Who’s getting chicken dinners? The Strong National Museum of Play just announced 2024’s Video Game Hall of Fame inductees. The list was less controversial than last year when Barbie Fashion Designer and The Last of Us beat out several arguably more worthy titles, including Quake and fan-favorite Goldeneye 007.
This year’s hall-of-fame nominees included many worthy games like Elite, Metroid, and Guitar Hero. However, only five of the dozen made the list.
Asteroids
This classic video game hit arcades in 1979, selling 70,000 cabinets and making Taito/Midway a cool $150 million (over $645 million adjusted for inflation). Asteroids quickly became the King of the Quarter, beating out former top dog, Space Invaders, by raking in approximately $500 million in arcades worldwide. The title was eventually licensed to Atari, which went on to sell 3.8 million copies for the Atari 2600 and driving sales of more than 30 million home consoles.
Myst
The early 1990s were dominated by fast-paced action games like Doom. However, in 1993, Rand and Robyn Miller released Myst, the polar opposite of the first-person shooters so popular at the time. Myst was a laid-back casual experience that challenged players’ minds rather than their trigger fingers. What probably stood out for most people were the spectacular and surreal graphics that, for the time, were as close to photo-realistic as games got and remained so for years.
Resident Evil
Released in 1996, Capcom called Resident Evil the first “survival horror” game. Although that claim is technically valid since the publisher coined the term, it was preceded by others in the genre like System Shock in 1994 and Alone in the Dark in 1992. Regardless, Resident Evil ushered mature horror games into the mainstream. Those damn dogs! It sold over 5 million copies and launched a franchise that would proceed to sell 150 million more as of 2023, making it Capcom’s best-selling series in company history. It was so influential that it spawned books, comics, movies, and TV shows based on the universe.
SimCity
Will Wright’s inspiration for SimCity came from his work on Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984. He had built a map editor to help design the game and found it to be just about as fun as playing the finished product. So he began work and released the city builder in 1989. The top-down, simplistic graphics were underwhelming. However, what it lacked in shine was made up for in fun. Watching the city come to life and evolve was fascinating, and managing various crises like fires and learning about urban development by trial and error was addictive.
Ultima
Like many kids in the late 1970s and early 80s, Richard Garriott had a fondness for tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons. When computers came along, Garriott began programming games for his own amusement. After a local computer store manager encouraged him to sell one, he released Akalabeth: World of Doom for the Apple II in 1979. He was just 18. It sold enough to inspire him to aim higher, so Garriott dug his heels in and launched Ultima I in 1981. It sold 20,000 copies in its first year, prompting him to work on a sequel, which he released in 1982, then Ultima III in 1983. The trilogy funded and inspired Garriott to found Origin Systems, a studio that produced several more sequels, including the MMORPG Ultima Online. It also launched other games that would become classic franchises, including Wing Commander and System Shock.
Strong’s 2024 list of Hall of Fame winners is solid, avoiding the controversy of last year. The inductees are undoubtedly some of the most influential games in history. Maybe next year, Metroid.