Maybe my mind is going or maybe it's just that in the pre-broadband days I was less connected but I swear to GOG some game series that are now popular used to be really niche.

I'm thinking like Morrowind, which nobody seemed to have heard of yet nowadays everyone has heard of Skyrim. Or Starcraft ("isn't that Warcraft in space or something?") which shocked me when the hype around Starcraft II appeared, I thought I was the only one outside of Asia who played it... well almost.

I'm sure these games used to be niche but maybe I just hung out with the wrong people. Do you have memories of these games being less popular? Can you think of other games that you swear were niche?

Planescape: Torment and System Shock 2 are probably much more popular now than they were on original release.

How was the very 1st C&C received? That's kind of off topic but I'm curious and I bet we can find some HUGE sleepers if we think about it.

It was very well received. I knew a lot of my friends had it plus PC Gamer had a great review on it.

Yeah in the UK it was very big. Actually it must have been one of the first PC games that I played because I remember my brother buying it for his computer (he saved up a heck of a lot from his paper round for that thing, it took him years). Ah, nostalgia.

Okay stupid question then. Still I'll be curious to see what other games get mentioned here.

My friend did the exact same thing over here in the US. His new machine had a turbo button and we lost our summer playing that and Sam and Max hit the road.

Seriously, nostalgia.

Starcraft was unknown? News to me. Along with Diablo II, Starcraft was the DotA and Counterstrike of the late 90s; everyone was playing it. I'll grant you Morrowind, though; only magazines seemed to push the game, but nobody I knew bothered with it and instead went for Neverwinter Nights. Come 2006 though, very few people would actually bother with Neverwinter Nights 2 and would instead stick to Oblivion.

Some other personal observations; Planescape: Torment was the RPG Oddity. Everybody knew it as the oddball Interplay RPG (thanks to the trailer included in the Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale disc), but very few people I knew had played it, while Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale had much bigger traction. Come to think of it, Fallout was also pretty much unknown outside of the magazines.

I remember one of my friends in school describing Harvester but he never told me the title of it. He ended up getting the game taken away from him as his parents found out how violent it was. (Not a good game for a 12/13 year old kid IMO)

When it was released on GoG I remember going "Ah, so THAT'S what it was called!"

Very much agree with the Arena series - I THINK Morrowind started to push it a bit more mainstream but it was still a fairly RPG-crowd only type game. Oblivion was the one that really pushed it, as Microsoft made it a feature of the early 360 days.

C&C and Starcraft were large releases. Anyone playing computer games played C&C. Maybe like a Dune was a bit more niche but by Command and Conquer it was a very big game.

Here's one... Call of Duty. "Back then" it was all Unreal. Even in the "realistic" field Medal of Honor was THE killer WWII shooter app to be playing. CoD didn't come into its own until later - and now people would be saying something like "Medal of what now?"

And as an strat / (space)simulation / RPG gamer "back then" I always thought adventure games were much more niche than they really are. Today they seem huge (at least as far as indie standards are concerned). I'm always surprised by how many quality looking adventure titles are still being made and how well received they are.

Nah, it's not a stupid question at all.

Lots of games were received differently in certain regions of the world. Keep in mind that pre-internet all gamers had were magazines and friends.

*can't help but make stereotypical '80s - '90s gamer joke* Who are you kidding - back then gamers didn't have friends! ;)

pretty much everyone played the first one and atleast red alert around here...the other CC's didnt quite pick up as much though. People knew them sure - but werent quite as interested. Starcraft, Warcraft 1/2 and even Total Annihilation were bit more pop.