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 systems via the Game Link Cable. This vision gave birth to the Pokémon franchise.
In 1996, Nintendo published the first installment in the Pokémon series, a pair of games known as Pocket Monsters Aka (Red) and Midori (Green), which starred creatures with special powers that players could collect, […]
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.
In 2001, Microsoft entered the video game market with its first home console, the Xbox. Halo sold alongside fifty percent of all systems, leading critics to name it Microsoft’s “killer app,” a program so valuable that its loss would deplete the overall desirability of the hardware.
In an era when PC games dominated the first person shooter genre, […]
Street Fighter II
Inducted Year: 2017
Street Fighter II made arcade fighting games a video game phenomenon.
Street Fighter II, released by Capcom in 1991, and the second in a series of one-on-one martial arts games, popularized the fighting game genre, paving the way for Mortal Kombat (1992), Virtua Fighter (1993), Tekken (1994), King of the Fighters (1994), Super Smash Bros. (1999), and a host of other fighters.
Previous arcade games often focused on battling against a computer opponent, competition for high scores, or multiplayer cooperative […]
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 of the company’s arcade game, Radar Scope, had arrived from Japan, but it was clear that the game would not sell.
Nintendo needed a new game fast. In a few months’ time an unknown junior employee, Shigeru Miyamoto created a game that launched his fame, earned the company […]
Clue
Inducted Year: 2017
Who doesn’t appreciate a good mystery? Between the world wars, pianist Anthony Pratt enjoyed the murder mystery party games he saw played at posh European hotels where he worked. In 1943 Pratt and his wife Elva designed a board game based on those party games, centered on deduction. Winning players solve a murder mystery by eliminating possible locations, weapons, and murderers to come to the correct conclusion. Pratt was granted a patent in 1947, but post-war shortages halted […]
Paper Airplane
Inducted Year: 2017
Historians debate the origins of paper airplanes. The ancient Chinese used papyrus paper to invent the kite, but their primitive designs likely did not resemble modern flight. Leonardo DaVinci wrote about constructing a flying machine out of parchment. In the early 19th century, Sir George Cayley identified the four primary aerodynamic forces of flight and built kite-like gliders out of linen. Early attempts at constructing flying machines fascinated children and adults alike. The success of the Wright Brothers […]
Wiffle Ball
Inducted Year: 2017
As David Nelson Mullany, a retired semipro baseball pitcher, watched his 12-year-old son and a friend play a pick-up game with a perforated plastic golf ball and a broomstick, he decided that postwar America suburbia did not have “enough room for two teams, enough space for a field,” and neighborhood baseball games led to “too many broken windows.” But the ball son David A. Mullany used made throwing curve balls and sliders difficult. Father David began to cut […]
