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    • tetris, because it is tetris
    • pong, and probaly other examples of early home console games
    • wolfenstein3d, doom, quake, quake3, doom3 because all of them were technical milestones, had lasting impact on the industry and they show the rapid advancement of pc gaming in the 90s and 2000s
    • the elder scrolls series, as a simmiliar showcase.
    • final fantasy 1, 6 and 7, as a showcase of jrpgs through various generations and the fmv of 7 and onwards were imho precursors of 3d rendered movies.
    • half-life, because of the impact of it's scripted set pieces and its level design
    • counter-strike and starcraft, as the games that probably gave us professional e-sport.
    • dota, because its for mobas what doom is for first person shooters.
    • deus ex and thief, pioneered the "immersive sim" and they are great showcases of the interactive nature of games
    • Pokémon, cultural impact can't be denied and the trading aspect is a great example of a non traditional multiplayer experience
    • various Mario Games, but definitely Mario Bros. Super Mario World and Mario 64 and probably Galaxy as a showcase of the evolution of plattformers in 2d and 3d, maybe throw a spyro or banjo kazooie in there.
    • Grim Fandango, Kings Quest, Monkey Island, point and click adventures are there very own beast and often feature actual memorable characters. I definitely think more often about Manny Calavera than i do about Gordon Freeman or any Morrowind NPC, even though i played half-life and Morrowind much more than Grim Fandango
    • Minecraft
    • super meat boy, fez, hollow knight... lots of interesting indie games and they show how much more accessible game development has become.
    • Prince of Persia and karateka, the way they were animated alone would be enough, but they also featured an actual story, they were interested in showing and featured music used simmiliar to a movies soundtrack.
    • probably much more
    • games that are a product of a very localized culture (gothic could not have been made anywhere else but the ruhrarea for example)
    • the whole military complex is missing (from Mil Sims like Operation Flashpoint to actual recruitment vehicles like Americas Army)
    • more modern games, which i just don't know or that have not been rattling around in my brain for long enough, but baldurs gate 3, the last of us, or alan wake would probably end up on my list in a couple of years.
    • 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

  • 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✨

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • 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

  • The Binding of Issac. Hands down my favourite game and a work of pure dedication.

  • 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.

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