Wrong. It was WC5 without a doubt. Hell, I didn't know of the movie atrocity until I saw ads for it after I relocated to the US in '98. Besides, I can't think of any movie trailers that would have played back then two years prior to its release.

@mistermumbles:
You`re right. I wicked the movie and found out that it came out in 1999. Wing Commander: Prophecy came out 1997, so it must have been an ad for this one.

You gotta be kidding! Starcraft was one of the most popular games for the last 17 years in North America. I've been playing it since it came out up until about 2 years ago regularly and probably will play it again on occasion at LAN parties etc. over time. We played the hell out of that game, and I even run my own private Battle.NET server for it. :) In fact, all of the Blizzard games have enjoyed pretty much equal extreme popularity here starting with Warcraft II if not their older games as well.

I myself stopped buying Blizzard games when World of Warcraft came out because the MMO subscription model gameplay wasn't my thing personally, and Starcraft II and Diablo III's DRM and business model don't appeal to me either, but their games are and always have been immensely popular in North America.

I didn't have ready access to gaming news until around six or seven years ago, so this might have more to do with my own ignorance, but I didn't know Deus Ex was as popular as it was until about five years ago. A website listed it as one of the top 100 games of all time and went on and on about how many people liked it, and then I noticed a bunch of people here talking about how they wished the game was here. That's the only one I can think of, though.

I don't recall Deus Ex being immediately popular, but I think people caught on pretty quickly. Some of the early reviews whined about it having ugly graphics and animation, but once people played it and figured out how reactive and open-ended the game was they started flipping out.

I suppose that's true. We get over it quickly, though.

I bought it in Germany at the time - so it definitely was released over there - and I do think I remember Under A Killing Moon getting quite a bit of coverage in magazines.

I am not sure I got the same impression re: translations being more frequent / important back then. I really learned English through computer games (now live in the UK; completed three degrees in English speaking countries since) as that was about the only spoken English easily accessible, as so much is dubbed / translated in Germany otherwise.

Startopia. If I remember correctly, it only sold ~30,000 copies when it was first released. A lot of people probably still don't know what it is, which is a shame because in my opinion it's a pretty fun game.

Another one is Battlezone (1 and 2). Damn, come to think of it I played a shitload of games when I was a kid.

Yes this! I love Startopia but as you say, it still doesn't quite get the recognition I think it deserves. I got the game cheap(ish) in the bargain bin at Blockbuster, I think. I didn't quite know what to expect but it turned out to be a very fun management game and in many ways it's the truest successor to Bullfrog's Theme Park (which I love but perhaps doesn't stand up to well for the modern gamer).

Games like Rollercoaster Tycoon became more serious and went off in a much different direction whereas Startopia brings the funny and stays true to the Theme Park spirit while also expanding upon Theme Park's somewhat limited gameplay. I must buy it on GOG sometime as the CD I have is getting old.

Yeah, based on the the info I gathered now, I think the series really just bypassed my personal bubble.

It depended on the publisher and the release, I think. Some games were released in English, some got translated. The main problem was, _if_ a game was released here in a German version, it became very hard to find the original version in a store. At some point, I could easily get an English movie (through multi-language DVD rental), but games still often came with German audio only. In general though, I agree that games provided a great opportunity for learning English. I think Infocom text adventures did much more for my vocabulary than any of those silly and repetitive "Colin and Linda" workbooks that my teachers were so fond of ...

Morrowind and Starcraft were never niche thanks to the strong advertizing in game magazines since long before they were released.

Tower Defense was quite niche at the beginning and look how many TD games we have now.
Counterstrike was just a private made mod for Half-Life and look how many games in this direction it has spawned, although it died for me with version 1.5, have played it a lot ages ago with my brother.
Fallout (1) wasn't that succesful in the beginning too, it's remarkable how many attention it has gotten over the years long before this FPS from Bethesda came out.
Gothic was just a buggy mess from some German studio for most people in the beginning if they heard of it at all. It has gone a long way to its highest point of attention with Gothic 2 through it's downwards slope with Gothic 3 to its death with this horrible Arcania.

I never understood why the people were so geil about the Gothic games. The whole series is so crappy. The fighting is very bad and often impossible and the skill system is so incredibly dumb!

Because it's immersive, has very well written dialogues, a more realistic skill system than usual and the fighting system is actually pretty good if you got into it (becomes easier if your skill for the weapon at hand has risen via learning points and teachers).
Gothic 1+2 are the best 3D RPGs I know, I played though them several times and surely will again sometime after I finished Gothic 3, which sadly has the dumb standard fighting system for people who didn't comprehend the (far superior) old one.

Master of Orion II. I'm the only one i know irl that has played it...and i used to have an internet cafe so that goes to show how unknown the game was and still is. For me, it's one of the best games ever made.