What launched as the stylish comeback of a 1999 shooter became a guinea pig for Valve's ideas and larger initiatives. Steven Messner, Senior Reporterīetween 20, Valve subjected its FPS to an amount of change and experimentation that would have killed a lesser game. No game other game has managed that-not at the same scale-and I'm terrified that no other game will manage it again.

Therein lies EVE Online's lasting legacy, that uncanny ability to make a collective fiction feel real. Those tectonic shifts in EVE Online's landscape are felt through the first-hand experiences of the players themselves, personal stories of betrayal, discovery, and camaraderie that carry the same emotional gravity as if they happened in real life. Because every player inhabits the same universe, EVE Online has become an enormously diverse digital society with its own recorded histories and cultures that wax and wane as player-built empires rise and fall. What's really monumental, however, is the sheer scale of that collective fantasy. In EVE Online, the wrong move and undo years of work. The result is a player-driven world with a real economy and a tangible sense of consequence, which in turn gives every action a sense of weight and meaning rarely found in other games. Where other MMOs hem you in with authored narratives or limited player interactions, EVE Online's developers are remarkably willing to sit back and let players steer. But the point is that, unlike so many other MMOs, in EVE Online is the only one courageous enough to let players define their own experience-for the most part. At this point it's less of a game and more like an alternate reality where players can become warlords, dictators, or just another scummy pirate blowing up poor space truckers for shits and giggles. Not all of these games released between 20-following one of the biggest trends of this decade, some PC games have had tectonic effects on our hobby long after their launch day.ĮVE Online is the closest we've come to that sci-fi dream of living a second life in a virtual society. This list of 25 is our memory of games that continue to matter for their themes, for their impact on the business or technology of games, for reshaping the relationship between players and developers, for having formed a new genre, or for failing spectacularly.

We write all the time about the best games you can play on PC, but the end of the decade is an invitation to examine which games have changed PC gaming itself.

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