Tag: Mattel Football

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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World Video Game Hall of Fame’s 2021 Finalists Include Animal Crossing, Portal, StarCraft, and More

The Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame has announced they will enshrine this year’s inductees on May 6th. We’ll know which games comprise the Class of 2021 in just 47 days, but it’s safe to say that one of the clear frontrunners was identified exactly 365 days ago.

It was on March 20th of 2020 that Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and in the year that followed, it transformed the way a lot of people think about video games. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that the franchise’s GameCube debut, Animal Crossing, was chosen as a finalist in 2021.

It’ll be joined by six other first-time finalists vying for a spot in the Hall of Fame this year. That lists includes 1977’s Mattel Football, which introduced the world to handheld gaming, as well as 2009’s FarmVille, a game that minted an entirely new generation of “gamers” on Facebook. There’s also Blizzard’s StarCraft, which further popularized the RTS genre in 1998 and helped birth the esports scene. Finally, three games from 1982 (Microsoft Flight Simulator, Namco’s Pole Position, and Midway’s Tron) impressed the Hall of Fame’s internal committee, which chose to highlight the variety found in some of the industry’s earliest efforts.

These games will be competing against a handful of returning finalists that are getting another crack at the Hall of Fame in 2021, including Activision’s Call of Duty, EA Sports’s FIFA International Soccer, Harmonix’s Guitar Hero, Valve’s Portal, and Broderbund’s Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

The members of the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee are the final decisionmakers on which of these titles will become part of this year’s induction class, but the public can once again have a voice in the proceedings by visiting WorldVideoGameHallOfFame.org between now and March 25. The three games that receive the most votes in an online poll will be submitted as the “Player’s Choice” ballot when the Committee meets later this Spring.

You can learn more about this year’s finalists after the break, and be sure to tune in to the virtual ceremony celebrating this year’s inductees into the World Video Game Hall of Fame on May 6 at 10:30 AM (Eastern Time).

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