This page is a list of the release dates of all the games from the 90s and into the early 2000s that I consider subjectively significant. The release dates have been researched from information available on the internet, and whenever possible I tried to find at least 3 or 4 sources that agree with each other. A lot of sites simply fill in the 1st or 30th of a month when the exact day of release is not known, and often dates are from a localized version or port to a different system that came out years later. It's still possible that a wrong date got copied by many sites, but usually dates that disagree with the majority of sites appear only once and nowhere else, which makes them most likely mistakes.
Until the late 90s, games arrived in stores whenever the delivery van got to them and went on the shelves once someone got around to unpack them, with no real attention by publishers to have one specific release date. So claims for releases that are off by one day or two are very common, and I went with what seems to be most commonly listed. For a lot of games from the early 90s, no sites have any more specific information than the release year, but using a Usenet search engine, I've been able to find discussions about people waiting for the game and sharing that their store just got it in, which let me narrow it down to the release month for almost all of them.
This list is entirely subjective and consists of games that are still highly regarded classics to this day, games I remember being highly praised when they came out, games that belong to series that kept going for decades, games that turned out to have very high review scores when I looked them up, or weird niche games that I find personally interesting. I started the list in 1990, at the release of the Mega Drive in Europe and the Super NES in Japan, and ended it with 2001, as the worldwide release of the GameCube and the Xbox. Along with major developments in PC graphics at that time, 2002 feels like the start of modern videogames as we have them today. (Though it also would be fair to consider the era of the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox a transition period between retro and modern games.)
If someone spots any information that is certainly wrong, or has any further games that should be on the list, I can easily be reached on Mastodon.