We didn't.... and I still don't *Single tear* :)

Fallout. I remember it as an interesting little appetizer of a crpg that came out while everyone was eagerly anticipating Baldur's Gate. It's stature seems to have skyrocketed since the release of Fallout 3.

Hey, I had plenty of friends! It's not my fault that they were either invisible or digital.

Command and Conquer was known as the less interesting version of Red Alert. It would usually go like this; Person 1 would freaking love Red Alert and person 2 would tell him that Red Alert is actually the second game in the series. Person 1 would have his curiosity piqued and person 2 would hand him his Command and Conquer copy. Person 1 would proceed to play the game for a while, be thoroughly unimpressed and return the game, usually the next day. The reason would always have to do with a lack of Soviets, specifically, no Mammoth Tanks and no Tesla Coils (and no funny accents).

I feel sort of the opposite about those titles, actually, suggesting that I hung out pretty much exclusively with people who were like me :P Morrowind was hugely anticipated by pretty much everyone I talked to, an Starcraft was...it was just a monster. It was the second video game I'd heard of where people played games professionally (Quake being the first) and a few even earned a decent living do so.

I suspect that I knew about those so readily because they were descended from a royal pedigree. Daggerfall was the cult hit - necessarily so because of the bugs and general difficulty in getting to the content. Morrowind was the polished gem from the rough. And Quake of course came from Doom and Wolfenstein before it, but improved on basically everything.

That said, yeah; some of the big hits on GOG are cult classics, games that never got the attention they probably deserved at the time.

Interesting question but your examples don't fit. Maybe it's because some of you are young, or it was just different in your region, but Morrowind, C&C, and Starcraft were all very popular (bestsellers).

This one seem to qualify as well.

Not sure but Wasteland wasn't all that popular, at least I hadn't heard of it until I read about it on a review of Fallout.

Wasteland was a very popular game in the 80s! Can remember playing it on C64 (or was it Amiga) At least we kids knew about this game and back in the days only kids played computer games. Nowadays we got old and stare shocked at the kids, calling themselves "digital natives" and don`t know sh.. about the history of computer gaming.
Many of the old games on gog were also well known and played when they originally came out. Adventures were also a big thing in the 80s and beginning nineties. In the first half of the eighties there were the so called "text adventures" where everything was presented as text only and you had to type in the commands like "get key", "north" or "use key". Then there were the "graphic adventures", which also used text descriptions and text commands. Those games had a better parser (the part of the programm which had to interprete your commands) and they now showed you a picture of the place where you are. Finally there came the "point and click adventures" where everything was showed graphical on the screen and you were able to walk with you character and interact with the surrounding.
Ah, the history of computergaming is an interesting story, full of wonders, mistakes, evolutions and catastrophes.

I did. Even bought a shiny new graphic card just for it. Trouble is that it turned out I really. really don't like the Elder Scrolls Series gameplay ... :)

But yes, plenty of the old games here on GOG really were well received and big hits. Even things like Battle Chess - one of the many cross-platform games that were around before DOS based PCs really got big.

As others said, pre-Internet it was very easy to "miss" a popular game if you friends didn't know it and if you happened to not read the magazine that was reviewing it. Many of the games that have been mentioned (Morrowind, C&C, etc.), were immensely popular, though it's of course always possible that someone lived in one of the aforementioned bubbles that remained completely unaffected by them.

I have a question myself though. :)

I'm a games collector for more than three decades now, but I'm 100% certain that I never heard about any of the "Tex Murphy" games until I saw them on GOG. Yet, the games _must_ have been popular, otherwise "Tesla Effect" would have been impossible to create. Is this perhaps a regional phenomenon? Did these games perhaps never get translated into German, and no one released them in Germany? (At that time, translation was considered much more important than it is now.)

Ya, I do remember Tex Murphy being one of the "bigger" midgeneration adventure games. The biggies being (after the text adventures) things like Gabriel Knight and Leisure Suit Larry. Tex was in that category. Amoung those "in the know" the Lucas Arts adventures were the bee's knees but Tex, Larry and Gabriel (plus Phantasmagoria) were the big budget adventure games of the time... at least in the US.

And Tooms I looked at "popular" at least as far as this thread was concerned, as the games that were big "outside" of the gamer circle.

I could be wrong, but for this thread I was thinking those "mainstream" sort of titles. For example (and again, I'm taking the perspective of someone in the US) I had friends that WEREN'T "gamers" but they played a ton of Bond (Goldeneye) a ton of Tony Hawk and a bunch of Tekken / fighting games.

Morrowind might have been a popular best seller in that it sold a lot of copies for the day, but if I went into the house of any of my friends at the time and mentioned it the response would have been "Morrowhat? Never heard of that geek stuff. Now let's play some split screen - brah you better not pick the short guy!"

I took this thread to be popular with the mass market, not popular within gamer circles (granted I violated that when I mentioned how everyone who had a PC in the early '90s played C&C ;) )

Dude. I swear Darkstone was NEVER as popular in the days of Playstation 1 as it is now that its on GoG. You could literally NEVER find a person who played it(I was one of its fans, loved the Wizards in the game) and yet...EVERYONE on GoG has heard of it/likes it.


When did I miss the conversion people?! Help a Gamer understand?!

Morrowind was a pretty strange beast. While it was well-known among gamers (Bethesda accompanied the release with a very elaborate marketing campaign, complete with half a dozen of promotional videos), and sold decently (though not great) initially, it left many gamers confused and disappointed because it broke with genre conventions that they expected.

The main marketing slogan for Morrowind was "Live another Life", and that was also the leading motto during the game's design. Consequentially, the game was designed as a vast open world that gave the player lots of different options for pursuing the "career" they desired for their character, as well as giving them the freedom to completely ignore the main quest. This game, then, was sold to a generation of players who were used to "beat the game" being the main objective.

When the game explicitly tells you to leave the main quest aside for a while, go exploring, and gain some recognition in this world in whichever way you desire, many gamers were confused due to lack of direction (the backlash from this triggered the introduction of massive handholding later in Oblivion). Another common comment about the game's freedom of choice went like this: "Yeah, you can progress in a whole lot of different guilds, but it's all completely useless because it doesn't help you beat the main quest."

There were also lots of players who first gamed the leveling system (since they were used to this from other games), and then complained about the effects that that had on the game. Many players just didn't know what to do with the freedom that Morrowind gave them, and ended up being disappointed.

But over time, more and more people realized what the game had to offer, thousands of mods enhanced the experience, and the game became an incredible longseller.

Weird, seems that this is one of the series that simply bypassed my own personal bubble at that time. ;)

I'll have to ask my friends if they ever heard about the series. In any case, I recently played "Tesla Effect" and it made me quite curious about the previous games in the series. :)

I have to concur with your points on Morrowind, though....I still prefer the Vanilla game over any modded version, and still play my game. Never did any of the quests, I was more the dungeon runner, loot merchant guy. >> Until I got bored and killed everyone with a level 8 Spellsword Custom Class.