The Strong National Museum of Play has announced their annual candidates for induction into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. This year the complete list of nominees includes Age of Empires, Angry Birds, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), Defender, Frogger, Goldeneye 007, Golden Tee, Harvest Moon, Mattel Football, NBA 2K, Quake, and Tamagotchi.
It’s a packed field in what is always a packed competition.
Deciding between just the games you can play on a PC is hard: Age of Empires, Call of Duty 4 (2007), and Quake are hugely influential swings. How do you pick between foundational FPS Quake, a foundational RTS Age of Empires, and the Call of Duty entry that introduced the now-ubiquitous idea that you should level up and get perks in every kind of game that’s not an RPG?
That’s not even to touch the games that are kind-of on PC. Does an Atari count as a PC in our modern world? Kind of. Maybe you should vote for Defender, then. There’s also the sometimes-on-PC NBA 2K series. Hell, you might even vote for something that isn’t on PC. That’s probably fine because PC absolutely cleaned up last year.
Every year the public chooses three games to add to the hall of fame, while a committee of international experts chooses another three—though the public’s vote does also count as a member of the committee. 2024’s inductees were Ultima, SimCity, Resident Evil, Myst, and Asteroids.
Starting so late in the lifetime of the videogame medium gives The Strong a powerfully diverse range to draw from for each year’s slate of nominations. Their choices include not just PC or console videogames, but portable electronic games and arcade cabinets. That may well be why they induct so many games each year—a proper hall of fame is going to require a lot of catching up.
You can cast your vote for the 2025 inductees on the Museum of Play website.
