I think the better question is what about games deserves to be in a general history museum? The advent and changes of technology and the implementation is far more important than the examples of it in use. There are very few games on their own that would qualify as "culturally impactful" to the greater world by their sheer existence. (Mario, Pokemon, and Tetris immediately come to mind).

If we are talking about a "video game museum/exhibit" then the list broadens a lot, but it's less about the "what" and more the "why" that needs focused.

• Solitaire
• Doom
• Tetris

MechCommander (1998)

Sexy Beach 3

Everything 1Upsmanship puts on their "Celestial Hard Drive".

Or, Minecraft.

Doom

I could write an essay significantly larger than the game itself and it wouldn't be as powerful of an argument as just saying the name with the weight of legacy it commands.

To get the obvious out of the way: Pacman, Doom 2, Starcraft, Simcity 2000, Civ 3. All genre-defining milestones.

Total Annihilation. They're still making sequels today (Supreme Commander, Beyond all Reason).

Warzone 2100 was the first 3D rotatable zoomable RTS which was pretty mind blowing at the time.

Dwarf Fortress, obviously.

So many people in this thread just listing games they like and don't know what museums are for.

All of them. In the Museum of All Video Games

Hmm... Good question... They'll have to be the kind of videogame that was the first to do something, or set the standard for something, or has had a huge, long lasting cultural impact that can still be felt today.

So in that hypothetical museum I'd nominate:

• Pong.
• Tetris.
• Donkey Kong arcade game.
• Super Mario.
• Super Mario 64.
• Crash Bandicoot
• Metroid (the first one).
• Castlevania (the original one).
• Hollow Knight.
• Mario Kart.
• The Legend of Zelda (the first one).
• TES III Morrowind.
• TES V Skyrim.
• Doom (the original one).
• Half Life.
• Counter Strike (the original one).
• Ultima.
• Ultima Online.
• Dune (the RTS game).
• Warcraft.
• World of Warcraft.
• Age of Empires II, perhaps alongside the Definitive Edition.
• Sid Meier's Civilisation (the first one).
• Final Fantasy (the first one).
• Chrono Trigger.
• Minecraft (as much as I hate it).
• Elite (the first one).
• Wing Commander Privateer Gold.
• 3D Space Cadet Pinball.

Another World/Out of This World. Short game, but also a 1991 game made by one dev and one composer in two years, and artistically it still holds up fairly well even today.

Outer wilds

Gestures broadly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Video_Game_Hall_of_Fame

EA games deserve to be in a museum.

Because everyone needs to remember how a company can exploit their customer base with money grab schemes like loot boxes, pay to win junk and empty unplayable shells which need loads of expensive dlc's to make it even a little playable.

There should also be an entire wing for never finished bug simulators.

The area with actual proper games would be tiny. But it should include the old age of empires 2, city skylines 1, Kerbal space program 1 and everything from Larian studios.

Half-life, or any source game along with minecraft.

Limbo.

I really like the atmosphere. They created so much with such an minimalistic graphic style.

Factorio.

I don't know where to start. Overall a great example that some people like to optimize and put way more effort into this game than their job. Zeitgeist?

For me, it has got to be tetris. It is still thriving, even today. Anyone can understand the base concept and play it : it's simple and enjoyable, anywhen. Plus, it runs on remotely anything.

My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to a temporary video game exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image. A lot of the mainstays you'd expect were there, particularly from the arcade era, including ground-breaking titles like Dragon's Lair (which is fascinatingly beautiful and a bad video game at the same time). At one point, one of the signs mentioned moving on from vector graphics, which my wife had no idea what that meant, so I immediately looked around for an Asteroids machine. You don't really get how one of those games looks unless you're playing on the genuine article. That's the kind of thing that probably ought to be in a museum most.

I recently went to Galloping Ghost in Illinois, which is now the world's largest arcade. It's got nearly every arcade game you can think of, and they do a good job fixing them up. They have an F-Zero AX machine. I've always wanted to play one of those. I went to Galloping Ghost two years in a row, and it was broken both times. Turns out they're having trouble sourcing the displays. As you go around the place, most machines are working, but even only a year later, more of them had display problems. I imagine even just getting regular old CRTs is going to make this kind of thing way harder as time goes on, and a good CRT does affect how these old games look, because they were designed for them. This is the kind of burden I'd expect a museum to take on.

Bioshock

Halo: Combat Evolved

Fallout New Vegas

Also, cynical answer is also whatever current mobile game is making a bazillion dollars right now because ✨capitalism✨

Dwarf Fortress is, in fact, in a museum.

E.T. for Atari

This is a more complex question than just "what is your favorite video game," or "what games do you consider works of art?"

If I'm putting a game in a museum, it's because there's something about it that warrants preservation on a greater level than other games. To that end, my candidates are

• Pong (1972)

The first commercially successful video game.

• Tetris (1985)

Arguably the most influential game of all time

• Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999)

Handcrafted in assembly, serves as a lesson both in optimization and harnessing the players' penchant for finding intrinsic value in simplistic game mechanics

Edit: I just realized this comment looks like an infernal machine wrote it. I want to make it clear that I'm a human, with skin and blood and stuff

Mario 3 Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Minecraft Portal The original DOTA that was built on Warcraft 3 World of Warcraft

I choose these games not because they are good but because they had massive impacts on video games. Except for Mario 3, that ones just the GOAT.

Tomb Raider.

All of them.

Dwarf fortress

Alright, so here's my case for Thief, the Looking Glass Studios game.

Thief, on its own, is a great game and basically shares the claim to originating a lot of ideas behind stealth in games along with MGS, which came out the same year.

What many don't know is how incredibly innovative what they were doing with their engine tech was. In another timeline, id software were mildly successful action game makers while LGS became the industry defining mega success. The Dark Engine refines a lot of ideas present in Ultima Underworld and marries them to tech that was decades ahead of its time.

Check out the opening and closing of this long talk: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI

Thief had, probably, the first ECS in gaming. They also had their own rendering technique using "portals" that was a bit slower than id's BSP trees but allowed for insane geometry. They also had an incredible system for events called stimulus-response that was doing things like Breath of the Wild's "chemistry engine" again, decades before it would be rediscovered.

They weren't just making games, these were really simulations of a limited world with complex interactions. If the rest of the industry had caught onto their good practices, who knows what the landscape would look like today!

RDR2

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

Also what’s the game in the screenshot?

Elite dangerous. 1:1 replica of the Milky Way that is being actively colonized as we speak.

Redneck Rampage

Black and White

So I did a class on the art of the video game and MoMA (museum of modern art) has a number of them in their collection. There is even a Wikipedia article on it. Wikipedia Article

Resident Evil - the original.

Doom, Minecraft and Touhou

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has some games in their permanent collection: Games in MoMA

Terraria, a monument to indie games and the craft itself, gave tons of free content and still does, unlike the popular pay for expansion models on a half finished buggy game of their contemporaries

Also Journey and Flower for different reasons

All of them.

Art is art is art.

• Street Fighter II - Not the first fighting game, but the one that kicked off a massive cultural phenomenon, and defined so much of the format that every fighting game since has taken influence from.

• Puyo Puyo Tsu - Although this game never got a chance to shine in the west, in Japan this game was just as influential to the puzzle game genre as Street Fighter II was to fighting games. I often describe Puyo 1 as the Street Fighter 1 of puzzle games, but I think you could make a case for whether 1 or Tsu really belongs in the museum, since 1 was plenty popular at release and did inspire other puzzlers even before Tsu hit the scene. However, Tsu is the game that really established puzzle games as a serious competitive genre, with large tournaments being held all the way back then.

• Beatmania - The original vertical scrolling rhythm game. Could include either the original, one of the first editions of IIDX, or even a current cabinet.

• Dance Dance Revolution - While Beatmania gets credit for being the first, and for being plenty popular in Japan, DDR is what popularized the genre in overseas markets. And for good reason, it's equally notable for not being played with typical inputs.

• Rogue - The thing that a whole bunch of other games are like. Except now most of the games we say are like this, aren't really like this at all...

• Like every major Nintendo game - fuck it not even gonna list them all

One that comes to mind is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

• Journey
• Shadow Of The Colossus
• Shenmue 1
• Half-Life 1 & 2

for a more "traditional paint" like experience, Gris is just gorgeous to look at

Karateka, along with everything else Jordan Meschner did following it, starting the Prince of Persia series.

It's a nice evolution of personal style.

I've more or less dropped out of mainstream gaming so have no idea how the more recent Prince of Persia games play, nor if he has any involvement... but anyone who knew the original games should understand that these games did something foundational with movement and interface, helping the player to feel involved in the action.

Star Raiders for the Atari 400/800.

"List all notable video game characters"

Oh cmon

Might as well ask someone to list the top songs of every year since the 80's.

Edit nvm it's not even characters, just games.

Pong is from like 1972.

Ocarina

Half Life Dead Space Minecraft Terraria Stardew Valley Uhhh...how do you do line breaks in comments? This looks like trash.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Gris.

Anthem

(For history purpose, just like there are museums for the Holocaust or the WTC)

The original Star Wars Battlefront games. The best offline multiplayer I’ve ever had in a video game.

Pong, Pac-man, OXO, Mystery House, Super Mario, Battlezone, Wolfenstein, Doom.

The classic pioneers.

Assuming a single game, Minecraft. It should be a kids museum style where you can build things. You can make each room a different biome or structure.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Strong Museum of Play which contains the video game hall of fame

All y'all be honest with yourself. The answer is the prestigious league of legends.

It depends on what your museum is trying to convey. If it's moments of gaming history and games and consoles of significance, I'd go with:

For the earliest video games, I'd show the Tennis for Two on the DuMont Lab Ocilloscope, released in 1958.

You should also include the life of Warren Robinett, because he was the first ever game programmer to receive in-game credit for a game he made, because Atari never gave their programmers credit, but he snuck one in as an easter egg. He then went on to found the Learning Company which made all those Reader Rabbit games.

For the Crash of 1983, you have to include ET for the Atari 2600 as the posterboy, but "Pitfall!" should also be included. Pitfall was a good game, but it was the breakout hit of Activision and therefore proof that third-party video games were viable, leading to the glut of video games which, in combination with ET being such a colossal failure, caused the crash.

For the resurgence after the crash, the Nintendo Entertainment System, but specifically the one that came with the little robot to help you play games. It's essential that you convey that Nintendo intended to sell it as a toy rather than a games console because the games market in the US had completely died in the crash, but the toy market was very much alive.