MSN put together a list of '90s games we now call classics, and reading it felt like flipping through a photo album of my own adolescence. Pokémon Red and Blue, Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007, all the heavy hitters are there, and they've all earned it.

Super Mario 64 deserves a minute here, because people forget how much of a gamble it was. Nobody knew how to do 3D platforming in 1996. Nintendo basically wrote the rulebook while shipping the game, and the camera everyone complains about now was invented on the spot because someone had to. You can trace a straight line from that castle lobby to basically every open world game you've played since.

GoldenEye is the one I have the most muscle memory for. Four-player split-screen on a 20-inch TV, screen-watching accusations flying across the room, someone picking Odd Job and immediately getting yelled at. I want to say my friends and I logged more hours on Facility than on every other game that year combined. Rare built a console FPS that ran on hardware that had no business running it, and the industry spent the next decade catching up.

Pokémon Red and Blue belong on any list like this for a different reason. The games themselves were charming but janky, bugs and balance issues everywhere, and it didn't matter one bit. The catch, trade, battle loop was so strong it carried an entire multimedia empire on its back. Game Freak shipped a phenomenon.

The rest of the list covers the usual deserved suspects, and I won't spoil every pick, but the common thread is interesting. These games didn't get called classics because nostalgia decided it. They got there by defining mechanics we're still using. The '90s was the decade where games figured out 3D space, analog control, multiplayer as a living room activity, and monster collecting as a systems engine, sometimes all in the same year.

Every generation gets the "games were better back then" argument, and I don't buy it, for the record. Plenty of garbage shipped in the '90s too, and I say that as someone who bought some of it at full price. But the classics earned the word.

If you missed any of these the first time around, most of them are available somehow now, re-released, remastered or emulated. Play Mario 64 for an hour and you'll see why a fat plumber in a painting still casts a shadow this long.