Tag: Museums and Archives

Silent Hill, Dragon Quest, Skyrim, and More Announced as Finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026

The World Video Game Hall of Fame has announced the games that will be competing for induction as part of their Class of 2026, and with five returning finalists, this year’s theme seems to be second chances.

So which games will get another chance to earn a plaque on the wall at the Strong Museum of Play’s World Video Game Hall of Fame? Rovio’s Angry Birds, Electronic Arts’s FIFA International Soccer, and Konami’s Frogger will all be going through the voting process for a third time, while NanaOn-Sha’s PaRappa the Rapper and Konami’s Tokimeki Memorial are both getting their second shot at induction.

That leaves seven newcomers to the process and they’re pretty impressive bunch. Konami’s Silent Hill could probably be considered something of a frontrunner after the excellent showing of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill F in recent years. But the Hall of Fame will also consider Enix’s Dragon Quest (released in North America as Dragon Warrior) for the first time, as well as Bethesda’s oft-re-released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Namco’s Galaga, Riot’s League of Legends, Capcom’s Mega Man, and Jagex’s RuneScape.

The vote now goes to the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee, but the public will also get two chances to have their say in the final inductees.

As always, the Player’s Choice Ballot will be available until March 13th, giving the three games that receive the most votes equal standing with the ballots from the rest of the committee members. And for the first time this year, the World Video Game Hall of Fame is taking a road trip to the Game Developers Conference, where attendees will have the opportunity to vote for the games they’d like to appear on another public ballot.

The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026 will be announced on Thursday, May 7, at 10:30 AM (Eastern Time). And if you’re unfamiliar with any of this year’s finalists, you can learn more about them after the break.

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Computer Entertainer, a Game Magazine from the 1980s, is Available to Everyone Thanks to the VGHF

Aside from the venerable Edge and the recently-relaunched Game Informer, it’s hard to find dedicated game magazines at your favorite bookstore in 2025. But even though they’re long gone, we’re not short of nostalgic odes to defunct titles like Nintendo Power or GamePro or Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Computer Entertainer doesn’t have the name recognition of any of those periodicals, but maybe it should, because no one was covering games like they were in the 1980s. And I mean that literally. It was published from 1982 until 1990 by Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan, sisters who also ran a video game store. There were other game magazines available in the 1980s, but from 1984 until 1987, Computer Entertainer was (most likely) the only magazine available in the United States that was solely dedicated to video games.

So why are we talking about this now? Well, the Video Game History Foundation has acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer and they’re making available to anyone, for free, through a Creative Commons license. That means that as long as you give credit to the VGHF, you can use articles from Computer Entertainer however you want.

I’ll let them explain.

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Meet the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025: Quake, GoldenEye 007, Defender, and Tamagotchi

The James Bond films famously open with 007 dispatching another would-be assassin and a wisp of white smoke escaping from the barrel of a Walther PPK. This cinematic bit of tradition was also used to open Rare’s GoldenEye 007, and it helped set the stage for one of the greatest video game adaptations of all time.

Today, as wisps of white smoke also floated over the Vatican after the conclusion of the papal conclave, the Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame announced that GoldenEye 007 had been selected as part of the institution’s Class of 2025.

The classic Nintendo 64 game was honored alongside three other title, including the other dominant shooter from the late 90s, id Software’s Quake. Williams’s Defender and Bandai’s Tamagotchi digital pet also got the nod as part of the Class of 2025. This year’s induction ceremony included appearances from Eugene Jarvis, the team on Defender; John Romero, the co-creator of Quake; and Tara Badie, the head of Tamagotchi for Bandai Namco.

After the ceremony, curators and historians from the Strong Museum attempted to place these games in their proper context within the history of video games.

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The Strong Museum of Play Acquires Prototypes and Development Documents from Volition’s 30-Year History

Volition opened their doors in 1993 and they spent the next 30 years developing a slew of critically-acclaimed action games such as Descent, Red Faction, and Saints Row. But that all came to an end in 2023 when the studio was shuttered by parent company Deep Silver. In the year-and-a-half since that closure, curators at the Strong Museum of Play have been in contact with many former developers from he company to collect and catalog Volition’s expansive history.

Earlier this week, the museum’s Director of Digital Preservation, Andrew Borman, announced the acquisition of the Volition Collection on LinkedIn:

While we have only just begun to process the collection, I am beginning to understand some of what it might contain. […] We can explore games that were unreleased and never made it to market, such as various Saints Row spinoffs and their prototypes, many of which haven’t been seen before. We are honored to preserve the history and legacy of Volition, and the work of many Volitionites that made such incredible games.

The Strong was given a massive trove of discs containing game builds and other supporting documents, including an early prototype of Saints Row (which was then known as Bling Bling) and development materials connected to Descent 4 (an unreleased prequel that was reworked into Red Faction).

Staff members at The Strong are currently working with the collection and “organizing, cataloguing, and migrating data from optical discs and other storage formats” to make it available to researchers and museum guests at a future date.

Minecraft’s Volume Alpha Soundtrack Has Been Added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry

Two years ago, Koji Kondo’s “Super Mario Bros. Theme” became the first piece of music from a video game to be added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. But it definitely won’t be the last.

The National Recording Registry’s Class of 2025 was announced earlier this week, and Minecraft‘s Volume Alpha soundtrack by Daniel “C148” Rosenfeld was among the inductees. Here’s what Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden had to say about the selection:

Since its official release in 2011, Minecraft has grown into a cultural phenomenon, building its legacy as one of history’s most successful video games one voxel at a time. Key to the game’s early success is the ambient-style soundtrack, created by German producer Daniel Rosenfeld under his alias, C418. The gentle electronic score lends itself perfectly to the game’s open-ended design and sandbox environment, which invites players to interact, explore and build, free from any specific narrative constraints.

Inspired by pioneers of intelligent dance music such as Aphex Twin and the ambient music of Brian Eno, Rosenfeld’s original soundtrack to the game, compiled on the 2011 release “Minecraft: Volume Alpha,” provides a soothing and inviting backdrop to the video game’s open-world environment, creating instant nostalgia in the process. The influence of C418’s music can be traced through the proliferation of ambient scores appearing in video games since Minecraft’s initial release, as well as the cultural phenomenon of “lo-fi hip-hop,” which grew in popularity during the late 2010s and shares many of the same calming and nostalgic musical aesthetics as those found in Minecraft’s original score.

Minecraft’s soundtrack will be joined in the Class of 2025 by a wide variety of recordings, including Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Tracy Chapman’s self-titled album (which includes “Fast Car”), Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, the Original Broadway Cast Album of Hamilton, and the “Reboot Chime” from Windows 95 (which was composed by Brian Eno).

World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Finalists for Class of 2025 Include Angry Birds, GoldenEye 007, Quake, and More

I can’t say that I blame them, but it sure looks the World Video Game Hall of Fame would like it to be 2023 again. The finalists for the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025 were announced earlier this week, and six games that failed to make the cut from 2023 are getting another try this year. That crop of titles includes Ensemble’s Age of Empires, Rovio’s Angry Birds, Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Rare’s GoldenEye 007, Visual Concepts’s NBA 2K, and id Software’s Quake.

They’ll be competing against two other returning finalists, Konami’s Frogger (which was last up as a finalist in 2020) and the Mattel Football handheld .

Unorthodox handhelds are something of the theme this year, as Bandai’s Tamagotchi digital pet is a finalist (for the first time) as well. It’s joined by a trio of other first-timers including Midway’s Defender, Incredible Technologies’s Golden Tee Golf, and Natsume’s Harvest Moon.

“This year’s finalists span the decades and range from arcade classics to one of the most popular mobile games of all time,” said Jon-Paul Dyson, the Director of The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games. “All of these games have enormously influenced pop culture or the game industry itself. Frogger was popular in the arcades of the 1980s, but an iconic Seinfeld scene in 1998 made it unforgettable. The brilliant coding of the first-person shooter Quake enabled unforgettable multiplayer matches that have mesmerized players and influenced many games that followed. Then there’s Tamagotchi, which bridges the gap between video games and digital toys, changing the way we think about games.”

The Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee, a body made up of journalists and scholars from around the world, is currently debating which of these games to induct as part of the Class of 2025, and you can help. A Player’s Choice Ballot will be available until March 13th and the three games that receive the most votes will be submitted alongside the other ballots from the committee members.

The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025 will be announced during a ceremony at The Strong on Thursday, May 8, at 10:30 AM. If you’d like to study up on this classic games, the curators at the Strong Museum have put together a cheat sheet describing each of games. You can find it after the break.

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The Video Game History Foundation’s Research Library is Now Open

Work had already begun on the Video Game History Foundation’s Research Library when it was first announced in December 2023, but the VGHF team has spent the last year making their online presence even better, diligently cataloging and scanning many of the materials available in their collection.

But the time has finally come, and beginning today, the Research Library is now open to all.

Though it’s officially in “Early Access”, the Video Game History Foundation Library (available at library.gamehistory.org) is a searchable catalog of the VGHF’s holdings. That includes magazines, newsletters, development documents, correspondence, commercials, and more. Best of all, material from the collection that’s been digitized can be viewed online from anywhere for free through the Digital Archive (archive.gamehistory.org).

This is an amazing resource for researchers or anyone who wants to learn more about games. For example, did you know Nintendo’s Rad Racer was originally going to be titled 3-D Racer? I didn’t, but I do now after digging through Nintendo’s Publicity Folder from CES 1987. Thousands of little tidbits of information just like that are waiting for you in the Video Game History Foundation’s Research Library.

Discover even more of what this (virtual) space offers with Library Director Phil Salvador in the video below:

I’m very excited to dive in to the Research Library and you can learn more about it on the Video Game History Foundation Blog.

Nintendo Offers Up a Video Tour of the Nintendo Museum… Which Opens on October 2, 2024

It’s been three long years since Nintendo announced their desire to transform a shuttered manufacturing plant in Kyoto into a Nintendo Museum, but with a grand opening planned for this Fall, the consolemaker is finally ready to give fans a sneak peek at what’s inside.

The video tour, which has been embedded above, is hosted by Shigeru Miyamoto himself, and it actually starts on the second floor in the “Make Connections” exhibit. There, museum patrons will be able to browse Nintendo’s 135-year-history of games, toys, and playing cards. This massive display case overlooks the first floor, which will feature eight interactive play exhibits. Miyamoto shared three of those exhibits during the video.

“Ultra Machine SP” is based on an indoor pitching machine sold by Nintendo in the 60s and 70s and will let you take the plate in a replica of a typical Japanese home. “Zapper and Scope SP” gives players a Zapper or Super Scope and lets them loose on a 13-player light gun game that attempts to modernize one of Nintendo’s first moves into the video game space. And you’ll get exactly what you expect in the “Big Controller” exhibit, as two players will attempt to complete a Nintendo-themed game challenge together using an extra-large controller.

With this combination of museum gallery and interactive play-based exhibits, the Nintendo Museum seems to be very reminiscent of The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. But as with all things Nintendo, I’m sure a few surprises are still being kept under wraps.

The Nintendo Museum will open to the public on October 2, but to help control attendance, Nintendo is currently offering tickets through an online lottery. You can reserve your tickets, and learn more about the rest of the museum, at the Nintendo Museum’s official website.

Get A Sneak Peek at the Video Game History Foundation’s Digital Library

The Video Game History Foundation has been collecting and digitizing game magazines, press kits, development materials, and the personal papers of several major figures in the games industry since their founding in 2017.

But recently, they took a major step towards making the items on their shelves available to the public with a sneak peek at their long-in-the-works Digital Library. In the video, which is embedded above, Library Director Phil Salvador walks us through how the database will work, using Nintendo Power, Game Players, and the Mark Flitman Papers as examples. There’s also a blog post, Introducing the VGHF Digital Library, explaining a bit more about their progress:

One of the most frequent questions we get is how you can access our collections of rare video game history research materials. Well, wonder no more! For the past two years, we’ve been building a digital platform where you can explore our archives, without having to visit in person. And we think it’s ready to show off.

We’ve put together an 18-minute demo of what our work-in-progress digital library looks like. This is our first look at how you’ll access the resources in our collection—plus an advance preview of the Mark Flitman papers, one of the exciting collections we’ll be rolling out when the library soft-launches next year.

Remember: This is a preview, and some things are a little unfinished! But if we’re all cool with that, we think it’s about time to show you what we’ve been up to.

This is extremely exciting news for researchers and anyone else who wants to dive into gaming’s often mysterious past. If all goes well, the Video Game History Foundation’s Digital Library should be up and running next year.

Every Season of “The Electric Playground” to be Archived at the University of Toronto Mississauga

Victor Lucas is a name you might not know if you’re on the southern side of the Canadian border, but after launching The Electric Playground during the very early days of the World Wide Web, he’s been shaping how we report on and talk about games for nearly 30 years.

The show first came online as a website (ElecPlay.com) in 1995, and Lucas would later lead a newsmagazine-style spinoff of the site for Canadian television beginning in 1997.

Video game news and reviews on television was a bit of a novelty at the time, but The Electric Playground would go on to create the template for a newsmagazine-style show about games during its initial 18-year run and inspired many game journalists to pick up a camera. In addition to its style, the show was responsible for giving Geoff Keighley, creator of The Game Awards, his first on-screen hosting experience. The Electric Playground would spawn a spinoff of its own in 2002 (Reviews on the Run, which aired as Judgment Day in the US), before coming to an end in 2015.

Lucas brought The Electric Playground (which was rebranded as EP Daily in 2008) to YouTube after its cancellation, and he continues to produce new episodes to this day.

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