9. Grand Theft Auto
Nowadays GTA games offer sprawling 3D worlds of incredible fidelity, where flip-flops are famously animated to both flip and flop. The original GTA was much simpler - a top-down high-score game where you raced around taking on driving and shooting missions inspired by movies and pop culture. Fantastic at the time, it felt very much at home on PlayStation.
10. Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII was always going to be a huge moment for Squaresoft, as they were then known, because it signaled their defection from Nintendo consoles to the upstart Sony Computer Entertainment. The result was particularly galling for Nintendo fans because it showed the RPG maker at the peak of its powers, using new technology to tell an unforgettable story about indelible characters who haunt us to this day.
11. Resident Evil
Another birth-of-a-genre story, Resident Evil wasn't the first scary video game, but it redefined our expectations for them. Iconic moments like the zombie dogs bursting into the house were laced throughout this fantastic blend of - as UK sitcom Spaced once put it - lateral thinking and extreme violence, and the core formula of exploring a mansion and discovering it has untold depths has rarely been bettered.
12. Driver
UK-based developer Reflections ultimately found a happy second life as part of Ubisoft, but for a while Driver seemed like a proper rise-and-fall story, with the miserable Driv3r on PS2 and Xbox among the worst high-profile flops of that era. The first Driver was a great game, though - a tough and unforgiving tale of an underworld wheelman inspired by classic Hollywood chase movies.
13. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2
We could have gone with the original, but this is where the series really came alive, defining the skateboard game archetype for several console generations in a way that made other attempts - like EA's Skate series - feel like weird anomalies. Using fighting game-style button combos to pull off tricks between balance-based grinds in fast-paced urban environments, this was a combo-lover's dream.
