andysheets1975: Planescape: Torment and System Shock 2 are probably much more popular now than they were on original release.

Psyringe: As others said, pre-Internet it was very easy to "miss" a popular game if you friends didn't know it and if you happened to not read the magazine that was reviewing it. Many of the games that have been mentioned (Morrowind, C&C, etc.), were immensely popular, though it's of course always possible that someone lived in one of the aforementioned bubbles that remained completely unaffected by them.

I have a question myself though. :)

I'm a games collector for more than three decades now, but I'm 100% certain that I never heard about any of the "Tex Murphy" games until I saw them on GOG. Yet, the games _must_ have been popular, otherwise "Tesla Effect" would have been impossible to create. Is this perhaps a regional phenomenon? Did these games perhaps never get translated into German, and no one released them in Germany? (At that time, translation was considered much more important than it is now.)