Eh, I loved painkiller, loved the weapons. loved the level design, the enemies, the secrets, the tarot card system, the compass for replayable missions. maybe none of those things were new but I found them to be very enjoyable.

Kill.switch was fun for it's day and I still fire it up on occasion.

Painkiller was just your typical first-person-shooter--in a crowded field--I had the game when new. Lost interest quickly. Privateer when new was so poor graphically that I lost interest. The rest of them I never bothered with. I was into the Amiga heavily at that time, primarily, and CGA/EGA graphics weren't comparable. I really enjoy these articles written by younger people revising the history of gaming--amusing...;) I guess they needed something to write about, although I can't agree with the article at all. At least he didn't say "The 6 games that had the most impact on PC gaming," but maybe he meant that?...;)

I mean, there was Unreal Tournament. Quake1/2, even 3, that had major impacts on PC gaming, I thought. Sierra games. Many others. Before console gaming, PC gaming was. In the 80's every game box featured Amiga screenshots on the box...didn't matter if it was an x86 DOS game, etc. I can be nostalgic with the best of them, but things are much better now, imo.

Not so sure about that list, since it just seems to be listing old games rather than giving any proof that they inspired anything. Painkiller wasn't even particularly notable when it came out; Serious Sam was already doing the retro-Doom thing that they're lauding Painkiller for 2 or 3 years earlier and Painkiller was just a 2004 "modernization" of Quake anyway.

Magic: The Gathering doesn't really deserve recognition as a computer game when even that wouldn't exist without the actual card game itself providing all of the influence it's getting credit for in the article. I'd also seriously doubt that Robinson's Requiem (that I've never even heard of) inspired any modern day survival games or had much, if any, influence on their creation, even if it was the first historical attempt at making one, and couldn't find any developer citing it as inspiration in any interviews or anything anywhere.

I didn't read the article but Westwood's Dune immediately came to mind.