none can match Portal 2’s utter polish and pristine quality. There is absolutely nothing bad that can be said about this game. Portal 2 preserves everything that made the original Portal brilliant – its wry, dark humor; its mind-bending, portal-slinging gameplay; and the deliciously evil GLaDOS – and enhanced the formula with even more creative puzzles, a longer game, and an expanded cast of memorable characters. In the end, the only complaint that can be made is that there isn’t a Portal 3 yet.

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