There's a couple of examples that often come to my mind when I think about my own gaming journey and feel like no one else took certain paths.
Outwars (1998) - a heavily Starship Troopers inspired (the film had come out the year before) action game, where the player completed missions in wide open levels as a sole space marine (or similar) against hordes of alien bugs. Lots of customisation options in terms of power armor types and weapons with which to wage your one-man war, but the game's signature feature was the fluid movement of the character. The power armors came with a jetpack which allowed the player to zoom through the levels horizontally
and vertically, and many of the levels were in fact designed with vast height differences in mind. The most vivid memory I have of the game in fact is a level set in a crashed space cruiser, where all the long corridors have now turned into tall shafts to navigate thanks to the position the cruiser hit the planet.
My school-years best friend had this game and I often borrowed it from him, and it became a little bit of our shared mini-obsession. Even at the time I didn't think it was anywhere near flawless - the difficulty is really unbalanced - but there was something in it that captivated our interest and imaginations. And in 2025, it's just another random late-90s PC game that's been largely forgotten. At least it has a
GOG page.
Drakan: Order of the Flame (1999) - much like the opening post example of Kameo, I feel like this should be remembered more by furries in particular. You
pilot a huge talking dragon, both in levels dedicated to dragon-to-dragon combat and in some of the larger levels as a transport method between the main gameplay sections. When you're not flying with your dragon BFF, the game is a pretty bog-standard late 90s 3rd person action title, but in that cosy kind of fashion that makes it still enjoyable to play. Or made it, anyway. Back in the day I didn't have as many games as I do now so whatever I had, I replayed through several times regardless of quality, so I don't really want to say for certain that Drakan was a particularly good game. But it had cool dragons.
The Riddle of Master Lu (1995) - OK so the first two titles I've seen mentioned once or twice in the past decade by other people, but this one sometimes feels like a complete fever dream only I conjured up because I've never seen it come up in any kind of retrospectives or genre history articles. It's a click-n-point adventure game from the mid-1990s based on the Ripley's Believe It or Not franchise: you control Mr Ripley himself as you try and track down an ancient artifact, like a store own brand Indiana Jones but with less whipping and nazis, and in-between you get to do your classic Ripley doodles and pick up lesser artifacts to take back to your Ripley museum. The graphics were based on digitised IRL actors so it's got that crunchy 90s FMV feel. The main thing I remember from this is how dang tricky it was. I was obsessed with click n point adventures around this period and even with my non-native English skills I could usually make good headway (and even complete) most of the titles I owned. I never made it very far in Riddle of Master Lu because the puzzles simply felt so obscure or difficult, and I remember how much that frustrated me because I simply wanted to continue. I've wanted for years to play it again to see if my big adult brain can now breeze through it, but as far as I can tell it's complete abandonware now and trying to get it working on a modern PC is a real faff.
Honestly there are probably a handful of other titles that I could namecheck as well, because as someone who was a PC-only gamer in the mid-late 1990s it feels like a massive amount of gaming history (and particularly all these mid-budget AA titles) has just been completely lost these days thanks to the console-dominated discourse.
