1. The Last Express (1997)
Never heard of The Last Express? Believe me, you're not the only one. Probably one of the greatest adventure games I have ever played (and I do enjoy my adventure games) The Last Express took place, quite uniquely, in real time and employed beautifully rendered Art-Nouveau style characters that had been painstakingly rotoscoped (that's right, motion capture was still on it's way to us back then) from footage shot over a 22 day live shoot. Which is impressive, to say the least. What I loved most about The Last Express, even more so than the consistently incredible (at the time) aesthetics, was the superb writing; the cleverness of the dialogue and the sheer depth of the characters. Upon its release in 1997, it was received incredibly well by critics and players alike and in my view could effectively be considered one of the best adventure games ever made. However, as a direct result of some extremely poor marketing from Broderbund, the title's publisher (who did literally nothing to promote the game other than feature the title in their press releases) The Last Express quickly fell into obscurity, only ever shifting around 100k copies, which, considering the games $6mil budget, meant Broderbund were over a million copies shy of breaking even. I was one of the lucky few who played The Last Express (thanks to a life-long love and hunger for adventure games) and if you ask me, that is absolutely criminal considering its immense standard. While I'll never condone piracy, if you're keen to play it retrospectively, downloading it is probably the only option now considering that it put both its dev team and publisher out of business, effectively meaning that it's impossible to get hold of. So there are ten awesome video games that totally never got the credit that they deserved. Any you'd like to add? You know where the comments are!