Inducted Games

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 […]

Ultima

Inducted: 2024 Ultima: The First Age of Darkness designer Richard Garriott seemed almost destined to create immersive video game worlds. The son of a professional artist and a NASA astronaut who had spent 60 days on the Skylab space station, Garriott grew up in a community of engineers and scientists who, like his father, worked at the Johnson Space Center near Houston, TX. As a boy, Garriott began making immersive Halloween and other holiday displays after entering a recreated witch’s chamber […]

SimCity

Inducted: 2024 Simulations are some of the oldest forms of video games, but few have had the popularity, influence, or staying power of SimCity. The germ of the idea for SimCity came from designer Will Wright’s earlier work on the game Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984), in which he found playing with the map editor he made as much fun as playing the game itself. Fueled by an interest he developed in the ways cities grow and evolve—and the impact city planning […]

Resident Evil

Inducted: 2024 Although not the first horror-themed video game, Resident Evil (or Biohazard as it was known in Japan) was the first game to popularize what game publisher Capcom called the “survival horror” genre. Created by game director Shinji Mikami and released in 1996, Resident Evil’s combination of cheesy B-movie dialogue, engrossing gameplay, and chilling suspense made it a favorite of gamers searching for more mature video games. In 1993, Capcom producer Tokuru Fujiwara tasked Mikami with remaking the company’s 1989 […]

Myst

Inducted: 2024 Most games reward action, but Myst was something altogether different. The brainchild of brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, it gave players the chance to explore a haunting world in order to decipher the mystery behind its creators. Featuring more than 2,500 beautiful, evocative screens, it boasted a level of depth and immersion never before seen in computer games. In the 1990s, consoles dominated the video game market but as it turned out 1993 was an annus mirabilis (wonderful year) […]

Asteroids

Inducted: 2024 In 1978, Taito/Midway’s Space Invaders filled Japanese and North American arcades, knocking Atari off its throne as the king of coin-operated video games. Atari could have capitalized on the Space Invaders craze by producing yet another clone, but when Atari executive Lyle Rains discussed with designer Ed Logg his idea for a new and different space-themed video game, they planted the seeds for one of the most popular video games of all time, Asteroids. Released in November of 1979, […]