The creation of the Digital Game Canon recognizes the importance of digital game culture. The Canon provides a starting-point for the difficult task of preserving this history inspired by the role of that the U.S. National Film Registry has played for film culture and history. (Our scope is international.) Our argument: We could do worse than to start by making sure these games and archival material related to them are available to future developers, players, and scholars.
At the 2007 Games Developers Conference, five panellists (Matteo Bittanti, Christopher Grant, Henry Lowood, Steve Meretzky, and Warren Spector) revealed and discussed our choices for the first ten games on this list. These were the ten game titles put on the Canon at this event, linking to each games information:
Spacewar! (MIT, 1962)
Star Raiders (Atari, 1979)
Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (Infocom, 1980; PDP-11 version)
Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov, 1985)
Sim City (Maxis, 1989)
Super Mario Brothers 3 (Nintendo, 1990)
Civilisation I/II (MicroProse, 1991-1996)
DOOM (id, 1993)
Sensible World of Soccer (Sensible, 1994)
Warcraft I/II/III (Blizzard, 1994-2003)
Full audio and slides from the event can be downloaded from the Preservation SIG website.
