Video Game Hall of Fame: All 24 Inductees Ranked - Part I (24-13)

Throughout history (yeah, this is going to be one of those kinds of articles - strap in), every time mankind has developed a new tool, they've found a way to play with it as well. Computers are no exception.

The concept of video games can be traced back to the 1950s when computers started using video monitors as opposed to teletype print-outs (for our younger readers, teletype is... well.. you know what, go look it up, we have an article to write.)

After 70 years - and especially after becoming as successful as it has - video games deserve a Hall of Fame of some kind.

And it does - inside the Strong museum located in Rochester, NY, and interactive museum "devoted to the history and exploration of play." The museum also houses the National Toy Hall of Fame, so it kind of has a handle on this whole "play" thing.

Earlier this Spring, the Video Game Hall of Fame - who's inductees are picked by both a public vote and an "International Selection Advisory Committee composed of journalists, scholars, and other individuals familiar with the history of video games and their role in society" - announced the arrival of four new games.

We'll get to them later, but we felt this was an opportune time to look at the entire roster of games in the Hall and rank them. Because that's what we do on the Internet.

Our list is primarily ordered based on the game's influence on the entire gaming world. It's not a pick of what games are "better" or "more popular", but simply how much impact each of them had on the game industry as a whole.

Of course, you may not agree with all (or any) of our picks, which is fine- you're allowed. We encourage you to share your picks in the comments below.

Also - and it has to be said because someone will forget - only inductees of the Video Game Hall of Fame are on this list. So, if you're wondering why the such-and-such game isn't on this list, it's because they're not in the Video Game Hall of Fame.

Or, they are and I forgot about them. Which sounds like something I'd do, to be fair, but I'm pretty sure I got them all. I counted the list, like, three times.

So, with that in mind - we've ranked the 24 Inductees in the World Video Game Hall of Fame by their influence on the world of games. Starting with...

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#24 The Oregon Trail (inducted in 2016)

If you went to elementary or junior high school in the US anytime between the 1980s until, well, now, you should be pretty familiar with The Oregon Trail. The game, which was designed to teach students about the migration into the American West in the 19th century.

While the game's accuracy (or lack thereof) of the American pioneer experience, and it's standing as one of the earliest pieces of "edutainment" software, certainly were grounds for a Hall of Fame induction, that's not the only reason.

Released at a time when both personal computers and gaming systems were rare among households (even at its peak, the Atari 2600 only sold 8 million units -nothing to sneeze at but hardly the majority of American homes), The Oregon Trail's usage in schools introduced students to both computing and gaming, inspiring whole generations to create their own games.

The Oregon Trail may not have been influential in the actual design of games, but it certainly got young kids around the world to start making them.

Provided they didn't die of dysentery.

From the American frontier to the final frontier...

23 Spacewar! (inducted in 2018)

In 1962, Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Steve Russell saw his vision come true when he, along with a handful of other students finished programming Spacewar!

The game, which was designed to emulate fast, gritty dogfight battles in outer space - much like the planes and ships in WWII and science fiction films.

The game, programmed on a DEC PDP-1 microcomputer in MIT's lab, proved so popular that it found its way into other labs all across the world.

Nine years later, that very same game was discovered by a young Stanford student named Nolan Bushnell, who saw the commercial prospects of a game that could be played on a computer monitor.

Bushnell, with the help of company Nutting Associates, eventually turned Spacewar! into Computer Space, put it inside a sleek looking cabinet and turned it into the world's first arcade game.

It didn't do very well. It wasn't a complete flop by any means - it even inspired many imitators - it wasn't the success the company had hoped for. It just was too complicated for the bar and student union crowd to keep plugging money into. So, Bushnell replaced it with a much simpler title.

But, we'll get to that a little later.

Next, we go from spaceships to battle axes...

#22 World of Warcraft (inducted in 2015)

The origins of the Internet go back almost as far as those of video games, so it was inevitable that the two would meet and produce children, much like the children who play online video games and say rude things about our mothers. Sorry, I'm getting off track already.

World of Warcraft is by no means the first online multiplayer video game - it's not even the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or MMORPG, which I'm calling them from now on because I'm not typing that every time).

But, what it did for MMORPGs, and online videogames, in general, was extraordinary. It was - and in a lot of ways, still is - a cultural sensation inspired a boom like-minded games and popularized the concept of online communities around games."

Communities that were just as real and important to those in them as any ones in the "real" world.

People met while playing this game. Some of them became lifetime friends. Some of them got married. Some of those people held their wedding ceremony in the game world.

As the museum itself wrote on their website, the game "World of Warcraft is reshaping the way people think about their online lives and communities."

While the game - which, as of 2015 still had 10 million subscribers - is still popular, its influence on the online and community aspect of gaming will be, we feel, its lasting legacy.

We better hurry to our next entry....

#21 Sonic the Hedgehog (inducted in 2016)

The early 1990s were a weird, but pivotal, time for the gaming industry. While the gaming industry had bounced back, commercially, after the floor fell out from under the business in 1983, the company that made that happen, Nintendo, pretty much had an iron grip on it. Not just in the US, but in Japan and, arguably, in the world, as well.

Sure, companies like Sega and, to a lesser extent, Atari, attempted to compete with the juggernaut that was the Nintendo Entertainment System, it just wasn't happening. It would take years for another company to catch up, much less pass them, but Sega finally did it in 1991 - with the help of a blue -and very fast - hedgehog.

Sega released their 16-bit console, the Genesis (just in the U.S. as it was called the Mega Drive everywhere else, but that's a whole other story), in 1989 with an aggressive ad campaign and a bunch of arcade hits converted into cartridges for the home. The system was more powerful and faster than the NES (16-bits, baby!), but they needed a game to demonstrate it.

Enter Sonic the Hedgehog.

We could go on for hours (seriously, just ask us, we will) about the story behind this game (or check out the book Console Wars, which is awesome), but the fact of the matter is that this game was faster and more intense than anything Nintendo was offering at the time.

Even after Nintendo launched their own 16-bit system, the Super NES, Sega was still outselling them - and that was great news for third party developers.

See, Nintendo had a very strict policy when it came to letting studios that weren't Nintendo develop games for Nintendo's hardware. Very strict. Sega's success in the 16-bit market gave them another system to publish games for, forcing Nintendo to reconsider their policies.

Eventually, Nintendo "won" the early 90s "console war", but the landscape of the business had changed. And it was that little blue hedgehog that helped facilitate it.

It also doesn't hurt that the game was (and still is) a lot of fun.

#20 Space Invaders (inducted in 2016)

Taito's Space Invaders arcade title was so popular in Japan, that rumors began to spread that it was causing a shortage of the 100-yen coin required to play it.

Now, this turned out to be just an urban legend, but there's no question just how popular the arcade shooter was - not just in Japan, but all over the world. This was the kind of game that got pop songs written about it.

Now, to be fair, a good part of the popularity behind this game was due to the fact that it wasn't Pong (more on them in a moment). In 1977, the video game market - arcade or otherwise - was flooded with Pong clones to the point that everybody was pretty sick of it. Space Invaders was something new, and people flocked to it.

However, it was also a really fun game - it still is. It's an exercise in stamina - how long can you hold out again this horde of intergalactic terrorists before you're overwhelmed. The sound was hypnotic, the action was tense, and a bug-turned-feature in the game caused the aliens to attack faster the more their numbers were depleted.

Space Invaders was not only gaming's first mega-hit, but it also inspired a new wave of creativity in game designers. Like any other groundbreaking game, it had more than it's share of copycats. But, it also proved that video games could be successful and still be more than just a ball and two paddles.

Speaking of that ball and those paddles...

#19 Pong (inducted in 2015)

People need to be eased into new concepts. When Nolan Bushnell and his friends turned Spacewar! into Computer Space and put it out in the world, it gained some interest at first. But, soon the novelty wore off and for a public not yet used to the concept of video games, it was a little too involved for a quick game down at the local watering hole.

In 1972, Atari's Al Alcorn put together a tech exercise based on a tennis game found in Ralph Baer's Maganox Odyssey home console (which, by the way, should already be in this Hall of Fame). That tech demo was so polished that Bushnell and her fellow Atari founder, the late Ted Dabney, decided to use it to replace Computer Space.

The rest is history.

Pong became the game industry's first major commercial success and it helped turn Atari from a business run out of a garage into the most profitable business in the world (at the time, anyway). It not only spurred on the popularity of arcades, but the desire to play the game on televisions created the demand for the first successful home consoles.

Basically, if it weren't for Pong, there'd be no PlayStation or Xbox today.

Even today, Pong is almost a perfect game - and we mean "game" in the most specific definition: "a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck." Thanks, dictionary! The fact that it's so simple also makes it such a perfect starting point for the evolution of games that game after it.

And a perfect example of this is...

#18 Final Fantasy VII (inducted in 2018)

The story of Squaresoft's (Now Square Enix) Final Fantasy VII is actually a number of stories in one. It tells the story of one company losing its grip on an industry by refusing to change with the times. It's the story of the popularity of RPGs in America exploding virtually overnight. But, more importantly for our efforts here, it's the story of how one title showed how video games could tell an epic story, and create an epic experience, just as well as any other medium.

Just from the name alone, it's obvious that there were plenty of RPGs before Final Fantasy VII. In fact, it even wasn't the first RPG on the PlayStation hardware - Suikoden and Wild Arms were released earlier, for example. But, Final Fantasy VII was the first game in the genre to make real use of the compact disc format. It had per-rendered backgrounds, 3D environments, full CGI cut-scenes and had a story that spanned four discs.

Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII

This was also the first game by Square not to be released on a Nintendo system, after years of working with them exclusively.

Nintendo had settled on using a cartridge format for their next system, the Nintendo 64, which would have limited the ambition that Final Fantasy's developers wanted for the game.

It's just one example of how Nintendo's reluctance to move to a disc based format caused them to lose their dominance over the game industry.

But, most importantly, the game's ambition and presentation inspired developers from all over to not just make games, but experiences.

While there were plenty of games before it that were cultural sensations, Final Fantasy VII was arguably gaming's first blockbuster.

#17 The Sims (inducted in 2016)

Will Wright has made a career out of making games that don't really go anywhere. You can call them "sandbox games", sure. That's as apt a description as any. SimCity, SimAnt, SimEarth... look, if it has "Sim" in the title, chances are it's a Will Wright game.

And most of these games have been very, very successful. But, nothing comes even close to the success that he scored with his 2000 release, The Sims.

To say The Sims was a cultural phenomenon at the time is a bit of an understatement. Two years after it released, it became the biggest-selling PC game in history with nearly 7 million sales. Everybody was playing it. I was playing it. Gary Busey was (probably) playing it.

It was referenced in television shows. Big name music acts would re-record their popular songs in Simlish, the game's fictional language.

It's so far spawned four sequels, expansions too numerous to count, ports to nearly every platform you can think of and, of course, plenty of copycats (for instance, a Playboy Magazine game - not kidding). It became shorthand for a "virtual world".

The Sims managed to take somewhat complicated game mechanics, simplify them, and put them in an environment that appeals to just about everyone.

But, most of all, it gave us a chance to take something we feel we have very little control over - our own everyday lives - and give us near total control. Or, at least the next best thing: someone else's life.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a house to mysterious remove all the doors from and set on fire,

#16 Tomb Raider (inducted in 2018)

The original Tomb Raider, just as a game, hasn't exactly aged gracefully. It's still a fun game, to be sure. But, compared to the games it inspired - hell, compared to its sequels, spin-offs, and reboots - it's a bit of a clunky mess.

The controls are stiff (although those back and side flips are still so satisfying) and the graphics are just... meh. That first level with the T. Rex, though.

Fortunately, holding up after twenty-odd years isn't all it takes to be in the Hall of Fame. Tomb Raider is an important title in the pantheon of gaming history for many reasons, but two specific ones put it at this particular point in this list.

Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (PS1)

Not those reasons. Stop it.

The first is the way it presented the action genre in a 3D environment that was (even now) pretty simple to control. Sure, it's not great compared to, say, some of the Assassin's Creed games (some might disagree with that, sure), but it's certainly not unplayable. And, at the time, it was a revelation. It's was light years above anything else out there and it led the way for more games like it.

Secondly, it helped solidify the idea of games having full fledged characters. Obviously, it wasn't the first game to have a protagonist with a backstory and motivation - RPGs were a thing for years by then, for example - but it was one of the first ones, if not the first to capture the public's imagination.

Lara Croft was featured on magazine covers, commercials for products other than the game she starred in, and treated in the media (in a tongue-in-cheek fashion) as a real person.

Tomb Raider helped position games as a storytelling medium in the world of entertainment, and games haven't been the same since.

Also, that first and the latest Tomb Raider movies were pretty good, I don't care what anybody says.

#15 John Madden Football (inducted in 2018)

I don't know if you've heard, but apparently, EA's Madden NFL games are a big deal. But, it had to start somewhere.

Most people know that, unlike a lot of other athlete-endorsed sports games at the time, John Madden Football was made with the input of the Pro (American) Football Hall of Fame coach. More often than not, a publisher would reach out to an athlete, write a check, and then put said athlete's name of the game, without the athlete having even looked at one minute of the game at all. Which probably explains Bill Lambieer's Combat Basketball.

What's interesting is that while the original release in 1988, for the Apple II computer, certainly did that, it wasn't until the game's console debut on the Sega Genesis in 1990 that EA really took advantage of Madden's football expertise.

John Madden Football for the Sega Genesis

Apparently it worked, because the title became the first major hit for the relatively new gaming system. Having an exclusive third-party sports title like this, considering the iron grip Nintendo had on third-party support in those days, went a long way to help the Genesis/Mega Drive get a foothold in the home console market.

These days, with an exclusive contract with the NFL, Madden NFL is the American Football game. But, even when it wasn't the behemoth that it is now, it still set the standard for realism in sports games and, in some ways, helped usher in the age of competitive esports we have now.

#14 Street Fighter II (inducted in 2017)

While Street Fighter II: The World Warrior wasn't the first fighting game ever made (obviously, it wasn't even the first Street Fighter game ever made), it certainly set the blueprint for the fighting games that came after it.

SF2, as we like to call it, introduced plenty of concepts that were new to the genre - things we take for granted now. Nowadays, most fighting games have a plethora of playable fighters to choose from.

In the very first Street Fighter, for example, players had access to just one: Ryu. SF2 had a extremely varied roster, made up of distinctive characters, each with their own backstory and fighting style. Players would soon pick their own favorites and stick with them in competition against other players.

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

Oh, yeah. That was another thing SF2 popularized: the concept of multiplayer competition. It wasn't an unusual sight to see crowds gathered around a Street Fighter II cabinet, each clamoring for a turn at whoever won the match happening at that moment. Each were anxious to apply their skills and strategies against each other.

And strategies could be applied, too. SF2 also introduced the concept of combos - albeit accidentally:

"One of Street Fighter 2's most popular features was a subtle tweak to the original game's control scheme. To reduce the reliance on luck, the team made it easier for players to perform characters' special moves. As it turned out, this opened up the game in a way the designers didn't intend, allowing players to link together multiple hits before their opponents could react. In short, they invented the combo. Some called it a bug," - Matt Leone, Polygon: Street Fighter II: An Oral History

Since its 1991 release in the arcade, Street Fighter II has spawned countless imitators as well as sequels, spin-offs, an anime series, two movies and much more.

Its release on home consoles was a major moment in the Nintendo/Sega console wars, with each company eager to have the definitive" version of the fighter on their system.

Even today, the Street Fighter series is integral to the competitive fighting game scene, including major events such as EVO. And it's all thanks to one game - and a bug,

#13 Donkey Kong (inducted in 2017)

One of the things about legendary Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (and his name will be coming up on this list again at least a few more times) is that his creations tend to buck the trends of gaming at the time. There's no better example of this than lucky number 13 on our list, Donkey Kong.

In 1981, Nintendo released an arcade title called Radar Scope which, while it was a perfectly fine game on its own, was yet another space shooter in the vein of Space Invaders. In other words, it was be-there-done-that enough that it simply wasn't successful.

Nintendo needed a replacement to put into these arcade cabinets, and fast. That's when they turned to Miyamoto, then just a junior employee, who came up with something revolutionary.

Donkey Kong

A game where you play... as a guy. Just a regular guy. And he's trying to save his girlfriend from a giant ape. It was so different from anything else in arcades, and was so much fun to play, that it became a cultural phenomenon.

Like many of Miyamoto's other creations, Donkey Kong showed that you can tell a story and still keep the game simple enough to be contained in the technical limitations at the time.

This obviously wasn't the first character-driven arcade game (we'll get to that in a moment, as well), but it also introduced us to a character that would eventually change gaming completely.

But, more on him later.

So, that's the first thirteen Video Game Hall of Fame games, ranked in order of influence. We'll have the next twelve shortly. In the meantime, what do you think of the list so far? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading!