I have a soft spot in my heart for the Commodore Amiga.  It came out 22 years ago in 1985 and was way ahead of its time.  It had a GUI, ,stereo audio, hi-res color graphics, hardware-accelerated graphics, etc.  It had all this years before the PC.  I didn't jump to the PC until 1995 because it was only then that it had managed to surpass the Amiga.  It was the Amiga that first brought things like 3D rendering, digital video editing, and looped audio creation to the mainstream.

Given the great multimedia capabilities, the Amiga was also a great gaming computer.  Wired just published an article listing the top 10 most influence games on the Amiga.  I played most of these and enjoyed them.  Games listed include:

  1. Defender of the Crown - Amazing graphics for its time.  Spent a lot of time playing this one.
  2. Sensible Soccer
  3. Speedball 2
  4. Syndicate - actually the first SVGA game on the PC I was aware of
  5. Lemmings - really cool platformer.  Now available on the PSP.
  6. Pinball Dreams
  7. Cannon Fodder
  8. Shadow of the Beast - First arcade-quality side scroller on a PC.
  9. Another World - One of the first vector-based adventure games.
  10. Worms -didn't know this was an Amiga title.

To this list I would add:

  1. Blood Money - first arcade-quality side-scrolling shooter on a PC.
  2. F/A-18 Interceptor - first 3D, color flight simulator on a PC.  This game sold me on the Amiga.
  3. Battle Chess - Animated Chess.  The rook eating the queen was one of my favorite moves.
  4. Dungeon Master - Established the 3D dungeon genre in something other than wireframe graphics.  Ultima Underworld definitely followed this trend and arguably, titles like Wolfenstein did too.

4/13 Update - Added Dungeon Master to the list.  Definitely influential.