Linux native games and the beginning of Linux as a gaming platform for commercial video games, is widely credited to have begun in 1994 when Dave D. Taylor ported the game Doom to Linux.

The original developers of Doom, also continued to release their products for Linux. Their game Quake was ported to Linux in 1996, once again by Dave D. Taylor working in his free time.

Other early commercial Linux games included Hopkins FBI, an adventure game released in 1998 by MP Entertainment and Inner Worlds in 1996, which was released for and developed on Linux.

On November 9, 1998 a new software firm called Loki Software was founded by Scott Draeker, a former lawyer who became interested in porting games to Linux after being introduced to the system through his work as a software licensing attorney.

Loki, however was a commercial failure and after Loki's closure, the Linux game market experienced some changes.

Not until 2009, the small indie game company Entourev LLC published "Voltley" to Linux which is the first commercial "exclusive game" for this operating system. In the same year, LGP released Shadowgrounds which was the first commercial game for Linux, using the Nvidia PhysX middleware.

Linux native games.

In July 2012, game developer and content distributor Valve Software announced a port of their Source engine for Linux as well as stating their intention to release their Steam digital distribution service for Linux.

This was a gamechanger for Linux.

In November 2012, Unity Technologies ported, their Unity engine and game creation system to Linux starting with version 4.

All of the games created with the Unity engine can now be ported to Linux easily.

In September 2013 Valve announced that they were releasing a gaming oriented Linux based operating system called SteamOS, built around Debian.

In March 2014 GOG.com announced they would begin to support Linux titles on their DRM free store.

In March and April 2014 two major developers, Epic Games and Crytek, announced Linux support for their next generation engines Unreal Engine 4 and CryEngine respectively.

On 22 August 2018, Valve released their fork of Wine called Proton, aimed at gaming. It features some improvements over the vanilla Wine such as Vulkan-based DirectX 11 and 12 implementations, Steam integration, better full screen and game controller support and improved performance for multi-threaded games.

Still, native Linux games are better.