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PC Games 1995

History of 1990s Computer Games | Computer Game Reviews | Amiga Game Reviews

1995 PC Games



This is a curated list of PC games that came out in 1995. The PC games are listed in alphabetical order. Both MS-DOS and Windows PC games are included. I will expand on this list in the future.

In late 1995 Westwood released Command & Conquer and Blizzard released WarCraft 2, thereby setting off the RTS Boom that would go on for half a decade and culminate in Blizzard's StarCraft of 1998, which remained popular into the 2000s.

Some big-name 3D sports games were released on PC in 1995 as well, satisfying PC gamers on both sides of the Atlantic. You see, the lowly consoles had snatched EA's FIFA franchise and the NBA Live precursors right from under the nose of the PC from 1992 to 1994, yet PCs could have run such games at four times the fidelity and with many more features, such as networking. If EA were so interested in making the best team-sports sims possible, why would they choose the weakest platforms as lead? Note how flight sims and golf sims were much more advanced due to their PC-exclusivity.

And not only were console specs much weaker than PC specs, consider the following:

At this point let us remind ourselves of the limitations of video-game machines, aka consoles. As a rule, you can't code on consoles; you can't draw graphics, write stories or compose music on consoles; you can't debug or mod console games; you can't make games on consoles; consoles do not have operating systems.
Consoles stifled creativity because console gamers could only play video games, but computer gamers could make their own games -- games that could compete with Sega and Nintendo games.
Console gamers had toys, computer gamers had tools. -- Computer Game History.

Also, console games are video games. Imagine calling LINKS or Apache video games when they are in actual fact computer games. Indeed, they are simulators. It is only jingling jesters that would be so ignorant or impudent as to refer to computer games as VIDYA.

1995 was the weakest year of the first half of the decade; certainly, 1995 cuts a poor figure when set against 1990 to 1994, with the cRPG genre once again being the biggest laughing stock of all. One would need an excavator to sift through the massive pile of stinking trash clogging up the 1995 games catalogue, though the games I have listed here are generally good-to-great.

After taking a prolonged pummeling from the PC in 1994 the Amiga of 1995 nevertheless hosted Worms, the best Galaga clone ever, six Amiga-exclusive Doom clones, two AGA block-breakers and an A500 port of X-COM -- which amounts to a miracle when one considers that the Amiga was on the ropes, bloodied and battered, and about to get knocked out for good!

Yes, you read that right: the good ol' A500 of 1987 got a port of X-COM in 1995 -- one of the greatest games of all-time.

The Standouts of 1995


Allow me to make a case for 1995 greatness by alphabetically enumerating its highlights:

  • Gremlin Interactive's Actua Soccer was the first 32-bit English football game as well as the first fully-3D team-sports game.
  • Digital Integration's Apache rendered Gouraud-shaded 3D in SVGA 640x480. Apache was the first 32-bit Gunship sim.
  • Westwood Studio's Command & Conquer allowed players to bandbox up to 63 mammoth tanks and send them rampaging across smoothly-scrolling, height-mapped battlefields. In 1995 that was amazing.
  • Edgar M. Vigdal's Deluxe Galaga on Amiga is the best Galaga clone ever coded. Deluxe Galaga even features 2-player simultaneous play.
  • Interplay's Descent employed six degrees of freedom in texture-mapped 3D subterranean environments.
  • Argonaut Software's FX Fighter allowed players to switch between flat-shaded, Gouraud-shaded and texture-mapped 3D.
  • Sir Tech's Jagged Alliance was the first full-featured and professionally-programmed 32-bit tactics game: a masterpiece.
  • LucasArts' Star Wars: Dark Forces occupies the FPS evolution middleground between 2.5D Doom-likes and Quake.
  • Gary Grigsby's Steel Panthers is the best tactics-level wargame ever made.
  • Eagle Dynamics' Su-27 Flanker on Windows 95 included a scenario editor and was the most complex flight sim yet seen (grognard-level).

Microsoft Windows 95



In August of 1995 Microsoft released the first good Windows OS for gaming, Windows 95. And while Microsoft Windows would not be referred to as Microshaft Windoze as often as it had been in its feeble 3.xx past, many computer gamers did not have pressing reasons to switch from MS-DOS to Windows in 1995, but MS-DOS games could be run on Windows 95 systems via DOS mode and dual-boot, anyway.

Windows 95 required an i80386DX 33 MHz CPU and 4 megs of RAM, but a 486DX2 66 MHz CPU and 8 megs of RAM was recommended. Many MS-DOS games exceeded such system requirements stemming back to 1991, but Windows 95 caused a ton of gamers to upgrade their PCs or purchase new ones, regardless. And needless to say, the Windows 95 launch was huge in that even non-computerists had heard of that new thingamajig from Bill Gates.

In theory Windows 95 would make PC game development easier because programmers only needed to interface with "DirectX" rather than deal with hundreds of different system configurations and chipset specifications. For example, instead of coding for one audiovisual chipset-type the programmer codes to the API, which (in theory) would encompass the gamut of chipsets, but under API rules. The downside to this is of course lack of diversity and lack of extremes: the DOS world is the Wild West whereas the world of Windows 95 is agrarian and standardized.

In addition, Windows 95's Plug and Play made hardware installation easier and its Autoplay made game installation easier for normies and newbies, many of whom would shriek and recoil in horror if they caught sight of Norton Commander, let alone the MS-DOS command prompt.


At this point, one should take a moment to reflect on the computer-literacy of the PC user of the early to mid 1990s. Consider the command line along with config.sys, autoexec.bat, IRQ levels, DMA channels, memory managers, TSRs, disk-caching and disk-compression. And now contrast that with your average Steam and GoG fanboy of 2025.

The DOS-era gamer was on a whole other level.

Windows 95 Did Not Make PC Games Better


It is important to note that Windows 95 and its APIs did not actually make PC games better. Instead, Windows 95 arguably only made it easier to develop PC games, which is a double-edged sword. No Windows 95-exclusive game can be cited that is objectively superior to the best offered by the MS-DOS game catalogue. In addition, no DirectX API game can be cited that is objectively superior to assembly-coded PC games.

My Hall of Fame (see sidebar in desktop view mode) consists of one dozen PC games, and only three of them are Windows-exclusive games, the rest are MS-DOS games. And the three Windows-exclusive games could have easily appeared on and been just as good on MS-DOS.

256-color square-pixel games were standardized by but did not originate on Windows DirectX: MS-DOS was hosting such games by as early as 1991. Before Windows 95 came out there were at least a dozen square-pixel games out for MS-DOS. In addition, the first square-pixel SVGA games are MS-DOS games. Before Windows 95 came out there were at least 16 square-pixel SVGA games out for MS-DOS. And at least one dozen SVGA square-pixel games came out for MS-DOS in 1995 alone.

Featuring up to 500 automation functions 3D API middleware on MS-DOS predates Windows 95 Direct3D SDK by three years. Thus, the first hardware-accelerated 3D PC games were MS-DOS games, not Windows games.

On PC smooth multi-directional screen-scrolling and sprite-shifting predate Windows 95 by four years. Such coinop-quality characteristics were honed on PC during the MS-DOS era, not the Windows era. Coders of EGA games were double-buffering screens in 1990.

On PC smooth hardware mouse cursors predate Windows 95 by almost one decade. The Atari ST and Amiga had ultra-smooth mouse cursors since 1985. Some Amiga games had per-pixel mouse cursor movement with zero lag in 1986 yet even in 2025 there are Windows games with lagging hardware mouse cursors.

Marquee selection in PC games predates Windows 95 by one year.

Moreover, Windows 95 cannot claim to have helped the PC supercede the Amiga as a computer game machine because MS-DOS, Intel CPUs and IBM S/VGA had already demolished the Amiga by the time Windows 95 came out; that is, the race was already won. And this is one reason why three decades of Windows PC gaming history is nowhere near as interesting as one decade of MS-DOS gaming history: it is competition that makes things interesting, not domination -- the race is everything, the victory lap nothing.

On top of that, the vast majority of the best and most historically significant PC games are MS-DOS games, not Windows games; it was the MS-DOS era that saw the biggest leaps forward in PC gaming, not the Windows era. The MS-DOS gaming era oversaw the transition from i808x to Pentium, ¾ MIPS to 190 MIPS, 128K of RAM to 64 megs of RAM, CGA to SVGA, bleeps & blurps to digital audio and 160K magnetic media to 700 meg optical media.

At warp-speed, MS-DOS games went from 8-bit to 32-bit exes, monochrome text-based to high-color cinematic 3D, 320x200 to 1600x1200 resolution, and Space Invaders to Quake: genre-invention and technical revolution upon revolution. In comparison, the Windows gaming era has been sloth-like, imitative and merely evolutionary due to normie involvement in game development and the diminishing returns of subsequent technological advances.

Practically every PC-game genre not only has its origin in the MS-DOS era but also hit its height in the MS-DOS era. Yes, PC games became much bigger and more accessible in the Windows era (which is ongoing), but are they better games?

In the sphere of PC gaming Windows 95's main claim to fame is that of greatly increased accessibility and mass-awareness that resulted in unassailable market penetration for three decades and counting.

In addition, Windows 95 (unlike MS-DOS) offered native aka built-in TCP/IP network protocol support, thereby popularizing online gaming for the mainstream.

***

The King computer game of 1995 was Westwood's Command & Conquer on MS-DOS.

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Each entry below links to either technical overviews, reviews or deep delves on the game. You can click an image and mouse-wheel up and down through the images.

List of 1995 PC Games











Lemmings 3 All New World of Lemmings Amiga DMA Design 1995:




MechWarrior 2 IBM PC MS-DOS Activision Studios 1995:

NBA Jam Tournament Edition IBM PC MS-DOS Iguana Entertainment 1995:


NBA Live 95 IBM PC MS-DOS Hitmen Productions 1995:


NBA Live 96 IBM PC MS-DOS Hitmen Productions 1995:



Star Wars: Rebel Assault IBM PC MS-DOS LucasArts 1995:


Steel Panthers IBM PC MS-DOS SSI 1995:



Warlords 2 Deluxe IBM PC MS-DOS Strategic Studies Group 1995:


Zeewolf 2 Amiga Binary Asylum 1995:



Best 1995 Computer Games: Awards



cf.

PC Games 1987 PC Games 1991 PC Games 1995
PC Games 1988 PC Games 1992PC Games 1996
PC Games 1989 PC Games 1993 Decade of 1990-99
PC Games 1990 PC Games 1994 PC Game Reviews

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