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Also, if you do find some good ones... choose ones you can get the source code to. Playing is one thing. Seeing the juju that makes it work is a whole 'nother level.
Jeremy Falcon
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There are some cool open source games out there like this city builder one. Probably not beginner friendly though, but could be enough to spark curiosity.
Or if you really want to go old school, there are DOS games like Nibbles. The QBasic source has been floating around the Interwebs for a while now.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: ...like this city builder...
Reading that page, it looks like a life project that has sucked up some time!
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Well, at least the author didn't spend all that time on crystal meth. 
Jeremy Falcon
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this is a great one! will that city builder games lead to Metaverse?
diligent hands rule....
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Yes, and the new XYZ_OMG_123 token, that was copy/pasted by a 13 year old, will be the new official US Dollar standard.
Jeremy Falcon
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There are always the old standbys - Go, Chess, Checkers (or Draughts), Backgammon, Reversi, ...
All of these may be found on the internet, including source code.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Lemmings!
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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This is another site I have used from time to time.
BrowserGames[^]
It is in german, but I think you might get a good enough translation to know about what a game is using your favourite online translator.
Titles I liked as a kid:
Rainbow island,
double bobble,
snow brothers,
bobble shooter,
...
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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In my teens I started with some text-based adventures. Concepts such as parsing and mapping, adapting text output to include random (but sensible) variations etc.
An early graphic one I started on was an air-traffic control simulator. Never finished it but found one a few years ago in Javascript. It was buggy and lacked some usability so I extended it. Air traffic control 'simulator'[^]
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xcom  might be a bit more complicated
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Hyperoids is an Asteroids clone with source available.
Hopefully they fixed the bug where your ship color matches the background on level 15(?).
It is hard to maneuver when you are invisible.
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Breakout is another classic.
One step above Pong.
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Defender was always my favourite. Played it way too much at college (and that really does date me!).
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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Going to break the mould here. Can I suggest check out some old gameboy games… the graphics are simple and the programming is often also not too complex.
I then recommend this playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeEj4c2zF7PaFv5MPYhNAkBGrkx4iPGJo
I’m not sponsored here, I did this playlist myself and made a couple of gameboy games. Since the graphics are simple you can be making games in a matter of hours. Yes it is C language, but the engine/libraries take fair of most of the heavy lifting.
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Minesweeper, Lounge Suit Larry, Hero's Quest
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In the early 90's there were a bunch of text-based MORG's played on dial-up. There were also a lot of text-based stand-alone games. I played Moria (as in the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings). You were a capital "H". All the easy monsters were lower case and the hard ones were upper case. Add a few keyboard commands for attack, move, and portal to the town to haggle for goods. Very simple but very addictive.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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If you can get by with text-based, try to find "The Colossal Cave" or one of the similar variants. You should be able to find the source code (basic), which you can dissect to see how it works.
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Unreal Tournament GOTY often referred to as UT99. Newer version came with game editors and the current version of the Unreal Engine is downloadable.
https://www.unrealengine.com/[^]
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My biggest issue with this is that they still haven't completely worked out the legal issues with emulators. It's really hard to find real Amiga 500's and C64s these days and original copies of corresponding games like Neuromancer (Amiga - Think the Matrix Movie before it's time), WhizBall (C64 Version is Best) and Midwinter (Amiga). Sure, games like Myst, Sid Meier's Pirates, Kings Quest and some older games have been licensed for sale, but many older games will not run on new hardware and they haven't been legally ported yet because there isn't a "market".
Microprose Falcon 4 is an example of an brilliantly efficient and well written game, but it runs like garbage on many version of Windows 10 because the DirectX9 emulation is so awful on Win 10. Falcon 4 runs way better on Steam Proton OS (Wine), but it's not 100% certain that GNU\Linux Wine is completely legal. Also, there are mild incompatibility issues running Falcon 4 under Wine instead of native Windows even if the frame rate in Wine is blazingly high and the frames are smooth.
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Frogger is an old but simple game I played way back when there were places called arcade halls.
Simple graphics and controls, teaches hit detection... And controlling your frustration levels.
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Read "Ready Player One" and list all the games mentioned there!
Barring that:
Zork
Empire (1977)
Rogue (1980)
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