1993

The question in 1993 wasn't what to play, but where to play it. Step into an arcade and you were likely to get punched - or worse. Fighting games like Samurai Shodown, Super Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II would kill you for a quarter, but Virtua Fighter gave them all notice that gore and speed were no match for technique and technology. The era of 3D fighting had arrived. That didn't stop the 2D sports title NBA Jam from shoving, dunking and raking in an estimated one billion dollars, one quarter at a time.

Back at home, the Sega/Nintendo blood feud found itself fueled by landmark titles. When Genesis owners bragged about the stunning animations of Disney's Aladdin, SNES owners pointed to the stellar design and presentation of Mega Man X. Secret of Mana kept RPG gamers happy on Super Nintendo, but Sega fans had their quest logs full with Shining Force and Lunar: The Silver Star, the latter on the recently released Sega CD. And while Sonic CD helped give that fledgling add-on a bit more weight, SNES powerhouse Super Mario All-Stars kept the mascot matchup balanced.

For Genesis gamers with more pent-up aggression, titles like Gunstar Heroes, Jungle Strike and the tongue-in-cheek, severed-head-in-hand sports parody Mutant League Football offered release. And despite the 16-bit dominance, Nintendo's 8-bit systems refused to die, coughing up Kirby's Adventure on NES and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land on Game Boy. Even the ill-fated Atari Jaguar made its retail debut, bringing the 3D shooter Cybermorph with it. (Hey - did you actually play it? Then stop snickering.)

And yet, you could say PC gamers were the luckiest of the bunch. The independently published, 3D-shooter-from-hell Doom proved that shareware (and id Software, for that matter) was no fluke, while Star Wars: X-Wing, Syndicate, and Master of Orion all showed different, brilliant sides of sci-fi. Adventure gamers couldn't figure out which quest to tackle first: Flashback, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Day of the Tentacle or Sam & Max Hit the Road. And while most gamers swapped floppy disks to get their gaming fix, early adopters of a new technology called PC CD-ROM explored both The 7th Guest's multimedia haunted house and the eerie, photorealistic dreamscapes of Myst. The massive success of those two games would make the entire technology viable.