Hours 10 a.m.–5 p.m. | Fri. & Sat. till 8 p.m.Inducted: 2023
If Atari’s Pong (1972) helped usher in the video game revolution with a simple tennis game, more than three decades later Nintendo’s Wii Sports returned video games to the masses with simple, though unique versions of tennis, bowling, baseball, boxing, and golf.
Released in 2006 and bundled with Nintendo Wii home video game consoles sold outside of Japan, Wii Sports best demonstrated how the company redefined the way video games could be played. Relying on a motion-sensitive Wii Remote, Wii […]
The Last of Us
Inducted: 2023
Post-apocalyptic settings and zombie enemies have cropped up in countless popular video games, not to mention books, films, and television shows. So it can be difficult to imagine how a newcomer could put a distinct stamp on the genre or offer an original experience for experienced gamers. In 2013, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us accomplished this feat. The game brought together motion capture technology, skilled voice acting, and layered storytelling to create an affective, character-centered journey of survival […]
Computer Space
Inducted: 2023
There was no video game industry in 1970. The games that we’d now call video games were still mostly locked away on computers in university and research labs, inaccessible to the public. Engineering student Nolan Bushnell played the most popular of these games, Spacewar! (1962), in a computer lab in the 1960s. The game’s spaceships—dueling in cosmic combat while orbiting a star—captivated the young Bushnell. Having worked summers at a Utah amusement park managing coin-operated pinball and arcade games, […]
Barbie Fashion Designer
Inducted: 2023
In 1996, at a time when most games were marketed toward male players, Barbie Fashion Designer proved that a game designed for girls could succeed. Widely acknowledged as the first market success in games for girls, in two months the game sold over 500,000 copies, outselling contemporary market leaders like Quake and DOOM. A market success, the game made $120 million in the first year.
Barbie Fashion Designer bridged the gap between the digital and the physical. Players used the […]