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 shapes in order to complete solid horizontal lines that then disappear. The pieces vary in shape and, as the game continues, they fall ever faster, stacking on top of each other and forcing the player to try to fit them in before the lines fill to the […]
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 (Famicom), known in America as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Since his introduction, the character of Mario has been in more than 200 games and on every Nintendo console ever created. Mario has become the most popular video game franchise of all time, selling more than 260 […]
Pac-Man
Inducted Year: 2015
Pac-Man (or Puck Man as it was known in Japan) made video games a mass cultural phenomenon.
Created by programmer Toru Iwatani in 1980 and released by Namco in Japan and Midway in the United States, Pac-Man’s yellow, pizza-shaped title character and four colorful ghosts injected personality into video gaming. The maze game captured the imagination of millions of people and became the best-selling arcade video game ever.
At the same time Pac-Man himself became the first iconic ambassador […]
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 Garriott described his game Ultima Online as a “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMORPG). In an MMORPG, players create unique virtual avatars to represent themselves as they explore an open, constantly evolving world. While playing, gamers chat with one another, collaborate in guilds, engage in combat, and […]
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. Games like GoldenEye 007 (1997), Half-Life (1998), and Halo (2000) followed in the footsteps of DOOM.
DOOM was more than just a commercial success—it also pioneered key aspects of game design and distribution that have become industry standards. The game’s designers created a game “engine” that separated the […]
Pong
Inducted Year: 2015
By most measures of popular impact, Pong launched the video game industry.
A simple game involving two paddles and a ball, Pong introduced millions to the joys of playing video games. Although it was not the first electronic game, and the Magnavox Odyssey home console already featured a similar tennis game, Pong was the first game to grab wide-scale public attention. Its success launched Atari into a preeminent role in the video game industry.
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell conceived the […]
Super Soaker
Inducted Year: 2015
The Super Soaker story began in the early 1980s, when Dr. Lonnie Johnson, a Tuskegee Institute-trained mechanical and nuclear engineer, was working on NASA’s Galileo Mission to Jupiter. At night, Johnson was working on his own project—a new heat pump that replaced Freon with environmentally friendly pressurized water vapor.
Tinkering with the pump’s design at home, Johnson hooked the nozzle up to his bathroom faucet. The steady stream that shot across the room gave Johnson an idea for a […]
Puppet
Inducted Year: 2015
Puppets may have originated in the Egypt of the pharaohs or in India nearly 6,000 years ago. Because the toy form appears long ago in nearly every culture in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, no one really knows where it began. Plato and Aristotle wrote of puppets, and ancient puppeteers presented the Iliad and the Odyssey using figures made of clay and ivory. Early Chinese and Japanese puppeteers fashioned miniature figures for religious ceremonies and the telling of […]
Twister
Inducted Year: 2015
In 1964 toy inventor Reyn Guyer conceived a shoe polish promotion as a game with a mat on the floor and with people serving as the playing pieces. Guyer hired an artist and a toy designer, Charles Foley and Neil Rabens, to help him with the development of the basic idea, and the three devised a game they called Pretzel. Foley and Rabens took the idea to the Milton Bradley Company, which saw promise, and the men received a […]
