I submit Lords of Midnight on the Spectrum, released 1984.

It's a massive turn-based strategy game. It has a two-pronged strategy: you can get one character to destroy the enemy's artifact, the ice crown, or follow a military campaign. The military campaign involves travelling around convincing each city's Lord to join the fight. You played it from a first person perspective, and you saw the mountains, forests and cities and so on. Each lord had a different personality, and some garnered nicknames, like Lord Brownpants, for consistent lack of backbone.

These days something like this would be done like Dragon Age, with a more narrative story. LoM did it with the story that emerged from the way you played it. Would the Gandalf-equivalent manage to convince Lord Y to join the fight and shore up the vital right flank? Would the small force you sent with the Prince destroy the ice crown before Doomdark's forces destroy the last free city. And so on. The replayability of the thing was surprising given the identical map and starting conditions, but small changes in your strategy would give entirely different situations come the climax.

Bushido Blade (PS1)- sword fighting done right. One shot kills, maimed limbs, limping around swinging wildly at your opponent because you were so hurt... ah, good times.

Golden Eye (N64)- Hello modern-day FPS with stealth elements.

Way of the Samurai (PS2)- Massive changes to the story based on virtually every action you take. The story could last 5 minutes or 3 hours. There really was no "right way" to play the game.

Virtual On. It's the giant robot fighting game that you play with two flightsticks. The unique control felt really natural and flexible. I think Xbox Live has the latest of the series. You can play with the regular 360 controller, and the twin analog sticks of the controller's design can somewhat mimic the layout of the arcade sticks, but it's just not the same.

By smashing his head in with the smithing hammer.

I'd agree with Perfect Dark, it was amazing just how many things they crammed into that game for when it came out. To be honest I never felt Golden Eye really lived up to the hype in comparison.

For PC games I'd go with Planescape: Torment. I still don't think an RPG has matched it for the narrative, characters, story and the effect your actions had on these.

Fade to Black - full 3D action in DOS. The animations were incredible for their time. This was the first game that made me think in 3 dimensions in a video game which was very difficult at the time.

Myth: The Fallen Lords by Bungie is my choice, not only because it did things that I hadn't seen before, but it also did things that haven't been replicated since.

It's razor-like focus on unit tactics over base and map strategy was a huge breath of fresh air. Proper use of unit abilities, flanking tactics, surprise attacks, and minimizing casualties was critical to victory, and the thrill of winning a multiplayer match with a single Bowman left alive is unparalleled.

Definitely a game that was ahead of it's time. These days the closest I've seen is the Total War games, but those are on a totally different scale.

I'd forgotten all about that one. Now that I think about almost every Origin game that came out was groundbreaking at the time. It seemed like every time they released something new I had to upgrade my PC just to play it.

System Shock (the first one). Criminally overshadowed by Doom when it was released.

Lets Play Jurassic Park: Trespasser
more interesting to watch than it probably was to play

Deus Ex. This game had it all from a great story, soundtrack, gameplay, and customization. It was my first experience where the choices you made took you on different paths.
Also the amount of augmentations meant you can play the game over and over and do something different. This was a very revolutionary game and I'm pretty sure many people agree.

Now go reinstall it.

This.
I remember slotting token after token into this game because it was so much fun, and it felt like you were actually piloting a giant anime robot. The dual stick controls were so well done. I actually have a copy for the PC, but the controls felt wrong with keyboard/one joystick. It might be worth the effort to see if I can go buy two cheap sticks and get them to work in tandem to play the game right.

The mall near where I lived 3 years ago had a Virtual On machine in the arcade, but it closed down right before I moved.

Totally agree. The other big thing: this game had physics! In an actual gameplay affecting way, you wanted to get your dwarves on high ground so they could throw bombs that would roll and bounce at your enemies. RTS games didn't have physics that mattered at all again until Relic's stuff way, way, way later.

Everything that that crowd of people did, first at Looking Glass and then at Ion Storm, was amazing and before its time. The fact that you can draw a straight line from Ultima Underworld through System Shock and Thief, through Deus Ex and Anachronox and all the way up to Bioshock is completely awesome.

I completely forgot about the physics until you mentioned this, and yes, that was huge. Not just from the gameplay sense, but Myth and Myth 2 both came out prior to 2000, which was the launch of Havok, so these games had fully integrated physics engines before you could simply buy a pre-packaged physics engine off the shelf. The fact that bowmen fired further from higher ground, or that you could take advantage of the timed fuses on the dwarves charges, was an even greater achievement as you point out.

Yes, I remember bombarding from across the map with my fetch and dwarves. I recall one particular replay of a King of the Hill game where in the final minute, it was 2 dwarves chucking molotovs at each other, but the map was raining, so each molotov was extinguishing, building a huge pile at the base of the flag. Finally the rain stopped, one molotov didn't extinguish, and the entire thing went up, obliterating one dwarf and leaving the other near death. About 1 minute 30 seconds later, a scimitar fell from the sky, landed on top of the remaining dwarf, and killed him.

I've never seen another game come close to creating that kind of unique sequence of events. Then again, I haven't played DoW, so maybe it can.

Myst. I don't think I've ever seen a game as far ahead of it's time as that one. Heck, in many ways it STILL hasn't been surpassed.