1995 contains one obvious gaming headline and one much larger, less obvious one buried in a piece of consumer software that was not a game at all.
Command & Conquer Becomes the RTS to Beat
Westwood Studios' Command & Conquer refined the real-time strategy formula further, adding full-motion video briefings, a more aggressive pace, and two factions — GDI and Nod — with genuinely distinct identities and playstyles. It became the yardstick every subsequent RTS release through the late 1990s was compared against, arguably more so than its own ancestor, Dune II.
Windows 95 Changes the Rules Quietly
The launch of Windows 95 mattered enormously to PC gaming even though it shipped no games of its own. Plug-and-play hardware detection, a more standardized driver model, and eventually DirectX support meant developers could stop writing directly against raw DOS hardware quirks. The transition took a couple of years to fully play out — plenty of 1995 and 1996 titles still ran happily under DOS — but the direction of travel was now set.
Why an Operating System Belongs in a "Best Games of the Year" Article
Because the platform a game runs on shapes what kind of game gets made. Command & Conquer's late-DOS-era production values were partly possible because the industry could already see where PC hardware and software standards were heading. The two stories are connected, not coincidental.
Following the Thread
Read Windows 95 and 98 Games: The Bridge to Modern PC Gaming for the full platform story, and browse 1995's full catalogue by year for everything else that shipped.
