Inducted 2025
Trivial Pursuit’s brain-racking questions have been challenging players for more than 40 years. As individuals or in teams, players race to collect pie wedges in six colors by maneuvering around the board and successfully answering trivia questions. The game rewards a vast breadth of knowledge, with questions ranging from geography to entertainment, from history to art, and from science to sports. After accumulating wedges of each color, players must land on the board’s central space and correctly answer a […]
Tamagotchi
Inducted: 2025
Considered a popular gaming fad of the 1990s, the handheld game Tamagotchi began with two fanciful childhood wishes: having a toy come alive and bringing a pet wherever you go. In 1995, former president of Wiz Company Akhiro Yokoi pitched the idea of a mobile pet toy to Japanese toy maker Bandai. The developer Aki Maita conceptualized Bandai’s raising simulator design for the electronic toy, influencing the future development of the virtual pet market in both video games and […]
Quake
Inducted: 2025
A dark, medieval world filled with peculiar technology and Lovecraftian creatures. Quake was a first-person shooter built with the mouse in mind, making use completely of its 3D space. Unlike its predecessor Doom, Quake’s engine offered true, real-time 3D rendering. 3D optimized gameplay with pre-processed and pre-rendered backgrounds sped up processing times that were typically sluggish during this time.
id Software took the success they had with Doom multiplayer deathmatches and expanded it; Quake’s multiplayer portion of the game proved to be massively popular with early online […]
Goldeneye 007
Inducted: 2025
In 1994, Rare and Nintendo began development of a video game inspired by the upcoming James Bond Film GoldenEye(1995). Based on the popular MI6 intelligence agent created by author Ian Fleming, GoldenEye 007 is a first-person shooting game with heavy stealth elements. The game includes a single-player story mode and a split-screen multiplayer mode for up to four players. The game ultimately sold more than eight million units worldwide and became known as a “killer app” for the Nintendo 64 console.
While games […]
Defender
Inducted: 2025
The conventional game design wisdom of the early 1980s suggested that many of the best video games were “easy to learn, but difficult to master.” This seemed like sound advice then and now, particularly for engaging casual players who might drop their quarters into a different arcade game if the first proved too hard. Released in 1981, at the height of the arcade video game boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Williams’s exceedingly difficult, horizontally scrolling space […]
Slime
Inducted 2025
Slime was created as an extension of an established chemical process. When sodium tetraborate (borax) combines with guar gum or polymers, it turns into a gelatinous substance that can be stretched, squeezed, broken apart, and molded back together like magic.
In 1976, Mattel introduced Slime—a neon green jiggly substance sold in small plastic trashcans—but it did have some similar precursors. Ten years prior, Wham-O introduced Super Stuff, a pink, moldable material that could be stretched, popped, and squeezed just like […]
Battleship
Inducted 2025
Battleship’s roots go back to the earliest manufactured war games. In 1890, the E. I. Horsman Company copyrighted its board game Basilinda, in which opponents arrange wooden pegs representing their army on either side of a cardboard screen. When the screen is removed, any soldier opposite an opponent’s cannon is taken off the board. During World War I, Russian officers reportedly played a similar game on a hand-drawn paper grid. In that game, players secretly plot the locations of […]
