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 open virtual world, or even the first game in its juggernaut franchise. But the 2001 game was the first of its kind to achieve massive mainstream popularity and widespread critical acclaim by appealing to millions of players who relished the freedom to push the boundaries of what […]
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.
Three student teachers, Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger, created The Oregon Trail in 1971 to help Minnesota schoolchildren learn American History. First programmed on a primitive teletype printer, the game challenged students to assume the role of Western settlers crossing the continent on the way to the Pacific coast. Players had to […]
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 role-playing and action-adventure games.
Originally released in 1986 as a flagship game for the Famicom Disk System, Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy—known worldwide as The Legend of Zelda—became one of Nintendo’s most popular franchises. Zelda serves as a coming-of-age story for the protagonist Link, who must gather […]
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 of household life. Designer Will Wright developed his forerunning city-planning simulator SimCity in 1989, but in The Sims, which debuted in 2000, he allowed players to explore intimate human relationships.
The game affords limitless play possibilities. Wright described it more as a toy than a game, a digital […]
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 console wars.
To develop a rival to Nintendo’s Mario, Sega hosted an in-house design contest that produced a new hedgehog mascot codenamed “Mr. Needlemouse.” Artists colored him cobalt blue and outfitted him in large red shoes that evoked allusions to boots warn by Michael Jackson and Santa Claus. […]
Space Invaders
Inducted Year: 2016
Space Invaders conquered arcades and living rooms, catapulting video games into the mainstream.
Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado and released in Japan in 1978, Taito’s arcade video game challenged players to zap an ongoing onslaught of aliens. Players took control of a powerful laser cannon that they moved across the bottom of the screen and used to fire at five rows of advancing aliens and occasional flying saucers worth extra points. The game included a “high score” at the top […]
Fisher-Price Little People
Inducted Year: 2016
Fisher-Price first offered its Little People in a 1959 Safety School Bus pull toy. Made of wood and lithographed paper, the figures helped small children imagine big adventures. These stylized figures populated a variety of play sets that encouraged youngsters to explore the world beyond their homes and to imagine themselves at school or the airport, at the service station or the amusement park, and at the zoo or a faraway (and wonderfully noisy) farm. Fisher-Price has offered […]
Dungeons & Dragons
Inducted Year: 2016
In the 1970s, serious war game players Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson added the concept of role-playing to the strategy games they enjoyed. They thus created an entirely new way to play, allowing older gamers to immerse themselves in fantasy worlds not unlike children’s imaginative play. The game soon became popular, and other firms published similar games built upon related mechanics but often employing different fantasy settings, from historic battlefields to outer space. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and […]
Swing
Inducted Year: 2016
Swings have long been a part of human play. Ancient cave drawings in Europe, carved figures from Crete, and ceramic vases from Greece document instances of our ancestors on swings. Even before that, the very first swings may have been fashioned from plant fiber and woody vines of tropical jungles. Seafarers and hunters who learned to braid hemp into rope perhaps hung a length or two from an overhead tree branch, set a wooden plank at the other […]
