Tag: SimCity

World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024 Includes Asteroids, Myst, Resident Evil, SimCity, and Ultima

Once you see this year’s crop of inductees to the Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame, you might be surprised that they didn’t get the call as part of an earlier vote. But less than four dozen titles have been selected to join this inner circle, so it’s also easy to see how some groundbreaking games could slip through the cracks.

And that’s where we are with the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024, which welcomed Atari’s Asteroids, Cyan’s Myst, Capcom’s Resident Evil, Maxis’s SimCity, and Richard Garriott’s Ultima into the fold during a ceremony earlier today. It’s true… but I can hear the questioning tone in your voice.

Wasn’t Asteroids the game that solidified the space shooter as the dominant style of arcade game in 1979? Yup. Didn’t Richard Garriott practically invent the RPG with Ultima? He did. Wasn’t the CD-ROM-powered Myst more popular than any other PC game in the 1990s? You got that right. And aren’t Resident Evil and SimCity beloved classics that people continue to replay every year? That’s a big yes.

The curators and researchers at the Strong Museum also filled in some gaps and had a few nice things to say about each inductee.

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Here’s the Finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024

Spring is in the air, and that means it’s time for the curators at the World Video Game Hall of Fame to unveil this year’s ballot of possible inductees. The Class of 2024 will be the tenth to be welcomed into the Hall, and this year’s competition will include a grab bag of previous finalists and a eclectic slate of newcomers.

Leading the pack is a trio of two-time finalists, including Capcom’s Resident Evil (previously up for consideration in 2017 and 2022), Harmonix’s Guitar Hero (2020 and 2021), and Cyan’s Myst (2017 and 2019). All three have a strong case for induction, but they’ll be competing against a few other previous finalists, including Elite (which was a finalist in 2016), Asteroids (2018), and Metroid (2018).

But don’t count out the rookies, who come from some of gaming’s less-crowded corners. There’s a browser-based classic from the early 2000s (Neopets), the original city builder (SimCity), an early dating simulation (Tokimeki Memorial), a big name in extreme sports (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater), Richard Garriott’s groundbreaking RPG (Ultima), and the chaotic trivia game that inspired the Jackbox franchise (You Don’t Know Jack).

“Even ten years in, there’s no shortage of deserving contenders that have had enormous influence on pop culture or the game industry itself,” said Jon-Paul Dyson, the Director of the Hall of Fame’s parent organization, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum. “These games span decades. Asteroids is an icon of the late 70s arcade. Myst showed the potential of CD-ROM technology in the 90s. Neopets became a staple of browser-based, free games as we entered the 2000s. And Guitar Hero, which is less than 20 years old, has already proven its staying power.”

As always, the World Video Game Hall of Fame is opening up the voting to the general public between now and March 21. Make your choice at WorldVideoGameHallOfFame.org, and the three games that receive the most votes will be submitted as a Player’s Choice ballot alongside the other ballots from the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee.

The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024 will be announced on Thursday, May 9, 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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“The Resties Required Reading List” Includes the 25 Games You Need to Play to Understand the History of Games

Justin McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Chris Plante, and Russ Frushtick host The Besties, a podcast where they talk about “the best game of the week” every week.

The Besties is part of the sprawling McElroy media empire, but episodes produced solely by the non-McElroy members of the show appear as a spinoff show known as The Resties, and for the last 18 months they’ve been sporadically adding games to “The Resties Required Reading List“.

Not a Best Games list, the “Required Reading List” is a collection of titles that serve as the best introduction to the wider world of video games. Plante likes to refer to it as “a syllabus for Video Games 101” and further described the project like this…

Our goal is to curate and contextualize a “must play” list of 25 games released between 1980 to 2020. These aren’t the best games or even our favorite games. They’re the games that should be experienced by everyone who wants a fundamental appreciation of the medium. They’re the games that will give you a richer connection with every other game you play.

Plante and Frushtick split the “Required Reading List” into eight episodes, each covering a five-year span that lands somewhere between 1980 and 2020. Within these smaller chunks of time they picked two-to-four games that best represent the era and a specific corner of gaming they wanted to highlight. In the end, 28 games made it through these mini-debates before the hosts cut three titles to reach their 25-game goal. Counter-Strike (from the 2000-2004 episode), along with Hearthstone and Spelunky HD (both from the 2010-2014 episode) ultimately ended up on the chopping block.

So which games did make the grade? You’ll find all the foundational classics from the 1980s (Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda), as well as the modern games that are currently moving the needle (Fortnite, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Outer Wilds). In between there’s Doom (1993), Pokemon Red/Blue, Resident Evil 4 (2005), Minecraft, and more than a dozen others.

Wanting to argue with a Best Games list is the most natural reaction in the world, but it’s hard to quibble with any of the choices on “The Resties Required Reading List” as the games you need to play to best understand the history of games. Or, to steal a phrase from one of The Resties, the “Required Reading List” is a way of “thinking about the countless ways games inform our lives, our culture, and future creators”.

You can see all 25 games from “The Resties Required Reading List” after the break.

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Bite-Sized Game History: Mastering Space Invaders, Serial Killers in The Sims, and SimCity’s Miyamoto Connection

Most games won’t keep track of your High Score anymore, but the desire to climb the local leaderboard was once a huge draw to arcade players the world over.

This edition of Bite-Sized Game History looks back at one of those competitors and their complete mastery of Space Invaders, as well as the sinister shenanigans that were almost included in The Sims, and Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence on the original SimCity.

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