My Top Five Video Games

1. Selection Criteria

Tim deliberated for months before settling on a framework: not games with the most hours played, but games that were most influential — ideally the first of their genre or feature set he ever encountered. Every game on the list is at least 24 years old; the oldest is 44. He presents them chronologically rather than ranked.

2. Star Raiders (1979, Atari 800)

Tim was around 14 when Star Raiders blew his mind. It was a true 3D game running in 8 kilobytes — positions calculated in 3D space, correct rotations, photon torpedoes with 3D intersection checks. He puts this in perspective: his Unity clone of Star Raiders has a 639KB executable (80× larger), 500MB with data (62,000× larger), and 6.5GB as a full project (812,000× larger).

The game used sprites for visual representation but the underlying simulation was genuinely three-dimensional. Written in assembly language and shipped on a tiny cartridge, it fascinated Tim so much that he pulled the assembly off the cartridge and studied it line by line. This process taught him the Atari 800 architecture — chipsets, graphics modes, extended graphics modes, and assembly language — all of which directly led to his first job in the industry.

3. Ultima III: Exodus (1983, played 1987)

Tim's first CRPG love. He hadn't played Ultima I or II — he went back to them afterward. What captivated him: party control, puzzles that didn't hold your hand (figuring out how Moongates worked on your own), 3D dungeons within a top-down overworld, and a final confrontation with Exodus that was "amazing and surprising."

A key design observation his teenage brain filed away: the game used different level-scaling models in different contexts. Outdoor encounters scaled to your party level, but dungeons had fixed (usually high) difficulty. Walk in too early and you'd get destroyed. This taught him that you don't have to pick one scaling model and apply it everywhere — an insight that would echo through his later RPG work.

Tim played it during the summer of 1987, between graduating from UVA and starting his master's at UCI. His mom told him to take the summer off because "you're never going to have another summer off the rest of your life." He gardened every morning, chatted with retired neighbors, then played Ultima III the rest of the day. He acknowledges that many RPGs since have surpassed it in graphics, story, characters, and mechanics — but Ultima III is still better for him because it ignited his CRPG fire.

4. Star Control 2 (1992)

Tim had played the original Star Control's two-player combat mode with a friend, but Star Control 2 "exploded his brain case." It was nonlinear and open-galaxy, had a great story full of funny and memorable characters, and beneath the humor ran a genuinely dark storyline.

Tim states plainly: "I cannot understate how much Star Control 2 influenced Fallout." The game's structure — open-world exploration, tone mixing humor with darkness, memorable alien characters — became a template.

He also loved the combat system's rock-paper-scissors ship dynamics, where even weak ships excelled against specific opponents, and the phenomenal music (he still hums the Utwig Dirge). Tim considers Star Control 2 an RPG — your ship is your character, you upgrade it, your crew are your hit points — and wrote as much in Philip Pepe's The CRPG Book.

5. Star Wars: X-Wing (1993)

Tim had played Wing Commander but loved Star Wars more. X-Wing used true 3D polygons rather than sprites — and because Star Wars ships are mostly gray, flat-shaded polygons looked perfectly natural. When ships turned, they actually turned, unlike Wing Commander's sprite-based ships that visibly "tilted." He draws the same comparison to Star Trek: 25th Anniversary at Interplay, which had the same sprite limitation.

What made it an "amazing simulation": the sound effects and music were spot-on from the films, weapons felt authentic, and the power-balancing system between engines, shields, and weapons gave the player meaningful tactical control. Tim played it so much he wore out his joystick — then won a new one at the Logitech booth at his first GDC in 1994.

6. EverQuest (1999)

Tim's first professional MMO experience. He'd had prior exposure to LPMUDs (covered in other videos), but EverQuest showed him how single-player RPG mechanics fundamentally change with a thousand players running around — quest design, progression, combat difficulty, exploration, PvP rules all had to be rethought.

He was playing EverQuest at night after 14-hour days making Arcanum — completely addicted. His memorable groups included:

• The Spicy Girls — everyone played a Spice Girl character (Tim was Posh)
• The Necro Squad — all necromancers, exploiting endless skeleton summons to tackle zones far above their level
• The All-Hobbit Group — a Lord of the Rings tribute with characters named Fred Wise, Unwise, Harry Wise, Ami Wise, and Kent Wise

EverQuest directly led Tim to wanting to make an MMO, which led to him working on WildStar at Carbine Studios.

7. The Common Thread

All five games share a pattern: each was Tim's first encounter with something new (3D games, CRPGs, nonlinear open-world design, true 3D simulation, MMO design), and each directly influenced a career milestone (first job, Fallout, Arcanum, WildStar). Tim notes his actual top 10 probably includes games viewers would expect, but these five earned their spots through lasting influence rather than nostalgia or playtime.

8. References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j6qqh3H-0Y