The Smithsonian Big "80" List Of Games

Remove all ads!

The Smithsonian has chosem 80 games, with the help of the public, for its exhibit on the "Art" of video games:

I thought the list was more interesting for what was missing, rather than what was included:

The really glaring omission is Half-Life, one of the most important games ever, in my opinion. I won't even start on all the great RPGs that are missing.

http://ingame.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/09/6613809-80-video-games-head-for-smithsonian-art-exhibit

 

du8ring the voting they lumped the RPGs in with the adventure games so theye didnt get a proper place is what I feel.

 

No Monkey Island, and no Ultima games either.

 

No Civilization.

 

I've only ever played 5 of those games.

Where's Frogger and Street Fighter 2?

 

I've played 26 of them.

 

How on Earth have I played more of them than you?!

Does this make me a cultured gamer rather than the usual riff raff?

Surprised there are no specifically 'Art' games on the list though unremarkable seeming as the label more often than not is slapped on to compensate for experimental game play that turned out to suck but take too long to repair before release.

 

Flower is more an art piece than a game, as is Heavy Rain to an extent.

Also, you've played more than me because I work in the modern games industry, where all we get are Call of Duty clones

 

Space Invaders but no Asteroids? What is this world coming to.......

 

I don't like that they picked many games in a series to feature. Did they really need to pick two Pitfall games, three Panzer games, four Super Mario games, and five Legend of Zelda games?

Civilization is a glaring omission. The game was ground breaking. Same thing with Half-Life. I totally disagree with including Doom II, but not the original, which is the game that set off the FPS rage.

Although I did get a smile seeing Earthworm Jim listed - that was probably my favorite Sega Genesis game of all time.

While I, like others, haven't played many of those games, I'm more surprised that I haven't even HEARD of many of those games! It's one thing to say you never played the game (perhaps you didn't have the platform that carried it), and another to say that you've never heard of it. For example, Attack of the Mutant Camels?!?! Really? I couldn't even name the platform that game was on. OTOH, while I haven't played all of those Legend of Zelda games, I certainly knew they existed.

 

Wasn't Wolfenstein before Doom?

 

This reminds me of the semi-annual "Most Awesomest Songs in Rock of ALL TIME" sort of lists, which are always different from list to list and completely arbitrary.

 

I was looking for The Shining Force, Warsong(Langrisser) and Castlevania from the box games. PC wise I was lookig for Ultima, Thief, Warcraft(not Starcraft, morons!), Panzer General, Flight Simulator... I could go on and on....

 

Castle Wolfenstein was before Doom, but IMO that's not what set off the whole FPS explosion (pun intended). Doom was on the Playstation as well as PC, and it was that wider audience (IMO) that got the whole FPS genre off the ground.

 

The problem (if you want to call it that) is that the criteria for selecting the games is not the same criteria that gamers would use:

So basically, gameplay or grond-breaking gaming experiences don't seem to be much of a factor.

 

Where's HyperOlympics?

 

Since they are talking about video games in general, they are mising some of the really good sports games as well then. The orignial Madden's, RBI Baseball, Blades of Steel, etc....

 

DragonQuest, or whatever it was called, was a groundbreaking animation game.

 

I'd guess you mean Dragon's Lair Harbs, Dragon Quest is the long running Japanese RPG series. Which possibly deserved a place, I'd guess the list is a bit US centric coming from the Smithsonian.

There's only a handful I hadn't heard of. I guessed Attack of the Mutant Camels was a Jeff Minter game from the title though! I've only played 19, many for just a few minutes.

As mentioned the handling of series is quite off. I've no problem including multiple games where each has a separate cultural impact but I'm not sure what Twilight Princess brought that the other 4 didn't. I've no idea how Halo 2 and Doom 2 brought anything the initial games didn't.

Where's Tetris!? Possibly THE game of all time. Should fighting, sports and music games have had at least one representative? Several of the major genres are missing entirely. Resident Evil was surely important for introducing horror into video games (wasn't the first of course but was the first major one).

I think Planescape Torment should have been on the list but not any of the other IE games. It's not that it has a good plot per se. But the plot unfolds according to your actions during the game and so it takes advantage of the unique interactive nature of the games medium that books or film cannot allow. Also, the plot and the gameplay inform and feed off each other. Design features taken for one reason are followed through into the other. The original reason for making TNO immortal was simply so that the player wouldn't have to bother reloading if he died! Nothing to do with the epic plot which they then built up around this. But symbiotically feeding back to gameplay TNO's immortality was then used to create puzzles (e.g. to get into the morgue just let yourself be killed).