Zelda: Ocarina Of Time Is Finally Part Of The Video Game Hall Of Fame

Honestly, all 4 selections are deserving in their own way. Some of the contenders didn't quite hit the mark, so I'm glad to see these were the ones chosen, specifically.

It's about freaking time!

I'm sorry, but Assassin's Creed? PaRappa the Rapper? These games are great, but I dunno about being hall of fame worthy.

How the heck did Sonic the Hedgehog get in before Mario!?!?

Was Ms. Pac Man really that important? It sounds like a great upgrade over the original formula for sure but is that really enough to warrant a spot in this hall of fame?

Not saying it can't by the way, just genuinely wondering if it was really... THAT important overall, particularly when it gets in there at the same time as Ocarina of Time which I'd argue really should've been there already.

Not to mention it's in with DDR, DDR, DDR , DDR, DIDN'T BOTHER TO HIDE IT! DDR, DIDN'T BOTHER TO HIDE IT! MS PAC-MAN! DDR! IN IN IN INN IINN IIIIIIINNNNNNNNNN!!!!!

How tf was PaRappa against Ocarina Of Time

Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Breath of the Wild next?

Chibi Robo or riot

PaRappa deserved it more.

Wonder how long it takes for Fortnite to get on there? 🤔

@Yosher I would say Ms. Pac Man definitely deserves to be in, it should have been in already as well.

Ocarina deserves to be in just based on impact alone. But I do feel that the game hasn’t t aged well. I would put it in fourth place among 3D zeldas, ahead of skyward sword and botw, but I would put links awakening and a link between worlds ahead of ocarina.

Ocarina of Time deserves recognition for the impact it had, sure. But the original has not aged well at all. The 3DS remake ironed out a few issues, but the core experience is still overall weak.

Props to the other three choices, too; all worthwhile, important games in their own rights.

Yes, Cody Rhodes will be proud.

I feel like only games that have had a tremendous impact on the industry should be inducted in the Videogame Hall of Fame. Therefore, all of these are excellent picks. Honestly, as far as modern games go (which I'll define as the 2010s to now), I'd say only GTA V and Breath of the Wild deserve to be inducted for their impact on the industry. Elden Ring maybe as well. Time will tell.

And we all moan about Nintendo drip feeding games onto NSO!! I get it's a hall of fame and requires exclusivity, but they seriously should have started this thing with about 50 more games right from the start. Seeing a handful of games going up against each other, that everyone knows should all be in there already just makes the whole thing farcical in my eyes.

Ocarina of Time has aged better than Breath of the Wild.

Yeah, I know, clickbait title. But I'm tired of the "hasn't aged well" discourse. Played it last year, twice. Still rocks. Definitely plays like a late 90s game. Because it is.

@icomma Why Dark Souls over Demon's Souls if Demon's Souls was the first one?

And, yeah, Minecraft definitely deserves to be up there for being the best selling videogame ever. Less sure about Fortnite.

I like this, the selection thinks of gaming in general, not the magic bubble of AAA titles only.

The Legend of Zelda: Hall of Famer of Time!!!

STARCRAFT AND WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANDIEGO GOT ON BEFORE THIS

Rightly so. It's one of the true greats

Apparently the video game equivalent of the Bible — a timeless masterwork and a gold standard against which games of all genres industry-wide are measured — "hasn't aged well at all" and offers "a weak overall experience," lol. Going to go out on a limb and say that Ocarina of Time has probably "aged" maybe a little better than you think.

Imagine if films or books were given the same treatment. "The Leonardo DiCaprio film adaptation ironed out a few issues, but man, Shakespeare's original Romeo & Juliet as a written work is just a mess. Some scenes are entirely words that you actually have to read in your mind to hear, and you have to physically lift your hand and turn a page to advance to the next part of the story - awful UX and unabashedly environmentally-unfriendly. No CGI, not one explosion. The characters don't even use smartphones. Totally unrelatable. It just doesn't work in today's advanced, highly-sophisticated world..."

@Friendly Link's Awakening probably not and Breath of the Wild definitely not, oldest game in there is from 2011 and second oldest is from 2004. Historical significance plays a huge factor in these.

Honestly, the biggest deal here is probably Dance Dance Revolution. I think the explosion of that series got an entirely new generation AND a new demographic into video games.

It definitely deserves that spot alongside Ms. Pac-Man... So happy rn

when will boogerman for the genesis get in??

@Yosher Well, apparently (According to the museum's website) a big factor was that Ms. Pacman had the first female lead character, as well as the interesting history of having first been created as an upgrade-kit for existing "Pac man"-machines.

@FroZtedFlakerZz both of them have arguably more historical significance/innovation in the world of video gaming, keeping in mind Ocarina of Time came after a bunch of Zelda games already

@MysticX That makes sense!

@Not_Soos I think you misinterpreted the comment here

@Not_Soos

Um, they're not throwing shade. They're just pointing out that Ocarina of Time is, like, important. In a long-lasting kind of way. You know, like the millennia-spanning Bible. I'd have gone with something like "the Citizen Kane of videogames" myself, but I'm not Flint.

@Yosher No, you're probably right--Mrs. Pac-Man is better than the original in almost every way, I lament the fact Namco does not have the rights to release it on modern platforms, I desperately wanted to see her as an Echo Fighter in Smash, and--I kid you not--I literally had a dream about the game just last night, lol. I guess I'm basically a Ms. Pac-Man simp at this point. The game frankly means a lot more to me than something like Ocarina of Time, but even I was left scratching my head at its inclusion. I wasn't alive back in 1982, but I highly doubt it left nearly the same impact as some of the other games on this list. Having multiple mazes was a game-changer, but original levels is a concept Donkey Kong already pioneered first. Maybe she was the first female protagonist in gaming or something, in which case I could understand the significance, but I know for a fact there were playable women in Atari games, so I'm not sure if that's the case.

@Beaucine @somebread Okay, I re-read their comment a few times over, and I realize I did seriously misinterpret it. A thousand apologies to @Flint. I'm very embarrassed with myself. I thought they were saying OoT was like the Bible in that they had both aged poorly. I see daily comments on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc. about how religion is the cause of every war, the Bible promotes genocide, is outdated, etc. and I thought this was another example of that. But, I've deleted my original comment. Sorry to Flint once again for the misunderstanding.

@Not_Soos I believe she is the first, or at least the first non-ambiguous case. There were several Atari games with female protagonists in the years after Ms. Pac-Man (which was released in 1982), but a cursory search of several lists of early female game characters and early Atari games didn't turn up any released before that year.

@link3710 Well in that case, I guess it's pretty well-deserved. Thanks for clearing that up. If anything, though, that just emphasizes even more how prominent she was in gaming history, which makes me all the more sad she never got into Smash or that the game is available to the public on modern consoles.

I've been contemplating buying a Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine for several months now just to have an easy way to play it, but it's like $200+ and I really don't have the room for it. I saw a tiny little handheld arcade machine of Ms. Pac-Man you can get at Wal-Mart for like 30 bucks, but I didn't like how small the screen was and thought it was kind of expensive for what it was. This is actually what my dream was about last night--that I saw one of those miniature machines for sale in another electronics store, and I was going to buy it, but the price tag was like 90 bucks, lol. Not really the most interesting dream I've ever had...

@Not_Soos Honestly, I feel the fact that it was the first prominent (i.e. available broadly) upgrade-kit arcade game (something that later led to upgrade carts like the Game Genie or Sonic & Knuckles, pc game expansions, and eventually DLC) is also a very good reason.

@link3710 Interesting--I wasn't aware of that. I knew there were some versions of Ms. Pac-Man that had like an upgraded chipset or something that gave the player more lives and increased the speed of the game. But, I was under the impression this was an illicit chip and not an officially licensed product.

It’s ‘bout time.

@Not_Soos Nah those were. Ms. Pac-Man itself is an expansion to the original Pac-Man board, rather than one designed from scratch. Though, despite working with Namco, they had to reverse engineer it from scratch.

Basically, a lawsuit of an illegal speed-up chip led to them being hired officially and making the first official mod. (it's way more complicated but that's the simple version)

@link3710 That story definitely sounds familiar. Would explain where I got the idea of it being illegal from. Didn't Ms. Pac-Man itself actually start as a game made illicitly by Midway instead of Namco? It's pretty ironic, but Ms. Pac-Man has just been plagued with legal disputes since its very inception.

The Strong Museum's World Video Game Hall of Fame?

Never heard of it. Is it well known? If it is, then why has it taken this long for an industry and era divining game like OoT to be admitted?

Ok that’s great and all, but how did ANY of these beat CANDY CRUSH!? That should have been there for years… this whole thing is very flawed.

@Not_Soos Well... it was made as an illicit mod named Crazy Otto. But due to a legal settlement, Midway couldn't release it unless they had permission from Atari, which required permission from Namco. But Namco approved of it, and wanted them to use the Pac-Man IP.

So there were three companies with their hands in it in the first place, but all legal. The issues started nearly two decades later when no one at Namco knew about the agreement and rereleased Ms. Pac-Man without paying Midway the licensing fees they were owed.

@CactusMan 64 or Game Boy? Everyone talks about the 64 version and not its obscure Game Boy cousin.

Going there this summer finally. Can't wait.

@Beaucine Playing it right now and it's still an amazing game.

@Beaucine Is your comment's first sentence a joke?

OoT definitely aged well in every regard except for the graphics and camera. Gameplay and level design are top notch.

Great to hear! Ms Pac Man's superb SNES port was one of my sister and I's go-to games when we popped in for some SNES time. It was endlessly fun. Ocarina has been overdue as well!

@BTB20

Sort of. I was just poking fun at the obsession with "datedness" in videogame criticism. To me, "datedness" is a neutral term. All games are products of their time. If you think about it, there's a lot about Breath of the Wild that is pure 2010s, whether it's the open-world-with-towers concept, the prevalence of repeated enemies and samey-looking ruins to pad out the landscape, the simplistic sidequest design, and the somewhat uninspiring main quest narrative. These are all common issues in modern open-worlders, even the best ones. We may not call Breath of the Wild "dated" just yet because it's still relatively close to the date we're living in, but we will in 2030. And you could say the same thing about Ocarina of Time being very much a late 1990s 3D game. But where does that leave us? Are you really doing justice to Breath of the Wild's immersive, sweeping overworld exploration, ambience, and physics system? Or Ocarina of Time's incredibly consistent succession of memorable dungeons and vibes? I think understanding a game's context and date of release is important, sure, but ultimately the art, the heart of the game, the experience it gives you, that's where it's at, that's what matters.

WTF!? Ms. Pacman? Really!?

Rogue was robbed, It literally spawned an entire genre. It's probably one of the most influential games of the industry.

@Flint @Flint Nah, that has always been a not really good comparison. Old videogames have definetely aged awfully on the whole. Comparing how an old nes/psx game has aged to Leonardo Dicarpio movies is absurd because videogames are a young medium while movies and books have been around for decades or centuries. People dont say that old movies has aged awfully because those movies were released after at least 40-50 years of existence of the medium, games post-ps4/wii u era will be most likely treated like that. Nobody talks about how good the movies from the first years of the creation of the medium were, nor how deep the first writtings of a civilization were.

This is quite the paradox. The fact that OoT making this hall of fame is newsworthy speaks to the absurdity that this hall of fame hadn't included it in the first place, yet it's so absurd that it begs the question why anything related to this hall of fame is newsworthy at all.

@Yosher Ms. Pac-Man cabinets generated over $1 billion in revenue in the 1980's and it's among the highest grossing arcade games of all-time.

I guess Dance dance revolution is an important game popularizing the use of videogames as a medium for fitness and exercise. But how the heck can you leave out such an iconic game like Resident Evil? I wouldn't go to a museum to see DDR thats for sure

Well deserved! Best 3D game ever made.

@GrailUK He didn't. SMB was in the inaugural class in 2015. Sonic 1 was in the 2016 class.

@Maulbert Phew. Order is restored