Inducted Games

Dragon Quest

Inducted: 2026 Dragon Quest, released in 1986 for the Nintendo Famicom, grew out of a collaboration between scenario writer Yuji Horii, manga artist Akira Toriyama, and composer Koichi Sugiyama. Sugiyama was a popular composer, known for his past work on earlier Enix games, who wrung memorable music out of the Famicom’s limited audio capabilities. Sugiyama’s approach to the creation of game music was revolutionary; he was one of the first composers to consider game music as a serious form of compositional […]

EA Sports FIFA International Soccer

Inducted: 2026 EA Sports FIFA International Soccer was not the first sports simulation video game—nor even the first one about soccer—but it became the most popular sports game franchise of all time, with sales continually bolstered by annual releases from publisher EA. Given soccer’s worldwide popularity, EA Sports FIFA International Soccer had a larger global imprint than other sports titles such as Madden, with approximately 325 million games in the EA Sports FIFA series sold by 2021. FIFA is the global game for the global sport. While in […]

Silent Hill

Inducted: 2026 What makes a game scary? For that matter, what makes a game great? Silent Hill was not the first horror game or even the most famous, coming three years after Resident Evil, but it pushed the boundaries of the horror genre with innovative 3D graphics, a dynamic camera, and an emphasis on psychological intensity, where a brooding dread pervades the game as players explore the game’s eponymous town. To survive is to succeed in Silent Hill, but it takes a lot to survive! […]

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 […]

Angry Birds

Inducted: 2026 Angry Birds was the breakout mobile game hit that convinced millions of people worldwide to pay for a game they could download onto their smartphones. More than two billion downloads later, hundreds of millions of people have spent tens of billions of hours flinging brightly colored birds at buildings built by egg-thieving pigs.  At its core, Angry Birds is delightfully simple. Hurl a bird from a slingshot to knock down the pigs’ precariously balanced structures. A quick video intro sets the story, then […]

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 […]