@Felthry Starting with F-Zero: I haven't played in emulator for a while, so things may have changed ... but F-Zero on the original SNES is /utterly smooth/ in gameplay. The seamless gamefeel does a great deal to sell the velocity of the vehicles and create a rare experience, and an emulation that doesn't achieve will fail to communicate an essential part of what makes the game important.

I'm going to be busy for a bit but go ahead and let me know any others you want me to talk about - or I can just go down the whole rest of the list if you want.

@Felthry (All of these have Wikipedia pages apparently? Useful.)

- M.U.L.E.: economics game. Has some pretty sweet game dynamics for markets. Particularly of interest for me because of the implicit condemnation of predatory business practices; as a kid, I would always monopolize food and create artificial scarcity to pull as much money as possible from my competitors, and then at the end it would always say the colony as a whole was super poor.

- Depression Quest: Incorporates the minimum possible element of player interaction, a choice with a fixed set of options, to highlight how depression /eliminates/ choices. The option is there, but you can't do it. That's not commonly used for narrative purpose in game design and it does it well. Also, choice-based text adventures are a thing and examples of it are good to include. (In the draft where this was a curriculum, the horror game "my father's long, long legs" - https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=u6urdbmp6pdv6lk1 - came first, because it's an excellent game and a more typical, if virtuosic, example of the Twine medium.)

- Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec: one of the best Gran Turismo games from the period when they still included the license test mechanic. I think those license tests were good pedagogical tools in and of themselves in the skills of analog controller-based sim-style videogame driving.

- Gone Home: Environmental storytelling, self-paced exploration, and multiple narratives, many of which take place in the player's mind as they determine what happened. Probably the most iconic first-person exploration game, and if not, I still think it's a more intellectually accessible choice than "Dear Esther".

- Left 4 Dead: This is the game that taught me how to play first-person shooters. As someone who was incompetent at first-person shooters, I was still an asset at normal difficulty because I was someone who could press the "get a downed person back up" or "get a special infected off" button for one of my allies. It's a cool game, it's a cool co-op shooter game, there's a lot to talk about with the AI Director and so forth, and it would also be a co-op game that a class containing players of very different skill levels could still participate in.

- Portal: ...it's a good first-person puzzle game? I haven't put a lot of thought into this choice.

- Mega Man 2: It's my favorite 2D action platformer game. Again, not a lot of thought put into this one.

- Myst: Early point-and-click adventure game. Explore beautiful fantastical worlds, solve weird puzzles, find all kinds of interesting worldbuilding information. I think a lot of puzzle games owe inspiration to this, and I think it's still a neat game.