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The World Video Game Hall of Fame 2017 Inductees (polygon.com)
Dave Knott writes: The 2017 World Video Game Hall of Fame inductees have been announced. The Hall Of Fame "recognizes individual electronic games of all types -- arcade, console, computer, handheld, and mobile -- that have enjoyed popularity over a sustained period and have exerted influence on the video game industry or on popular culture and society in general." The 2017 inductees are: Donkey Kong, Halo: Combat Evolved, Pokemon Red and Green, and Street Fighter II. These four titles join the inaugural 2015 class, which included Pong, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Doom and World of Warcraft, and the 2016 class which included Grand Theft Auto 3, The Legend of Zelda, The Oregon Trail, The Sims, Sonic the Hedgehog and Space Invaders.
If that's in there, then Carmen Sandiego should be, too.
Yeah, I'm not overly taken by this list. It feels like a list by someone who only really started gaming in the 00s, but is aware of a handful of the most popular 80s/90s names rather than someone who actually watched gaming evolve over the ages across it's key points.
Whilst I've always played things like the Halo games, I'm not overly taken by some of the candidates they're putting forward. I feel like Quake was far more important than Halo, ushering in the era of true 3D, the starting point for internet based online gaming and so forth. It was also the first FPS that explicitly designed for user extensibility from the outset (Quake C anyone?).
World of Warcraft? High userbase sure, but hardly as influential or groundbreaking as EverQuest and Ultima Online. It was ultimately just a clone of stuff that had come before it such as EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and such with half the features of those MMOs missing, but with Blizzard's IP slapped on. I don't agree that highest popularity means most significant impact on gaming in part because the market is growing so more recent IPs will always sell better, but that doesn't make them more worthy for special recognition.
The Sims, okay, a pretty successful franchise, and definitely fairly novel, I think it deserves something, but shouldn't SimCity come first? SimCity and SimCity 2000 not only stole many years of people's lives, but even made it's way into classrooms as a teaching tool, and was used for some high level city planning. It's still being cloned to this day, games like Cities: Skylines owe the bulk of their design to SimCity and SimCity 2000, and it was the birth point of Sim Everything Else - from Sim Tower, to Sim Ant.
Whoever put this list together doesn't have a slightest idea of how games evolved, probably wasn't even there to see.
Core War should have been in the first batch. It's still light years ahead of anything on the consoles.
Street Fighter 2 should be Street Fighter 2 Turbo. SF2T was SF2 with bug fixes and more moves turning it into a way better game.
SFT: Championship Edition was SF2 with bugfixes, some speedups for some characters (blanka?) and the pallette swap so you could have two of the same character fighting other than Ken versus Ruy.
SF2 Turbo, gave an overall speedup and added some new special moves.
Then again, bugs are not all bad: the whole combo move mechanic spawned by SF2 was in fact a bug.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
These lists are always stupid and predictable. You invariably end up with a yawn inducing list of games which were extremely popular during their time that you've known about since always. It's always the same old franchises, the same old "cornerstones of the gaming industry" crap.
However, these lists always fail to capture the full scope of the video game universe.
For starters, they often ignore platforms like the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, and most arcades (they'll toss pacman and space invaders in there because they have to). Where's Metal Slug, The King of Fighters and Art of Fighting? Where's Chaos: Battle of the Wizards? Nowhere to be seen.
Secondly, they never dig under the surface.
Blizzard is popular and hip and cool becaue of World of Wacraft and Overwatch... but they also made Rock and Roll Racing, way back when they were called Silicon and Synapse? Also, Blackthorne and Lost Vikings.
Apogee Software introduced the notion of "Shareware", and they were HUGE way back then (their games repertoire is massive, most are pretty decent). Of course they eventually became 3D Realms, made Duke Nukem 3D, and slid into irrelevance (but not without having their hands in all sorts of games... you'd be surprised how many).
Epic Games used to be called called Epic Megagames, and made such things as Tyrian 2000 and One Must Fall. Their games had all sorts of quirky easter eggs and many included everything plus the kitchen sink (see: Tyrian, which has a TON of weird different ships you can pilot, a beer mode (?), a jukebox and a hidden "destruct mode", a real time "scorched earth" type game that has nothing to do with the main game... as I said, kitchen sink). And of course, the Unreal engine was way more important than anything ID software ever made... after all, Epic is still around, but ID is a fading memory.
And you'll never see an open-source game in the list. Nethack (or rogue, or one of the other hundreds of free and open source Roguelikes)? Battle for Wesnoth? Warsow? Hunt the Wumpus? Nope.
Thirdly, they tend to stick to games with explosions and the potential to maim people and animals. Where are the adventure games (not to mention, TEXT adventure games)? And pool? Or golf? Or even racing simulations which are extremely popular right now?
And finally, of course, no list would never be complete without reminding us that Daikatana was the worst game ever made (not even close by any objective criteria you can pick... bad, yes... worst, no) and reminding us that Duke Nukem Forever was a total fiasco. Yes, nothing excites "gamers" more than finding something that they can collectively shit on.
Of course, the point of these lists is never to be useful in the first place. It is to excite nerds like us into shouting "WHAT THE F!"#$! THEY DIDN'T INCLUDE ALLEY CAT IN THE LIST? ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR MINDS!?" like I did just now.
Oh well.
Turbo was actually a response to a hack. Somebody got into a Championship cab and started changing shit so you could do special moves in the air and upped the speed. Street Fighter Rainbow, I think it was called.
I remember being on a car ferry to France and screwing around in the arcade on a hacked machine. On that one, every move was available mid air, plus the following hacks:
Hard houdoukens crossed the screen in about half a second.
Slow houdoukens Were almost still.
Medium ones were the normal speed but heatseeking.
A dragon punch emitted a wall of houdoukens.
I think blanka's eletric storm (or maybe Honda's slap) emitted a continuous stream of sonic booms.
It was inanely unbalanced but fun.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Where are the adventure games (not to mention, TEXT adventure games)?
Indeed. Collossal Cave Adventure kicked off the genre, but it became big with Zork, which was even bundled with business computers from Olivetti, Texas Instruments (TI) and Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC).
These two games were so influential that they're referenced in many other genres, and have given us lots of pop references (what millennials would call memes), including:
- xyzzy
- zorkmid
- PLUGH
- Twisty maze of passages, all different
- What, with your bare hands?
Other genre spawning games that deserve a mention include Warcraft (no "World of"), Populous, Star Raiders, Civilization, SubLogic Flight Simulator, Tetris and Rally-X. All groundbreaking in their own ways.