Inducted Year: 2021
Sand may be the most universal toy in the world. From a geologist’s perspective, sand is a dry, gritty material consisting of small, loose pieces of rock, soil, minerals, and gemstones. But children recognize sand as a creative vehicle for play suitable for pouring, scooping, sieving, raking, and measuring. Wet sand is even better, ready to construct, shape, and sculpt.
Historians have every reason to believe that the earliest people played in sand. As early as the 1800s, newspapers […]
Risk
Inducted Year: 2021
The French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse designed a board game with simple rules but complex interactions, La Conquête du Monde (The Conquest of the World) in 1957. Purchasing the rights, Parker Brothers published it with a few small changes as Risk in 1959. It became the first popular game involving strategy, diplomacy, conflict, and conquest.
Risk players control armies of tokens on a world map board in attempts to capture adjoining territories from other players, battling by rolls of the […]
American Girl Dolls
Inducted Year: 2021
Following a visit to historic Williamsburg, Virginia, and a Christmas shopping trip for her nieces, educator and newscaster Pleasant Rowland developed and launched a line of 18-inch dolls representing an era of America’s past. Each doll was paired with rich historical narratives and accurate reproductions of clothing and accessories. Rowland decided to sell the dolls—Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly—by direct mail. Between September and December of 1986, American Girl dolls sold $1.7 million worth of product.
Rowland’s formula for combining […]
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Inducted Year: 2021
Well, she sneaks around the world from Rwanda to… Rochester?
Gumshoes first began pursuing this particular master thief in the 1985 release of Brøderbund’s Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Developed as a game with a menu-driven interface (replacing the standard text-driven applications of early 1980s computer games), Carmen Sandiego evolved into an educational game that made learning geography fun for millions of school-aged students. Brøderbund programmer Dane Bigham was originally inspired by the text game Colossal Cave […]
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StarCraft
Inducted Year: 2021
California-based developer Blizzard Entertainment began development on StarCraft in 1995. The real-time strategy genre was not new for the company, having released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994 before quickly following up with a sequel titled Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness in 1995. Released in March 1998, StarCraft was more than just Warcraft in space, as the game added a new twist to the strategy formula while leading a revolution in multiplayer gaming.
Set in the 25th century, StarCraft’s […]
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Inducted Year: 2021
Flying has fascinated humanity since ancient times, but it was only in the twentieth century that heavier-than-air flight took off. Thousands of amateur and professional aviators pursued their dreams of navigating machines through the sky, but most people experienced flying as passengers, not pilots. Learning to fly was expensive, time-consuming, and (especially in the early years) dangerous. Microsoft Flight Simulator changed all that, by giving millions of people a highly realistic simulation of piloting a real plane, all […]
Animal Crossing
Inducted Year: 2021
“So, you mind if I sit here? I promise I won’t fall asleep, tumble onto you, and start drooling on your shirt!”
While this dialogue may resemble a terrible previous experience on public transportation, anyone who played the original title in the Animal Crossing series will recognize this as the first interaction with Rover, a cat who helps set up the time, player appearance, and town which will be the setting for this charming, light-hearted video game. The Japanese […]
