“Anytime, too, you do a thing that is a list, people will be upset that something is missing.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s just how it’s gonna be.But we were very aware of the potential for controversy and we talked to the curators at the Smithsonian because we were doing this at the same time they were working on their “Art of Video Games” exhibition, which was partly crowdsourced, and they had gone to the public and asked them to help come up with the criteria. We wanted a different approach from that. It was not just, “What is everyone’s favorite game?” We wanted a kind of cold, critical look at these things. I mean, we have the best Picasso paintings and sculptures in the world. They’re here. We have arguably the best Van Gogh paintings and Matisse paintings. We don’t have every Picasso painting. We just have the best. Right?
So that’s what we wanted to look for when it came to videogames. Not to be comprehensive, not to be a history museum, but to cherry pick specific moments, these specific examples of games we felt had a large and lasting impact on the culture of gaming and would be relevant for people to see and experience.” -Paul Galloway