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Software Games Entertainment The 2000 Beanies

The World Video Game Hall of Fame 2017 Inductees (polygon.com) 73

Dave Knott writes: The 2017 World Video Game Hall of Fame inductees have been announced. The Hall Of Fame "recognizes individual electronic games of all types -- arcade, console, computer, handheld, and mobile -- that have enjoyed popularity over a sustained period and have exerted influence on the video game industry or on popular culture and society in general." The 2017 inductees are: Donkey Kong, Halo: Combat Evolved, Pokemon Red and Green, and Street Fighter II. These four titles join the inaugural 2015 class, which included Pong, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Doom and World of Warcraft, and the 2016 class which included Grand Theft Auto 3, The Legend of Zelda, The Oregon Trail, The Sims, Sonic the Hedgehog and Space Invaders.
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The World Video Game Hall of Fame 2017 Inductees

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  • I always preferred SF2: championship edition to the original. I was never a fan of the new-fangled turbo one nearly so much. That probably has mostly to do with the good arcade near me having a really spiffy championship edition machine.

    I always sucked at Zangief, but I love the ending with him.

    • Re:Round 2: FIGHT (Score:4, Informative)

      by Xest ( 935314 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @03:24AM (#54359351)

      Yeah, I'm not overly taken by this list. It feels like a list by someone who only really started gaming in the 00s, but is aware of a handful of the most popular 80s/90s names rather than someone who actually watched gaming evolve over the ages across it's key points.

      Whilst I've always played things like the Halo games, I'm not overly taken by some of the candidates they're putting forward. I feel like Quake was far more important than Halo, ushering in the era of true 3D, the starting point for internet based online gaming and so forth. It was also the first FPS that explicitly designed for user extensibility from the outset (Quake C anyone?).

      World of Warcraft? High userbase sure, but hardly as influential or groundbreaking as EverQuest and Ultima Online. It was ultimately just a clone of stuff that had come before it such as EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and such with half the features of those MMOs missing, but with Blizzard's IP slapped on. I don't agree that highest popularity means most significant impact on gaming in part because the market is growing so more recent IPs will always sell better, but that doesn't make them more worthy for special recognition.

      The Sims, okay, a pretty successful franchise, and definitely fairly novel, I think it deserves something, but shouldn't SimCity come first? SimCity and SimCity 2000 not only stole many years of people's lives, but even made it's way into classrooms as a teaching tool, and was used for some high level city planning. It's still being cloned to this day, games like Cities: Skylines owe the bulk of their design to SimCity and SimCity 2000, and it was the birth point of Sim Everything Else - from Sim Tower, to Sim Ant.

      • Whilst I've always played things like the Halo games, I'm not overly taken by some of the candidates they're putting forward. I feel like Quake was far more important than Halo, ushering in the era of true 3D, the starting point for internet based online gaming and so forth

        Quite. I mean I know they were successive games from the same studio, but DooM and Quake really are extremely important. DooM really brought FPS to the fore. There were earlier examples, but it seriously blew them away and was vastly popu

        • Quake II is still one of my favorites to play. The scenes that are in the human processing facility are terrifying, with the sounds of screams in the background and insane marines banging their heads on the walls. Generally good gameplay all around, and the multiplayer was killer.

          • Quake II is still one of my favorites to play.

            Ha, same! I never enjoyed Quake I as much, single player.

            The scenes that are in the human processing facility are terrifying, with the sounds of screams in the background and insane marines banging their heads on the walls.

            iiiiit huuuuuuurrrrttttssss

        • And yeah, Quake was really the first fully 3D FPS. And they made multiplayer a huge part. It was moetty much designed for it. I know they switched from Qc to plugins for later games for speed reasons, but the delightful thing about Quake is that all those old mods still work, whereas for quake II, not so much.

          Did anyone here play slidequake? It basically gave you a hoverboard and some really cool levels designed for hoverboarding. Not that many, but it wa unreasonably fun!

          Plus quake was 2675% more brown than any game before (or since).

          I agree about quake, it was one of the fist 3D games. That's when the first 3D cards started coming out (i.e. Diamond VooDoo cards).

          However, it was also groundbreaking in another category, online real-time FPS multi-player. Quake was one of the first FPS games to be an online multi-player game. Capture-the-flag was quite popular back then and it gave rise to Unreal Tournament.

      • Having made an impact on popular society is also one of the criteria. World of Warcraft wasn't groundbreaking in terms of gaming, but it certainly was the first of its kind to break into the mainstream, and with the most influence on culture by far. For the record: I loved UO and some of the similar games that came after it like LoTRO or AoC, and I hated everything about WoW, but I still think it's the latter one that deserves to be in this list if one has to choose.

        Kinda agree on HALO and Sim City, bu
        • by Anonymous Coward

          The complete list of criteria:
          Video games become eligible for the World Video Game Hall of Fame by meeting four basic criteria:

          Icon Status - is widely recognized and remembered
          Longevity - is more than a passing fad and has enjoyed popularity over time
          Geographical Reach - meets the above criteria across international boundaries
          Influence - has exerted significant influence on the design and deve

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Came here looking for a mention of quake. Nuff said.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        These lists are always stupid and predictable. You invariably end up with a yawn inducing list of games which were extremely popular during their time that you've known about since always. It's always the same old franchises, the same old "cornerstones of the gaming industry" crap.

        However, these lists always fail to capture the full scope of the video game universe.

        For starters, they often ignore platforms like the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, and most arcades (they'll toss pacman and space invader

        • Re:Round 2: FIGHT (Score:4, Informative)

          by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @08:03AM (#54360067) Homepage Journal

          Where are the adventure games (not to mention, TEXT adventure games)?

          Indeed. Collossal Cave Adventure kicked off the genre, but it became big with Zork, which was even bundled with business computers from Olivetti, Texas Instruments (TI) and Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC).

          These two games were so influential that they're referenced in many other genres, and have given us lots of pop references (what millennials would call memes), including:
          - xyzzy
          - zorkmid
          - PLUGH
          - Twisty maze of passages, all different
          - What, with your bare hands?

          Other genre spawning games that deserve a mention include Warcraft (no "World of"), Populous, Star Raiders, Civilization, SubLogic Flight Simulator, Tetris and Rally-X. All groundbreaking in their own ways.

        • by Xest ( 935314 )

          "a real time "scorched earth" type game that has nothing to do with the main game..."

          I'm glad I'm not the only one that remembers that, I remember two player sharing a keyboard I think having way more fun with that than the main game. I'm glad someone else remembers it so that I can be sure it wasn't just a figment of my imagination :)

          Your post deserves more upvotes, it was a barrage of happy nostalgia that made me want to curl up in a ball, escape this century and decade, and go back in time.

      • It feels like a list by someone who only really started gaming in the 00s, but is aware of a handful of the most popular 80s/90s names rather than someone who actually watched gaming evolve over the ages

        So, someone in their mid-thirties, then?

        • by Xest ( 935314 )

          Dunno, I'm in my mid-30s and whilst I admittedly missed the very early era of gaming, I had more than enough time as a kid on C64, Spectrum, NES, Master System, Atari ST, Amiga, and so forth. I don't pretend to be old enough to remember the earliest days of gaming, but I'm old enough at least to have seen the evolution of some key genres (i.e. FPS, MMOs, Sim games, etc.)

          I'd say this is more like the sort of list I'd expect from someone in their mid to late 20s that missed the 90s.

      • I started on the Ultima series and loved them. When Ultima Online came out, while technically not the first MMORPG, it was the one that was played by the most. I was VERY disappointed with Richard selling Origin to Electronic Arts though. I played that until World of Warcraft came out. With a short stint on Star Wars Galaxies, which I thought had a very good game dynamic as well as one of the best online economies for it's time, in between. That is until Sony ruined it with the combat upgrade system.

      • by Ranbot ( 2648297 )

        I feel like Quake was far more important than Halo, ushering in the era of true 3D, the starting point for internet based online gaming and so forth. It was also the first FPS that explicitly designed for user extensibility from the outset...

        Agreed, and I'm not just being a fanboy, because I didn't really like the original Quake game on it's own.* I also give Quake credit ushering in true 3D, but the Quake engine's flexibly for modding is in my opinion deserving of greater praise. The mechanics of Quake Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Team Fortress keep echoing through games today. Heck, Team Fortress by itself could be "Hall of Fame" material, but it owes everything to Quake.

        * - I personally found the original Quake out-of-the-box game to be

  • Oregon Trail (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If that's in there, then Carmen Sandiego should be, too.

    • I was surprised to see it was not there either.

    • Maybe, or Monkey Island. But they are different types of games. Oregon Trail was the first successful instance of what we now call educational or "serious" games.
      • Oregon Trail was the first successful instance of what we now call educational or "serious" games.

        Where in Time... was the first majorly successful commercial education title. I would guess that the other big one from the era was Reader Rabbit, but it has nowhere the same recognition as Carmen.

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Oregon Trail was the first successful instance of what we now call educational or "serious"

        Yeah, but then it died of dysentery.

  • Bullshit list (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Whoever put this list together doesn't have a slightest idea of how games evolved, probably wasn't even there to see.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      on the other hand, they have an excellent idea of what foments angry disagreements among gamers, namely, hall of fame lists that don't include your favorite game. cue the trivial outrage. go ahead, argue until you're purple in the face, and let them know you're at least blocking their ads.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        You're misinterpreting. It's not that these games are crap, I had some fun playing them (except maybe pacman, because it was boring as hell), they just aren't what this list is trying to represent. Wolfenstein 3D was the inspiration for ego-shooters, open world RPGs were there before graphics etc. Long story short: these guys don't know jackshit.

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        It's not about favourite games, it's about the groundbreaking genre-creating games missing, while ones that brought nothing new (like Halo) are included.
        For the FPS genre, my early favorite was Quake, and later Half-LLife, but Wolfenstein deserves the top spot.
        My favorite text adventure is Trinity, but I think Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork deserve the accolade.
        My favourite 3D space shooter was Elite, but Star Raiders is the one who made the genre.
        I love Homeworld (the original with music by Yes), but Warc

        • For the FPS genre, my early favorite was Quake, and later Half-LLife, but Wolfenstein deserves the top spot.

          Wolf3d, Quake, Halo, and Half-Life are the only FPSes which deserve to be in the HoF, except maybe Goldeneye. And that's only on the merit of popularity, since Quake predates it. But even today you can't get console gamers to shut up about Goldeneye.

  • Where's Core War? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Core War should have been in the first batch. It's still light years ahead of anything on the consoles.

  • New respect (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @05:01AM (#54359559)

    I recently watched the Donkey Kong documentary 'King of Kong', I found new respect for the game, which I found extremely frustrating back in the day.

    While I've played the 70s and 80s games in their list, I never got around to picking up Halo or Sonic.

    I guess I've got some video game playing to look forward to.

    • You didn't miss much with Halo. It was a decent, but pretty generic shooter. It was the first game to do away with medpacks and instead use the wait-for-your-health-to-restore-by-staying-out-of-combat mechanic. Nowadays gamers usually pan it. It also had vehicles which was still pretty new at the time.

      If you liked King of Kong and how they break the game by getting too high of a score, you'll probably really enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        You didn't miss much with Halo. It was a decent, but pretty generic shooter. It was the first game to do away with medpacks and instead use the wait-for-your-health-to-restore-by-staying-out-of-combat mechanic. Nowadays gamers usually pan it. It also had vehicles which was still pretty new at the time.

        Plenty of FPS's had vehicles before Halo, Tribes (1998) had them. Operation Flashpoint (2001) was had many and it was released in the same year as Battlefield 1942. Halo was the progenitor to Modern Snorefare and other cover based shooters with no need for health or ammo management. Whilst it wasn't the first FPS to be designed for consoles (auto-aim and other player aids) it started the FPS consolidation trend. In FPS terms Halo was just another average shooter released in an age of many good shooters and

  • I can't believe that "Hello Kitty: Island Adventure" isn't on the list. It's like they're not even trying.

  • Personally, I'm amazed that it took Donkey Kong three years to make it into the Hall of Fame.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Any "Hall of Fame" for video games that didn't include Elite in its founding is seriously misguided. Open world, sandbox, 3D, vector graphics. That it's missing Civilization is bad enough, but ignoring the imapct of Elite is practically a criminal act.

  • There are a lot of games you could argue they should have included instead of the ones that have been added so far, a lot of which have been suggested above. But how did they fail to cash in on the 30th anniversary of Final Fantasy?

    Final Fantasy deserves to be on the list in its own right (one of the founding JRPGs, saved Square from bankruptcy, started a huge series with over 130 million sales total, etc) but they also could have used the opportunity to cross-promote with Squenix's own 30th anniversary p
  • for ATARI 8-bit computers, or GTFO!
  • And Bonnie Ross is on twitter taking credit for it. Mean while her sh!t bag company 343 has had two major flops in the franchise. MCC, which has never fully been fixed and the nightmare that was Halo 5.
  • Seriously. I mean, if we're talking about games that have truly had an impact, you cannot deny it. I don't really get it, but my kids do, and I can certainly appreciate it for what it is and how popular it has become.

    Personally... I have been gaming since gaming began really, although I don't do a lot of it. Some of the games that have made the Hall of Fame I have never played, but recognize them for being important in the world of gaming. I would have rather seen Quake or Half-Life on the list. I spen

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