The World Video Game Hall of Fame

Yes, there is such thing as a video game hall of fame. This year, The Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, established the World Video Game Hall of Fame. The museum was founded in 1968 and originally created to display toys and dolls that had been collected by the museum’s founder, Margaret Woodbury Strong. Over the years, the museum has grown significantly to accommodate a larger number of exhibits and collections. In 2009, a massive collection of video games and related products was added inside the museum’s walls and currently houses over 55,000 items. Now it would like to begin celebrating the most influential video games of all time.

The museum has compiled a list of 15 games to be considered for induction this year into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. That list is as follows:

  • Angry Birds
  • DOOM
  • FIFA
  • The Legend of Zelda
  • Minecraft
  • The Oregon Trail
  • Pac-Man
  • Pokemon
  • Pong
  • The Sims
  • Sonic The Hedgehog
  • Space Invaders
  • Super Mario Bros.
  • Tetris
  • World of Warcraft

I can’t imagine that there is anyone out there, gamer or otherwise, that hasn’t at least heard of these games as they are landmarks of the industry. They deserve to be recognized and preserved for future generations to understand the industry’s origins and where it has gone since its inception.

My only complaint with this idea would be the parameters for the selection of candidates. I believe the candidates should come from a more narrow selection of games in terms of release, similar to how most sports leagues in the U.S. handle their respective halls of fame. While Minecraft and World of Warcraft are certainly contenders, they were released decades after a majority of the titles on this list. If I were assembling candidates for the first ever video game hall of fame, I would start with titles that came from the earliest days of video games.

Narrowing down my personal selections among this year’s list was quite difficult. I have played every game on this list, with the exception of World of Warcraft, and I could make an argument for each one. However, after much deliberation, I narrowed my personal selections down to three, which are listed below with a brief description of why I chose them.

 

The Oregon Trail

Playing video games in school usually resulted in getting my Game Boy or Game Gear getting confiscated. However, there was a time long ago when I and my fellow students were encouraged to play video games. I strongly remember going to the computer lab in second grade to play The Oregon Trail with our teacher’s blessing. At the time, it was simply fun to get away from learning fractions and sentence structure or whatever we were learning back then to go play a game. Later on in my future history studies learning about the United States expansion westward towards the pacific coast, I would recall certain aspects of the game while learning about the hardships of those westward travels, especially dying of dysentery. There is a much greater variety of educational games available to students today but The Oregon Trail is considered a pioneer of the genre and because of that, it has earned it’s place in history.

Pong

The “first” video game. What more needs to be said?

Super Mario Bros.

I’ll admit that I didn’t actually play Super Mario Bros. until close to two decades after its original release. Regardless, the game is seen by many as a revival to the home video game console after the industry crash in the early 1980’s. I myself believe that without this game and it’s corresponding console, the home video game console seen would look very different today, if at all even. Gaming may have been something that only those with personal computers could enjoy outside of an arcade had this game not seen the light of day.

What are your thoughts? Who would you vote for and do you plan on actually doing so on the museum’s  website? Who would you nominate for next year’s list? Let us know in a comment!

One Response to The World Video Game Hall of Fame

  1. Baron Fang says:

    Ha, I actually have that mini-Pacman arcade unit on the left. Requires 4 C-batteries. Who remembers those?

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