I don't think anyone grew up playing exclusively the greatest hits, right?

Doesn't need to be extremely obscure or extremely old. I had this WiiWare game called Paint Splash that was pretty much just a painting app. My sibling would draw stuff and I would pretend to be a "paint worm" that eats it with the eraser tool. We also played another WiiWare one called Chick Chick Boom that was kinda fun and weird and frustrating. Of course we never bought anything, it was all demos that took hours to download...

I thought "Zack & Wiki" was a widely known game, as it has great production value and is made for Capcom, but while trying to find it out the other day to check something, turns out there are barely a handful of videos about it on the internet! I didn't remember the title so I was looking for keywords and it took me hours trying "pirate game wii monkey puzzle" and other combinations. In the end I pulled out the list of all Wii games and went through them one by one.

It's a puzzle game with some real-time elements, pretty fun to play.

So I guess... obscure-ish? I have plenty of more obscure titles that were important to me, being old and all, but this one was surprising in its obscurity.

I remember Clonk quite well (or well rather me trying to make it work on Linux, OpenClonk is a FOSS version). Is Homeworld obscure? SpringRTS as well, Heroes of Annihilated Empires (I still have that one on Steam), Warzone 2100 (played the heck of it on PS1 on a demo disk). There is also that FOSS RTS with blobs... Globulation 2. There is also Bos War or Wideland.

Tho I am not really aware of how obscure some of these are. I'm pretty sure Clonk is rather obscure. They were some WiiWare games as well, but so bland and boring that I dont remember much about them.

I think the immense popularity of the Wii resulted in a ton of games being made in a hurry by random studios, and most were not appealing enough to be remembered... WiiWare titles in particular are mostly forgotten. The same is probably true for the Sony consoles (except the PS4 and beyond). I wonder where these forgotten games will come from for future generations... I don't think most kids are browsing itch.io or anything.

Well, maybe I do know a few more modern ones.

• It's not <em>that</em> obscure, but I did like the co-op in <a href=https://store.steampowered.com/app/314410/Rampage_Knights/>Rampage Knights</a>, which is like a weird satire roguelike version of Castle Crashers?
• I'll use this as an excuse to bring up a personal favorite, <a href=https://lorenschmidt.itch.io/strawberrycubes>Strawberry Cubes</a>. Including old indie games is kinda cheating since they never had a chance to be remembered, but it is pretty important to me.
• If we count MMO games, AND WE DO, I played a good amount of Manyland and Moshi Monsters. Also an old "io game," Cursors.io, that was like a maze where you played as your mouse pointer (created by the same guy as Agar.io???). All of these have been shut down!

Oh, for MMOs there is Dragon Nest, the only MMO I ever actually enjoyed playing and was quite sad when they shut it down. TPS fantasy MMO, the gameplay was very well done. Shooting, casting spells and shit over enemies was very good and very juicy.

wanp said:

... personal favorite, Strawberry Cubes.

Oooh I had forgotten about Loren Schmidt, at some point I followed their work. I even bought Strawberry Cubes somehow

A game i played a lot and seems to have fallen out of the Zeitgeist is Forsaken. At the time it looked like the future, but to be honest the game mainly stuck in my mind because at the time I barely spoke English and the word "forsaken" seemed extremely strange to me, I couldn't make sense of it nor guess what it might mean.

I remember the word because of the game... maybe a 6DoF game would be fun to make

Someone was making a Descent-like in Godot, I even played the alpha, it was promising. The person working on it did make progress for about 2 years but then it poofed into nothingness. I can't find it again, but if I do I'll edit this post.