After selling more than 200 million copies over the last decade, it’s hard to remember a time when Minecraft wasn’t nearly synonymous with the entire medium of video games. And though it was only available in an unfinished state from 2009 to 2011, it seemed to emerge from Mojang’s offices as a fully-formed phenomenon even in its earliest days.
So as players continued to flock to its Lego-like world in droves, it was a bit of a shock when the game was denied entry into the World Video Game Hall of Fame three separate times. Shortlisted as a finalist in 2015, 2016, and 2018, the title was passed over again and again and again. But Minecraft’s creative sandbox become too big to ignore this year, and it has finally been enshrined among gaming’s greats.
In a stunning upset, three unlikely candidates also garnered enough support from the Hall of Fame’s Selection Advisory Committee to join the Class of 2020. A genre-defining match-3 puzzler from PopCap (Bejeweled), a classic coin-op from Atari (Centipede), and one of earliest adventure titles from Sierra (King’s Quest) won out over more popular titles such as NBA Jam, GoldenEye 007, and Guitar Hero.
While this year’s class might look a little surprising, historians working at the Hall of Fame’s parent organizations, the Strong Museum and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, helped put their importance into perspective.
“The success of Minecraft speaks to the maturing of video games as a cultural touchstone,” said Digital Games Curator Andrew Borman. “No longer do game creators need to be obsessed about having the most realistic looking graphics. Minecraft features a retro simplicity that hearkens back to fondly remembered days of 8-bit computers. Minecraft came of age at a time when indie gaming had emerged to give individual developers a greater say in the games they developed, and no game is a better representative of this movement than this bestselling hit creation.”
“Players from around the world have devoted tens of billions of hours to playing Bejeweled and the games that it inspired,” said Curator Shannon Symonds. “Now, Bejeweled and its successor puzzle games seem commonplace, a regular part of all our lives, and it’s that reach, influence, and icon status that make Bejeweled so deserving of being the very first mobile game added to the World Video Game Hall of Fame.”
“Centipede appeals to a wide demographic and is often cited as a game that helped attract more women to the arcade in the early 1980s,” said Jeremy Saucier, the Assistant Vice President for Electronic Games and Interpretation. “But it’s also one of the best-selling arcade games of that era and its fast-paced, bug-blasting gameplay is as challenging and satisfying to play today as it was decades ago.”
“It’s difficult to overstate King’s Quest’s influence on adventure games. More than any other game of its type, King’s Quest established or reinforced many of the conventions of the adventure games that followed it,” said Archivist Julia Novakovic. “Many games today can trace their lineage back to King’s Quest.”
The full induction ceremony can be viewed here:
As in previous years, the World Video Game Hall of Fame is already thinking about next year’s induction ceremony. And to that end, they’re already encouraging players to Nominate A Game for the Class of 2021.