They might not be classic, but are definitely old...

Grab System Shock Portable. It's what I use for my SS1 plays (I have multiple original CDs of the game, including one still in shrinkwrap). Not only does it make the game run on modern systems, but it includes the mouselook hack that makes the game control much, much better. (I only use key control in the cyberspace portions now.) Also includes the high resolution and texture patches, among others.

2006 and 2007 is not old.... :/

So in year 2040 the game released in 2001 still won't be classic?
What will it be then? Recent release?

Of course not, but mid-2000's games are certainly not classics.

No idea, if you already know it - but if you buy the new Bard's Tale (http://www.gog.com/game/the_bards_tale), you get the old trilogy with it.

Quote from the game card:

"What's cool about it: Includes the original classic games The Bard’s Tale 1, 2, and 3."

GOG started in 2008 with games like Descent 3 which was released in 1999. I think no one would dispute they started with only classic games, right?
So why now, 6 years later, can't games 6 years younger than Descent, from 2005 be classics?
It is the same gap.

And I thought *I* had a backlog! Well done.

Obviously it's my personal bias, 2001 marked the release of the first Xbox and the start of the multi-platform era and in general the decline of
PC gaming for most of the 2000's (I guess you could say PC has recovered now). It's more just that I view a shift in markets occurred in the 2000's when the original Xbox brought a new generation of more casual gamers into the market, and most developers abandoned their old PC audience, games had to be made for consoles first during the 2000's. Thus game quality degraded significantly. I'm not saying that their was no bad games in the 90's, and I'm not saying that their were no good games in the 2000's (their were Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale II, Arcanum but they were very much 90's games that just had extended development cycles).

I can understand how there are varying definitions of "old" and "classic" with regards to games. A lot of it is predicated on age - to me an old classic is from the C64 or the TI-99/4A, though I also include Amiga and some DOS titles. Younger folks probably qualify early Windows games, or even games only a decade old (since that's when their own introduction to gaming was). So obviously there will be disagreements about what is classic.

I think that rather than using age as the sole determinant, it could be more useful to thing in terms of game architecture. An old classic might originate from an obsolete platform (Atari ST, Apple II, Sega Genesis), or it might reflect older technology (256-colours, chip-based soundtrack), or be based on a play dynamic associated with a certain time (grid-based dungeon crawling, FMV games, text-parsing adventures). As the technology has improved over time, games have tended to age better in various ways, so an "old" game (like Outcast or Terminal Velocity or Evolva) doesn't looks as starkly old as one from the early days (like King’s Quest or even Populous).

Of course it is. When I was in high school, we considered music older than a year old. For video games (for me at least) anything that is over 5 years old is old.

That is your prerogative. Feel free to declare classics as only games before 2000, even if that means Icewind Dale is not a classic, nor is Unreal Tournament GotY, Thief 2, Vampire the Masquarade: Redemption, Baldur's Gate 2, any of the Hitman games, Arcanum or any post-2K games.

By saying
you set an arbitrary time limit about classics, which means that if said limit is 10 years, my previous examples do not count for you as classics, because
I prefer to not have temporal limits on what is a classic and what is not, though for presentation reasons I do use the decade as a relevant number. Thus why on post 6 I never mentioned classics, only pre-2K and 10+ years old.

So, if by classic you mean a game at least X years old and of good quality, games released in 201X can become classics after enough time, so claiming that is false.

If by classic you mean games released before 2K (and again, of a certain quality), then you prevent quite a lot of games from being called classics, like for example Vampire the Masquarade: Bloodlines (2004), Psychonauts (2005), The Guild (2005), Gothic 2 (2005), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007 onwards), The Witcher (2007) and a lot more games. Will those never become classics simply because they were developed after 2K? Or will those too become classics after some time?

And if they do become classics after some time, what is said time limit? 5 years? 10 years? 15 years? 20 years?

it may help that some of the definitions of "classic" do not mention age at all - for example "A classic is an outstanding example of a particular style, something of lasting worth or with a timeless quality"

Gothic 2 was not from 2005