World Video Game Hall of Fame Inductees Revealed - The Strong National Museum of Play
ROCHESTER, New York—It’s official! Asteroids, Myst, Resident Evil, SimCity, and Ultima today joined the 10th class of the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play. These five games—which have significantly influenced popular culture and the video game industry—emerged from a field of finalists that also included Elite, Guitar Hero, Metroid, Neopets, Tokimeki Memorial, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and You Don’t Know Jack. The games are enshrined in the museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame rotunda, part of the ESL Digital Worlds exhibit.
About Asteroids: Released in 1979, Atari’s Asteroids offered players challenging gameplay, glowing graphics, and intense sound effects in an action-packed space setting. The game quickly supplanted the popular Space Invaders in many arcades and sold more than 70,000 arcade units, becoming Atari’s bestselling coin-operated game. The home version of the game—made available on the Atari 2600—took the game’s popularity to new heights, bringing it into millions of living rooms.
Says Jeremy Saucier, assistant vice president for interpretation and electronic games, “Through endless variants and remakes across dozens of arcade, home, handheld, and mobile platforms, Asteroids made a simple, yet challenging game about blasting rocks into one of the most widely played and influential video games of all time.”
