Originally Posted by nytimes.com

When Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, started preserving video games and video-game artifacts in 1998 he thought it was closer to professional oblivion than a bold new move into the future.

In just a few years, however, Mr. Lowood’s notion that video games were something with a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying has gone from absurd to worthy of consideration by the Library of Congress.

On Thursday at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr. Lowood announced a game canon, an idea that grew out of a proposal submitted to the Library of Congress in September 2006 by a consortium made up of Stanford, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois.

“Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance,” Mr. Lowood said in an interview. And if that is acknowledged, he said, “maybe we should do something about preserving them.”

Mr. Lowood and the four members of his committee — the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist — announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

Mr. Lowood’s canon was closely modeled on the work of the National Film Preservation Board, which every year compiles a list of films to be added to the National Film Registry, managed by the Library of Congress since 1989 (a consequence of the National Film Preservation Act, passed in 1988). The first list of films included “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Searchers” and “Nanook of the North.”

Almost all of the games on the Lowood list represent the beginning of a genre still vital in the video game industry. Spacewar!, for example, created by a group of early computer programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the first multiplayer, competitive game, and the first action game too. The first three Warcraft games represent the introduction of real-time strategy overlaid on a narrative; and Zork introduced the world to the adventure game.

SimCity helped establish the genre known as god games, in which players take on an omnipotent role, controlling the game world rather than simply participating in it. It also broke convention by refusing to establish criteria for winning, leaving the decision of what constituted success up to the player.

SimCity was selected by Mr. Bittanti, a researcher at the Humanities Lab at Stanford who works with Mr. Lowood. The game is “one of the most important art works of the 20th century,” Mr. Bittanti said, adding: “It completely reinvented the whole notion of games. And then it transcended the game world to become a cultural phenomenon.”

SimCity and its four follow-ups have sold 17 million copies, and the franchise it spawned, the Sims, has sold 85 million copies.

Mr. Grant, the editor of the popular Web site joystiq.com, who selected Super Mario Bros. 3, said the game was important for its nonlinear play, a mainstay of contemporary games, and new features like the ability to move both backward and forward.

Mr. Lowood said that preserving video games presented certain challenges. For example the hardware that games are played on changes so frequently that there are already thousands that can only be played through computer programs called emulators, which, while readily available on the Internet, technically violate copyright laws.

“We have to be really careful here because the technology is just going to make this harder for us,” Mr. Spector said. “The game canon is a way of saying, this is the stuff we have to protect first.”

Originally Posted by MPower

Populous and Dune preceded Simcity and Warcraft as God and RTS games. They may not have been as popular, but they did lay the groundwork. I am surprised they left them off.

Originally Posted by Jozrael

Yea, though StarCraft and Diablo and other Blizzard games sold tons of copies, none introduced anything groundbreaking. They and Half Life 2 may well be worthy of consideration for best games of all time (top 10 20 or whatever floats your boat), they didn't change the -culture- of gaming.

Unless you go to South Korea. xD

Originally Posted by willravel

Starcraft introduced zerging. Diablo 2 Expansion featured one of the best orchestrations I've ever heard in a game. Maybe not groundbreaking, but something.

Originally Posted by Carno

The rush was around before Starcraft came out, and it's hardly worth mentioning when talking about the greatest 10 games of all time.

Originally Posted by Prophecy

As for Half-Life, well I'm not trying to be rude, but what exactly did Half-Life bring to the table to warrant an honorable mention in the greatest games of all time list? From what I remember Half-Life just took the standard fair of the day and did it extremely well, but added nothing ground-breaking to the genre.

Originally Posted by superdude123

OOOO...
u forgggooootttt,,,
Halooooooo

Originally Posted by Daniel_

I'm surprised not to see Pac-Man, and there are several others that I could add (no Sonic?)...

Originally Posted by NoSoup

I can't believe they left Mario 64 off the list

Originally Posted by Jetstream

Is Mario 64 really that good a game?

Never had chance to try it.

Originally Posted by BBtB

Also.. Solitaire... seriously..

Originally Posted by biznatch

Seriously?....

Originally Posted by Jetstream

Are you for serious?

Originally Posted by Carno

If Pong weren't the first, something else would have been.

Originally Posted by Carno

If Pong weren't the first, something else would have been.

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

It's one of the first stand-up video games and the one that the Atari was initially created around. It's boring, but Pong basically created the whole arcade industry. And that, my friend, is what the fuck is so special about Pong. Without it, you'd have never had the chance to pump quarters into something other than the horsie at the grocery store.