The Smithsonian is planning an art exhibit (take that Ebert) of 80 games from the past 40 years. Yes, 40! Pong arrived back in 1972.
You can vote for the games you think should be included from a pre-selected group. While I did see many of my favorite games, this selection was heavily console biased. As with any such list I can’t believe they didn’t include certain games while including others that don’t deserve a spot.
Call me biased, but they didn’t include any fighting games like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, which is really disappointing. Also missing were the original Civilization, X-com, Planescape: Torment, and Braid. Any of those games should have been included in the voting list for either their innovation and/or their art. Almost unforgivable is the absence of Pong itself, although maybe they didn’t put that up for a vote b/c it’s already going to be included.
On the other side, why they included Unreal instead of Half-Life is beyond me. The inclusion of Black Ops… really? Why devote museum space to a game that’s only a few months old and hasn’t really been tested by time? Moreover, what in Black Ops merits it’s space on such a list? It’s art is not stylized or really any different from any of the other military FPS games out there, and the gameplay is even less innovative than the art. I’m not knocking the game itself as it can be fun, but there’s nothing artistic or innovative about it.
But the list certainly did get some things right, or at least didn’t fail completely. They included Zelda, Metroid, Megaman, Doom II, FF7, Fallout & Baldur’s Gate II, Rez, Starcraft, Ikuraga, Shadow of the Colossus, WoW, Portal, and a host of others that really deserve a shot.
It’s a little strange that they decided to exclude Super Mario Bros from the list but included Pac-Man and WoW when all will be playable at the exhibit. Weird decision processes.
