Warzone 2100

Back in 1999, Warzone 2100 felt like a glimpse into the future of strategy gaming. Forget endless waves of faceless soldiers; here you could actually design your own tanks and choppers like a mad scientist in a scrapyard. “Do I want wheels, treads, or legs?” was a real question you’d ask yourself, and somehow it mattered more than deciding what to eat for dinner. The game tossed you into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where your enemies weren’t just hostile factions but also your own terrible design choices—like strapping a flamethrower onto a paper-thin car. Originally on Windows, Linux, and Mac, Warzone 2100 combined base-building, resource hunting, and that sweet, sweet chaos of customizing units that often exploded in seconds. It’s clunky by today’s standards, but in its day it was a glorious experiment that made you feel like an engineer of doom… until you realized the AI was much better at it.