Syndicate - a 1993 isometic cyberpunk game where you control up to 4 agents and go on various missions to take over the world for your criminal syndicate. The missions are generally steal technology, assassinate someone, or protect someone. My friend had this c1996-1997 and we played it alot at his house. It was a fun game to play straightfowardly, but it was also one of those games were you can just run around massacring innocent people. Given that and the game’s general premise, it would have been fodder for the anti-video game violence crowd if it was more famous. It has some game elements you wouldn’t expect. For example, you had to tax the territories you conquered for money to research and buy new weapons. If you taxed them too highly they’d rebel and you had to play the mission again.
I bought it on GoG around 2019 and then played it then and again during COVID. It had an expansion pack called “Syndicate Wars” that’s I’ve seen some people call one of the hardest games ever made. At first I found that unplayable, but I beat the whole thing during COVID shutdown.
Playing it again, I still think that it’s fun but some elements haven’t aged well. I hate that you can select one agent at a time to move/control, or select all 4 of them, but you can’t select 2 or 3 at a time. Also, it’s isometic and the view never cuts away obstructing objects like it does in games like Fallout.

Wasteland - Speaking of Fallout. I discovered this post-apocalyptic 1988 RPG on Apple II emulator c2000 and was really impressed by how big and complex it is. It’s like a proto-Fallout. Like some other old computer RPGs I’ve played, it’s a little too complex, which more different skills than you’ll ever need. There are also a number of different ways to screw up your game. I had to try three playthroughs before I beat it without ruining my game (you can save unlimited backups, but both times it took me too long to realize how I’d ruined things for me to be willing to go band and try from an earlier file).
If you grew up on consoles you wouldn’t have realized how in depth a game like this could be even in the ’80s. And it had other things you wouldn’t find on a ’80s/’90s console game, like a three legged prostitute that gives you “wasteland herpes.”
If you remember the old copyright protection measures games of this era his, Wasteland had a creative one. You needed a paper “paragraph book,” where you would periodically be told to turn to specific paragraph for the text that advanced to story. You could find this online if you were playing it on emulator. It was full of fake paragraphs, so you couldn’t just read ahead to cheat (sometimes it would specifically do something to throw you off, like have otherwise identical paragraphs were you learned a fake password that would bring disaster). I read through it after beating the game. There was an entire fake storyline where you go to Mars.
They made a sequel about 10 years ago. I haven’t played it, but I think it came with the original game.