Bullet Points: 5 Turn-of-the-Century Games

If video games were classic TV, these games from the early '90s and prior could be considered the I Love Lucys and the Brady Bunches.  But what about games from the early era of online gaming, at the turn of the century?  These are the Fresh Princes, the Seinfelds, and yes, the Single Guys of video game history.  Well, I've got good news for all you Jonathan Silverman fans out there: a few games from the 1998-2000 era are still going strong.  But these games aren't capitalizing on nostalgia: the people who play them never stopped playing them in the first place.  Here's a list of five games that have survived the loss of most developer/publisher support, the loss of 95% of their original fan bases, and the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

Starcraft 

Release Date: March 31, 1998 (four days after the FDA approved Viagra) 

Who Plays It:  Koreans.  Highly competitive Koreans.  Highly competitive Koreans who make thousands of dollars a year and get laid more than Jim Morrison... for playing Starcraft.  In South Korea, the game is televised frequently, and played in arenas that seat thousands of fans.  Take a look at this picture of a Korean "e-Sports Stadium" and tell me you're not looking into our own post-apocolyptic future. 

North Koreans, unfortunately, are only permitted to play the poorly programmed and propaganda-filled "Kim Jong-ilCraft". 

Everquest 

Release Date: March 16, 1999 (one week before NATO bombing began in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War) 

Who Plays It: Blind people, obviously.  Christ, look at these graphics: 

Most of the games on this list are still pretty in their own way.  Everquest was never pretty.  There are text-only MUDs that have better graphics than Everquest.  So it must be the outstanding gameplay that keeps people playing it (and paying for the privilege!) nine years later, right?  Nope, the gameplay is actually extremely boring and repetitive.  So why, you ask, why are people still playing Everquest?  God only knows, but it probably has something to do with cyber sex. 

Myth II: Soulblighter 

Release Date: December 20, 1998 (one day after the House of Representatives impeached Bill Clinton) 

Who Plays It:  About 500 die-hards.  Chances are you hadn’t even heard this real-time strategy game when it was brand new, despite the rave reviews it received.  It’s far more likely that you heard about the next game that came from the same development team – a moderately well known game called Halo.   

Bungie, the game’s developer and publisher, pulled the plug on their Myth II multiplayer servers in 2002 – but not before releasing code that enabled fans to run their own servers.  Today, Myth II is almost exclusively played on MariusNet. 

Diablo II 

Release Date: June 29, 2000 (one day after Elian Gonzalez returned to Cuba) 

Who Plays It: More people than you might think, unless you’re already playing it yourself.  For a game that could be competently played by a high-functioning ape, and is about to turn eight years old, it’s fairly amazing that Diablo II is the 33rd most popular game on gamefaqs.com.  So why has Diablo II continued to draw people in?  It’s the eternal lure of experience points and better gear.  If somebody made a game where all you did was watch two girls one cup over and over again, but with each play through you gained a level, and each ingestion of fecal matter gave you a new sword or greaves, people would play that shit for years, too.  Especially if you slap a Blizzard logo on the box. 

Counter-Strike 

Release Date: November 8, 2000 (one day after Al Gore was elected President of the United States) 

Who Plays It: Every lone gunman ever, according to Jack Thompson. Thompson, a Florida attorney and activist, blames things on violent video games like Jerry Falwell blames them on the gays, and Counter-Strike is one of his favorite targets.  But does Counter-Strike really train you to kill? 

No, it doesn’t (but Brazil banned it anyway, at the same bizarre, so-late-what’s-the-point time it banned Everquest).  What Counter-Strike does teach us is that you don’t have to be part of a big development house to make an awesome game.  It was originally developed as a Half-Life mod by two fans, Minh Le and Jess Cliffe.  Valve, the creators of Half-Life, took interest in the mod and brought it into the commercial mainstream with stand-alone versions.   

Still, thousands of people play the original Half-Life mod every day.  So listen up kids, if you go to Westwood College and learn how to code video games, you can become an industry icon, too.  Just don’t forget to tighten up the graphics on level three. 

And my mom said I would never get eeny-where with these games!