Strong Museum Inducts Three Classic Games (And Tamagotchi) Into Video Game Hall of Fame
The Strong National Museum of Play has now inducted four new games into the World Video Game Hall of Fame: GoldenEye 007, Quake, Defender, and Tamagotchi. This brings the Hall of Fame total number of games up to 49.
The Strong started this initiative in 2015 as a part of its game preservation program. Although based in Rochester, NY, The Strong’s Video Game Hall of Fame includes submissions from international game studios, not just homegrown ones.
“Welcome Defender, GoldenEye 007, Quake, and Tamagotchi – four iconic titles that helped shape gaming history,” the museum said in an X (Twitter) post. “Congratulations on joining the ranks of the best video games of all time.”
Classics of All Genres
GoldenEye 007 was released in 1997 on the N64. A collaboration between Rare and Nintendo, it was the console’s first FPS, and was met with widespread critical acclaim. However, it was its multiplayer deathmatch that really set a fire under the video game industry: it introduced four-player splitscreen, an idea copied by and iterated upon by most other first person shooters ever since.
Quake (1996) is also renowned for being a top-tier FPS. However, in terms of its historical importance, it has two notable features: an influential soundtrack by Trent Reznor, and the birth of a server/client architecture system that let players create their own servers to run games on. Pretty much every multiplayer game has this option now, and it’s all thanks to Quake.
It would be easy to dismiss Defender (1980) as an Asteroids or Space Invaders knock-off, but this would be doing it a great disservice. Inspired by those games, its creators, Williams Electronics, instead sought to expand upon their gameplay. Thanks to physics-based explosions, a scrolling screen, and notorious difficulty curve, Defender went on to inspire the genre of shoot ‘em ups, or shmups.
This year’s final inductee is the Tamagotchi. Although not technically a video game, it is an evolution of the electronic handheld games common throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Launched in 1996, the Tamagotchi was the world’s first virtual pet and although it was initially written off as a fad, it has since gone on to inspire multiple digital toys, virtual pet video games, and even robot pets.
The World Video Game Hall of Fame
Similar to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, the Strong’s Hall of Fame invites members of the public to nominate inductees that have a cultural impact of some measure beyond a passing trend.
Games entered into the Hall of Fame sit alongside the museum’s dedicated International Center for the History of Electronic Games, which recently acquired a sizable collection from Volition, the makers of the Saints Row series.
