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 addictive new series with a built-in fan-base and mass appeal.
Producer Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t originally mean for the game to feature Mario, but after a sketch of the famous plumber in the driver’s seat captured everyone’s attention, the choice seemed easy. In addition to Mario himself, players choose […]
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 and the rest of their four-person team worked eight months straight to deliver their counter punch, Mortal Kombat.
Released in 1992, the one-on-one martial arts fighting game not only launched one of the most popular fighting game franchises ever, it also spurred debate over what video games depicted […]
Microsoft Solitaire
Inducted Year: 2019
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 digital version of a centuries-old game, and because it so common as to seem commonplace.
As Microsoft began looking for a game to include in its release of the Windows 3.0 operating system, it chose a version of the Klondike variation of Solitaire—programmed initially by intern Wes Cherry with 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 solving, and treasure gathering with only words.
Will Crowther created the game as a programmer at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), a firm that did much of the foundational work for ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. He created the game to connect with his daughter, inspired by […]
Magic: The Gathering
Inducted Year: 2019
Magic: The Gathering was unlike any previous card game when it was introduced in 1993. Inventor Richard Garfield loved games. A PhD candidate in mathematics, he brought games into his courses for undergraduates and even demonstrated “condiment games” when dining with colleagues. When a game publisher refused a board game he’d submitted, Garfield challenged the man to “describe a game concept—any concept—and I’ll design a game around it for you.” So Kent Adkison, president of fledgling game company […]
Coloring Book
Inducted Year: 2019
It’s difficult to imagine a time without coloring books, one of the first ways children play at creativity. Inexpensive line art books have been a fixture in homes throughout the 20th century and beyond, tempting children to add color, and perhaps realism, to their favorite characters, machines, buildings, and lands, seas, and skies.
McLoughlin Brothers of New York City published one of the first paint books in the 1880s, when the firm collaborated with Englishwoman Kate Greenaway and printed […]
Matchbox Cars
Inducted Year: 2019
English die casters Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith founded Lesney Products in 1947 and, along with partner Jack Odell, began making small toys to fill slack demand during wartime. In 1952, Odell was inspired by a rule at his daughter’s school that permitted students to only bring toys that fit inside a matchbox. He scaled down Lesney’s road roller toy, packaged it in a matchbox, and sent his daughter off to school. The Matchbox car was born.
Soon the […]
