THRUST

Does what it says on the tin.It's neither about its minimal design and simple graphics, nor about the unnervingly monotonous sounds of an engine thruster.The plot doesn't affect the gaming experience at all. It was done by one man from start to finish. But it's about physics and inertia and breaking a sweat while grapling the controls of your spacecraft, avoiding cave walls and thinking about your movements before you moved. It's graceful and addictive. it's timeless and unique.The cold design of the world traversed gives the player a common feel of a dystopian world without the usual   landscape and machinery visuals.It's truly an inspiration to hundreds of games that came afterwards. A game that could do with more in-game sounds and music, but hey- Rob Hubbard's title theme for the c64 version still rocks hard enough to make you ignore the above mentioned thruster sounds.

QIX

One of those games quickly achieving cult status that you both hate (for being too damn hard to play in an arcade full of people yelling around you) and love (because it breaks new grounds).
You're a drawing marker (though I like to think of it more in terms of a futuristic vehicle as seen from way, way up) marking area by area of a rectangle screen with the aim of claiming  at least 60 percent of the rectangle, all the while avoiding direct contact with the Sparx who thread the same paths you did and claiming an area without it being touched by a mysterous entity the game was named after.

It's a fun and exciting play, so I guess its quick decline in popularity has to do with somewhat abstract graphics that didn't clearly indicate what you were seeing on the screen. Being a game ma(r)ker has always been hard. To me this is as essential in the history of gaming as Tetris, Pang, Block Out and other like-minded games. Try it for yourselves on any of the browsing game sites with classics nd you'll see how great it is.