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 to an explosive popularity.
The game’s designers found inspiration in Hollywood movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, precision-based computer games such as Prince of Persia, and the real-life archaeological discoveries of the tomb of King Tutankhamun. With these elements in mind, developers used cutting-edge technology to create a cinematic, […]
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 to boost real-life rockets into orbit, so it’s perhaps not surprising that computers also became the means for modeling interstellar combat.
The person most responsible for doing this was Steve Russell. When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acquired a new DEC PDP-1 minicomputer, he set out to create […]
John Madden Football
Inducted Year: 2018
John Madden Football redefined sports video games.
In 1988, Electronic Arts (EA) was all but ready to throw in the towel on making American football video games after its release of John Madden Football for the Apple II met with modest sales. After three years of expensive development the game was a commercial disappointment.
However, EA’s founder Trip Hawkins insisted that the company try again. Lead designers Scott Orr and Rich Hilleman knew that EA would need to break from previous sports game […]
Final Fantasy VII
Inducted Year: 2018
In 1987, developer Square released a role-playing game called Final Fantasy. Designed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, this game allowed players to control the Four Warriors of Light in their journey to save the world from destruction. Critics and players alike loved it. Ten years later, Square-Enix released the most successful game in its franchise, Final Fantasy VII.
Square began developing FFVII in 1994 for the Super Famicom, but rising costs of cartridges led them to alter development for the Japanese-only Nintendo 64 Disk Drive […]
Pinball
Inducted Year: 2018
Pinball traces its roots to bagatelle, an 18th-century French parlor table game that challenged players to use a stick to shoot balls across a table filled with pins and scoring holes. But modern coin-operated pinball machines originated in 1931 as American manufacturers separated players from the bagatelle board (or “playfield”) with a piece of glass, incorporated mechanical systems to remove balls from the playfield, and added a coin mechanism to monetize game play. Later that year, David Gottlieb’s […]
Magic 8 Ball
Inducted Year: 2018
Abe Bookman of the Alabe Crafts Company of Cincinnati introduced Magic 8 Ball in 1946. The novelty provided answers that swam randomly out of its inky depths. The size of an overgrown softball with a flat spot that let it stand as a desktop paperweight, Magic 8 Ball would respond to questions with one of 20 phrases framed in a triangle in the round window. What’s the secret of this toy? The black ball decorated with an “8” […]
Uno
Inducted Year: 2018
The Robbins family of Reading, Ohio, loved to play cards, especially the game crazy eights. But that game’s tricky rule variations sometimes led to friendly family arguments. Merle Robbins, a barber by trade and the father of the family, marked a deck with instructions, to avoid such confrontations. Play a king and the direction of play reversed, a queen meant skip the next turn, and aces were wild. The family and their friends soon learned that the newly […]
