One thing I actually kind of miss is when demos would start playing behind the menu. Lots of arcady types and early 90's FPS would do this. Sometimes they'd even reveal secrets.

Carmageddon had a funny menu with the dismembered hand getting blood all over it. Postal 2's menu is... interesting :P

Early Ultimas like 3 and 4 had neat menus, Call of Duty Black Ops had probably the best easter egg ever and an all around cool menu to begin with. You can break free from the chair you're stuck in and use an old DOS machine in the back of the room to play a Smash TV vietnam zombie clone and a full version of ZORK 1 :D

My vote is for Evil Genius, although psychonauts is a close second

Civ 4, solely for Baba Yetu. Can never get tired of that.

Also I really like the still-life diorama menus in Sniper Elite 2. There was another game that had that that I can't remember... one of the Splinter Cells, maybe?

The Hard Reset menu is kind of neat looking.

This needs to be on GOG.

Advent Rising
Avadon The Black Fortress
Clive Barker's Undying
Heroes III
Planescape Torment
Super Metroid
Inquisitor

edit: I found it.

For the record Evil Genius main menu (theme?) is great.

I agree, it's a nice little game.

Seems unlikely though: http://www.gog.com/en/wishlist/games/spaceship_warlock

Might be a weird choice but first thing I thought of was Bulletstorm, which has some excellent main menu music and sweeping vistas.

More seriously though, probably Morrowind. Gotta love those soft drums.

And there should be no doubt about it!

It always makes me sad how incredibly stale and flat computer-generated music always sounds. I understand that it's enormously cheaper than getting the music actually orchestrated, but it never quite sounds right. It's a shame, because there's a lot of really great video game music that could be so much better if it was actually performed. Seeing fully orchestrated music like in Evil Genius always makes me happy.

The menu for Riddick looks really cool, but it seems like the cube-spinning stuff would get kinda irritating after a while, like those irritating transitions people sometimes put in their PowerPoint presentations.

Bionic Commando main menu is very cool looking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ygdmJBjT0

Games have main menus? I pretty much just hit the key to skip them in every single game I play.

At first, you're in awe at how it looks. And then you just keep clicking 'continue' whenever you enter it. So it's not that bad.
hehe, yeah, it's just brilliant.
How do you skip menu!?

A properly designed game lets you hit enter a few times and be playing. That's what iD always used to do. wolf3d.exe enter space enter enter and you should be playing.

But yeah, a slight bit of sarcasm, but not much when dealing with well thought out games. The menu isn't some place where people should be spending much time.

Stranglehold had a pretty kickass Menu