Inducted Games

Grand Theft Auto III

  Inducted Year: 2016 Grand Theft Auto III’s vast open world made it famous while its mature content made it infamous. It wasn’t the first 3-D “sandbox” game to allow players to freely interact with an […]

The Oregon Trail

  Inducted Year: 2016 As the longest-published, most successful educational game of all time, The Oregon Trail has blazed a path for the use of video games in learning. MS-DOS The Oregon Trail, 1982 Three student teachers, […]

The Legend of Zelda

  Inducted Year: 2016 Inspired by creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s childhood expeditions through woods and caves, The Legend of Zelda popularized non-linear, open-world exploration games and paved the way for some of the industry’s most famous […]

The Sims

  Inducted Year: 2016 The relationships and routines of everyday life became endless fun with The Sims. Whereas many video games explore themes of fantasy and adventure, The Sims found play possibilities in the small-scale worlds […]

Sonic the Hedgehog

  Inducted Year: 2016 Sonic the Hedgehog took the 16-bit gaming era by storm in 1991 with its lightning-fast game play and cool, hip title character, temporarily vaulting Sega ahead of Nintendo in the 1990s […]

Space Invaders

Inducted Year: 2016 Space Invaders conquered arcades and living rooms, catapulting video games into the mainstream. Space Invaders, 1978 Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado and released in Japan in 1978, Taito’s arcade video game challenged players to […]

Tetris

  Inducted Year: 2015 Tetris is a truly international game that’s been persistently popular around the world because its rules are simple but its play possibilities are endless. The challenge seems straightforward: rotate and move falling […]

Super Mario Bros.

  Inducted Year: 2015 Who is more memorable than Mario? Created by legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto and published by Nintendo, the side-scrolling platformer Super Mario Bros. first appeared in 1985 on the Nintendo Family Computer […]

Pac-Man

  Inducted Year: 2015 Pac-Man (or Puck Man as it was known in Japan) made video games a mass cultural phenomenon. Midway Mfg. Co. Pac-Man Flyer, 1980 Created by programmer Toru Iwatani in 1980 and released by […]

World of Warcraft

  Inducted Year: 2015 By bringing tens of millions of people together in a compelling virtual universe, World of Warcraft is reshaping the way people think about their online lives and communities. In 1997, developer Richard […]

DOOM

  Inducted Year: 2015 DOOM shaped the course of gaming history. Led by John Carmack and John Romero, the development team at id Software created a landmark game in 1993 that popularized the first-person shooter genre. […]

Pong

  Inducted Year: 2015 By most measures of popular impact, Pong launched the video game industry. Atari Pong Flyer, 1972 A simple game involving two paddles and a ball, Pong introduced millions to the joys of playing […]

Halo: Combat Evolved

  Inducted Year: 2017 Halo: Combat Evolved became one of the most popular first-person shooter games of all time, and re-defined players’ expectations for the genre. Microsoft Xbox Halo: Combat Evolved, 2001 In 2001, Microsoft entered the […]

Street Fighter II

Inducted Year: 2017 Street Fighter II made arcade fighting games a video game phenomenon. Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, 1992 Street Fighter II, released by Capcom in 1991, and the second in a series of one-on-one […]

Donkey Kong

  Inducted Year: 2017 Necessity is the mother of invention, and Donkey Kong became an instant classic because of an immediate need. In 1981, Nintendo’s fledgling North American video game business faced disaster. Thousands of copies […]

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

  Inducted Year: 2021 Well, she sneaks around the world from Rwanda to… Rochester? Gumshoes first began pursuing this particular master thief in the 1985 release of Brøderbund’s Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Developed […]

StarCraft

  Inducted Year: 2021 California-based developer Blizzard Entertainment began development on StarCraft in 1995. The real-time strategy genre was not new for the company, having released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994 before quickly following […]

Microsoft Flight Simulator

  Inducted Year: 2021 Flying has fascinated humanity since ancient times, but it was only in the twentieth century that heavier-than-air flight took off. Thousands of amateur and professional aviators pursued their dreams of navigating […]

Animal Crossing

Inducted Year: 2021 “So, you mind if I sit here? I promise I won’t fall asleep, tumble onto you, and start drooling on your shirt!” While this dialogue may resemble a terrible previous experience on […]

Minecraft

  Inducted Year: 2020 The building game Minecraft has become a global phenomenon with endless game play options, enabling players to mine and use sets of pixilated blocks to build fabulous structures limited only by […]

King’s Quest

  Inducted Year: 2020 Originally released in 1984 for IBM’s ill-fated PCjr, King’s Quest set the standard for the graphical adventure game genre and cemented Sierra On-Line’s cofounder Roberta Williams as one of the most […]

Centipede

Inducted Year: 2020 Co-designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey in 1981, Atari’s Centipede is a fixed shooter arcade game that ultimately became one of the most commercially successful titles of the video arcade’s […]

Bejeweled

Inducted Year: 2020 In 2001, PopCap Games published Bejeweled, a web-based Flash game that popularized the “match three” puzzle game sub-genre and became one of the most iconic mobile games in history. Bejeweled challenged players […]

Super Mario Kart

  Inducted Year: 2019 When Nintendo released Super Mario Kart in 1992 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, they combined the thrill of driving games with characters from their beloved Mario franchise to produce an […]

Mortal Kombat

  Inducted Year: 2019 When arcade game manufacturer Midway Games asked programmer Ed Boon and artist John Tobias to create a game to compete with the surging popularity of Capcom’s Street Fighter II, the designers […]

Microsoft Solitaire

  Inducted Year: 2019 Microsoft Solitaire, 1990 Microsoft Solitaire meets all the criteria for the World Video Game Hall of Fame: influence, longevity, geographical reach, and icon-status. And yet it is often overlooked—perhaps because it’s a […]

Colossal Cave Adventure

Inducted Year: 2019 The best games fire the imagination, and anyone who has typed commands like “get lamp” into Colossal Cave Adventure experienced how the game could conjure up a world of spelunking, puzzle […]

Tomb Raider

  Inducted Year: 2018 Developed by Core Design in 1996, Tomb Raider was far from the first action-adventure video game, but its added emphasis on puzzle solving and difficult jumping maneuvers provided a unique experience that led […]

Spacewar!

  Inducted Year: 2018 No game deserves more credit than Spacewar! for inspiring the modern video game industry. During the 1960s, America was in a fierce space race with the Soviet Union. Computers helped scientists figure out how […]

John Madden Football

  Inducted Year: 2018 John Madden Football redefined sports video games. Sega Genesis John Madden Football, 1990 In 1988, Electronic Arts (EA) was all but ready to throw in the towel on making American football video games after […]

Final Fantasy VII

  Inducted Year: 2018 In 1987, developer Square released a role-playing game called Final Fantasy. Designed by Hironobu Sakeguchi, this game allowed players to control the Four Warriors of Light in their journey to save the […]

Pokémon Red and Green

  Inducted Year: 2017 Game developer Satoshi Tajiri spent hours of his childhood bug collecting, and when Nintendo released the Game Boy handheld in 1989, he had a vision of an insect crawling between two […]