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.
Re:who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok I found the list but not via links, i had to guesstimate it in the browser url bar.
My thoughts on their list:
No Civilization. No Simcity. No Prince of Persia, No Monkey Island, No Super Mario Kart.
Doom should be Doom 2 or Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein was the first FPS to be popular with everyone. Doom was bigger than that but Doom 2 exploded on the scene. There was not one home computer back in Doom 2's time that didn't have Doom 2 on it. No other game can EVER beat that without bundling.
Halo was popular. It was a xbox system seller and something pc/mac fans were waiting for until microsoft did the dirty and turned it xbox only. But this game wasn't revolutionary in terms of gaming as a whole. When this game came out PC gamers had Unreal, Quake, Call Of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Thief, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune etc. This spot should be Half Life or System Shock or Deux Ex.
Street Fighter 2 should be Street Fighter 2 Turbo. SF2T was SF2 with bug fixes and more moves turning it into a way better game. Everything about SF2T was better. More characters, more stages and it sold more copies too.
Re:who? (Score:4, Informative)
Street Fighter 2 should be Street Fighter 2 Turbo. SF2T was SF2 with bug fixes and more moves turning it into a way better game.
SFT: Championship Edition was SF2 with bugfixes, some speedups for some characters (blanka?) and the pallette swap so you could have two of the same character fighting other than Ken versus Ruy.
SF2 Turbo, gave an overall speedup and added some new special moves.
Then again, bugs are not all bad: the whole combo move mechanic spawned by SF2 was in fact a bug.
Re: who? (Score:3)
I agree that Wolfenstein should be on there. It was the granddaddy of FPS's. It set the style of picking up supplies for reloads and healing, the visual of having the end of your gun always visible at the bottom of your screen, and just generally developing a hate for Nazis. I still occasionally fire it up for kicks - there's something jarring about not being able to lift your head to look around. Adds to the suspense.
Generally it look like this is a popularity list, without much deep thought. That none
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Does that include sales and revenues from arcade version? SF2CE and turbo were far more influential.
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Halo was popular. It was a xbox system seller and something pc/mac fans were waiting for until microsoft did the dirty and turned it xbox only. But this game wasn't revolutionary in terms of gaming as a whole. When this game came out PC gamers had Unreal, Quake, Call Of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Thief, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune etc
Yeah, Halo seems like the weakest of the inductees and looks like a reach to please younger and/or console gamers. There was nothing unique in Halo that PC games hadn't done years prior. Even on consoles there was Goldeneye long before Halo. Halo was good game, that just happened to hit the market at the right time to spawn a huge franchise.
Re: who? (Score:1)
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I think the contribution of Halo was atmosphere and storytelling, not so much game mechanics. What FPS did a better job of world building at the time? Half life was good at this but I think Halo was better. But yeah HL should also definitely be on the list.
There's no shortage of games with atmosphere and stories in PC gaming history if that's the main criteria for greatness. For story-driven FPS games specifically, you already mentioned Half-Life, but System Shock (1994) and System Shock 2 (1999) would also be contenders (and have been mentioned by others in this discussion). Halo was very good at porting existing game concepts and mechanics to consoles at a very fortuitous time.
Round 2: FIGHT (Score:2)
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)
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.
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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
Re: Round 2: FIGHT (Score:2)
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.
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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
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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.
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Kinda agree on HALO and Sim City, bu
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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
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Came here looking for a mention of quake. Nuff said.
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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)
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.
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"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.
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So, someone in their mid-thirties, then?
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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.
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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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re:Round 2: FIGHT (Score:5, Informative)
Turbo was actually a response to a hack. Somebody got into a Championship cab and started changing shit so you could do special moves in the air and upped the speed. Street Fighter Rainbow, I think it was called.
I remember being on a car ferry to France and screwing around in the arcade on a hacked machine. On that one, every move was available mid air, plus the following hacks:
Hard houdoukens crossed the screen in about half a second.
Slow houdoukens Were almost still.
Medium ones were the normal speed but heatseeking.
A dragon punch emitted a wall of houdoukens.
I think blanka's eletric storm (or maybe Honda's slap) emitted a continuous stream of sonic booms.
It was inanely unbalanced but fun.
Oregon Trail (Score:2, Informative)
If that's in there, then Carmen Sandiego should be, too.
Civilization (Score:1)
I was surprised to see it was not there either.
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Maybe it was there, but you just did not figure out where exactly.
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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.
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Voyage of the Mimi 4 life, gangstaz.
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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)
Whoever put this list together doesn't have a slightest idea of how games evolved, probably wasn't even there to see.
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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.
Re: Bullshit list (Score:1)
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.
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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
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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.
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Because Goldeneye was the first time anyone had done multipleyer FPS right on a console.
No, that was Halo. Goldeneye was terrible.
Where's Core War? (Score:2, Informative)
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)
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.
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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]
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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
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"It was with the release of Dune II from Westwood Studios (1992) that real-time strategy became recognized as a distinct genre of video games".
Yes, but the first successful RTS was command and conquer.
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I suspect the list isn't complete, but even so Dune 2 was Amiga User International's Game of the Month and Computer Gaming World's Strategy Game of the Year when it came out in 1993, and has been included in numerous "best of" lists since then.
Command and Conquer undoubtedly sold more units than Dune 2, but if you want to go on pure sales then Starcraft beats both of them hands down.
It is normal for later (successful) games to sell more than earlier (successful) games, there's been mo
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Dune 2 Reception [wikipedia.org]
True, however it is C&C that popularised the genre.
I like Dune 2, it was the first of what we'd call a modern RTS, but it's not as good as C&C. Dune 2 is more the Release Candidate of RTS, C&C was the SP1 with most of the bugs ironed out. I think the biggest contributing factor in Dune 2's success was the Dune backstory where most gamer's of the time were also avid Sci-Fi fans and readers. If it weren't for this, I suspect C&C may never had been made.
Even back in 1995, compared to C
Hello Kitty (Score:2, Funny)
I can't believe that "Hello Kitty: Island Adventure" isn't on the list. It's like they're not even trying.
Donkey Kong (Score:1)
Elite (Score:1)
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.
Marketing Fail (Score:2)
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
Star Raiders (Score:2)
HALO:CE was a Bungie game... (Score:1)
Where is Minecraft? (Score:2)
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