The most popular first person 3D games

Champions of Krynn is a RPG released in 1990 by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) and is the first game in the Dragonlance Gold Box series. It is based on the Advanced Dungeons &am...

In the 25th century, bureaucracy is still awful—but now you also have laser guns. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday is a surprisingly solid sci-fi RPG that blends space oper...

Imagine Doom and Ultima Underworld had a low-budget child who was homeschooled in a basement filled with Mountain Dew cans. That’s Amulets & Armor. A mix of first-person ...

Destruction Derby (1995) is the game that taught us driving isn’t about speed or elegance—it’s about gleefully ramming your car into other vehicles until only twi...

Welcome aboard, Captain! Advanced Destroyer Simulator throws you into the high seas with all the firepower and radar beeps a '90s DOS machine can handle. Manage torpedoes, dodge de...

Take Eddie Murphy’s swagger, remove the charm, add some DOS chiptunes, and you get Beverly Hills Cop—a game adaptation that asks: “What if being a wisecracking de...

Quake II is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and released in 1997. It is the sequel to the original Quake and was a significant milestone in the evolution...

In 1989, Deathtrack tried to answer a question nobody asked: “What if NASCAR had machine guns?” The result is a futuristic racer where speed and firepower go hand in ha...

ATAC (1992) is what you get when someone says, “What if we made SimCity, but for waging the War on Drugs?” You play as the head of an anti-narcotics task force, deployi...

In Castle Master, you get dropped into a spooky polygonal castle and told, “Figure it out.” And that’s it. Early 3D graphics make every wall look like it was pain...

If you like your RPGs verbose, Betrayal at Krondor is basically a fantasy novel you play. Set in Raymond E. Feist’s Midkemia, the game oozes with narrative depth, detailed ch...

This sequel takes the same D&D-in-space formula and tries to go bigger, bolder, and... okay, maybe just more complicated. Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed continues the galactic strug...

Elite Plus takes everything intimidating about Elite and polishes it just enough to feel slightly less hostile. The visuals are improved, the interface smoother, but the soul remai...

Dark Side (1988) is a first-person sci-fi adventure set on a moon orbiting a planet that’s about to be destroyed. No pressure. The gameplay combines exploration with puzzle-s...

Based on the Tom Clancy-inspired novel, Team Yankee puts you in charge of a tank platoon during World War III. It’s the Cold War gone hot, and you’re the unlucky comman...

MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries is a standalone expansion to MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, released in 1996 by Activision. Part of the larger BattleTech universe, the game puts pl...

MechWarrior (1989) was one of the first games to put players inside a 3D cockpit of a giant mech, but it wasn’t just a combat game, it was also an open-ended mercenary RPG, w...

Alternate Reality: The City is a role-playing video game developed by Paradise Programming for various platforms including Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, and Commodore 64. It was released ...

Blade of Destiny is old-school RPGing at its most unapologetic. Based on the German tabletop system Das Schwarze Auge, it throws you into a world where character creation alone fee...

Ah, 3D-Maze. If you used Windows 3.x, you probably saw this lurking in the corner of your screen savers like a digital minotaur. Released in 1991, it’s not quite a game, but ...

Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen is a role-playing video game developed and published by New World Computing in 1992. It's part of the long-running Might and Magic series. In Clo...