Henry Lowood has served as the Curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University since 1983. Thanks to this role, he’s been part of the growing field of Game Studies practically since its very beginning, and in 2006 he used his position to pitch a proposal to the Library of Congress about the importance of the academic study of games.
Partly inspired by the National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry and his own efforts to preserve important game-related artifacts since 1998, Lowood asked for the Library’s assistance in creating a “Game Canon,” a group of titles that would best represent the cultural and historical significance of video games. He got his wish a year later, and a committee (comprised of Lowood, his Stanford colleague Matteo Bittanti, game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky, and Joystiq’s Christopher Grant) was formed to decide on the canon’s initial composition.
After a lot of debate, the committee delivered ten recommendations for the “Game Canon,” ultimately highlighting 15 titles in total. Civilization and Civilization II were grouped together as part of this initial batch of games, as were the four games in the Warcraft series (Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and World of Warcraft). The rest of the eight selections covered a wide range of genres from the first three decades of game history, starting with 1962’s Spacewar! and moving forward through time to the aforementioned Warcraft series.
In between you’ll find 1985’s Tetris, 1989’s SimCity, 1993’s Doom, and a few other foundational games…
Library of Congress: Game Canon (2007)
- Spacewar! (1962)
- Star Raiders (1979)
- Zork (1980)
- Tetris (1985)
- SimCity (1989)
- Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
- Civilization (1991) / Civilization II (1996)
- Doom (1993)
- Sensible World of Soccer (1994)
- Warcraft series (beginning 1994)
This list certainly formed a good base for a “Game Canon” in 2007, and 15 years on, these titles still feel like a pretty good place to start. And unsurprisingly, most score pretty well in the annual updates I make to the Video Game Canon each Fall. A few reside in the Top 100, and all 15 can be found within the Top 500.
Lowood spoke to The New York Times about his lofty goals for the “Game Canon” shortly after its unveiling, and the academic turned out to be both successful and unsuccessful in bringing games to the Library of Congress:
“Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance,” Mr. Lowood said in an interview. And if that is acknowledged, he said, “maybe we should do something about preserving them.”
By 2012, the Library of Congress’s game catalog had grown to include more than 3,000 titles, as recounted by David Gibson, “a Moving Image technician here at The Library of Congress who is working on the acquisition and preservation of games,” for The Signal:
The collection as it now stands consists of about 3,000 games for a wide variety of platforms and 1,500 strategy guides, in addition to descriptive documentation that comes through Copyright with the games and about 50 examples of gameplay footage on VHS or DVD. The collection can be broken down into two major chunks: newer games that we have been receiving through the copyright process since 2006 and a large number of “older” games, roughly ranging from the early 1990s to 2005, that were held in the stacks of the Jefferson Building to serve the Main Reading Room, though this collection was accessed infrequently. With the help of my colleague, Brian Taves, who works as a cataloger in the Moving Image Section, we were able to bring these games into our custody upon the decision that the Moving Image Section would take on the responsibility of storing, cataloging, and ultimately providing preservation and access services for video games at the Library of Congress.
Unfortunately, Lowood’s desire for a regularly-updated “Game Canon” that complements the National Film Registry will have to wait. The National Film Preservation Board adds new films to the Registry each year (this year’s list should be announced any day now), but the “Game Canon” has remained stagnant since 2007.
While that part of the proposal turned out to be a bust, Lowood’s main goal for the project, “maybe we should do something about preserving ,” has proven to be a rousing success. Game preservation is a hot topic in 2022, and multiple organizations have been established over the last decade-and-a-half with a mission to safeguard the history of games. These organizations exist alongside an army of amateur historians, and both groups are dedicated to sharing the stories of the developers who create your favorite games and chronicling the experiences of the players who play them.
One of these organizations, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play, even resurrected Lowood’s idea for a living canon of games with the founding of the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2015. The “Game Canon” was well-represented in the Hall’s first year, as Doom, Tetris, and World of Warcraft were all included in the inaugural class. The World Video Game Hall of Fame has welcomed more than 30 games in the years since, including Spacewar! in 2018 and Civilization earlier this year.
Lowood remains a major voice in the Game Studies (in addition to regular appearances at academic panels and presentations, he was recently a guest on the Video Game History Hour podcast), and though there are still a lot of gaps in our knowledge of video game history, the field would not be where it is today without the efforts of Henry Lowood.