Tamagotchi makes World Video Game Hall of Fame

The Strong National Museum of Play has just added four more video games to its World Video Game Hall of Fame.

Four more iconic games have been added to the Strong National Museum of Play’s hall of fame.

These include such gems as Williams Electronics’ Defender, Rare’s GoldenEye 007, id Software’s Quake, and Bandai’s adorable Tamagotchi.

These games were all nominated for the 2025 World Video Game Hall of Fame. Games like Angry Birds, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and NBA 2K lost out to the iconic retro gaming quartet.

The nominees were judged on four distinct criteria: icon status, longevity, geographical reach, and influence, the Strong National Museum of Play revealed.

Defender, GoldenEye 007, Quake, and Tamagotchi all fit these metrics and made it to the museum’s hall of fame.

The museum said that all inducted games have “exerted influence on the video game industry or popular culture and society in general.”

Other previously inducted games include Resident Evil, Asteroids, Wii Sports, The Last of Us, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and many more.

In the eleven years the hall of fame has been active, 49 games have been inducted.

Defender

The early 1980s computer game Defender is a horizontally scrolling shooter game created by Williams Electronics.

The arcade game is set in an unknown city or planet, and players must defend against aliens while protecting astronauts.

Eugene Jarvis, a pinball programmer at the gaming studio, was responsible for programming and developing the game.

GoldenEye 007

GoldenEye 007 is a first-person shooter game developed by Rare and then published by the gaming giant Nintendo.

Based on GoldenEye, the 1995 James Bond film, the game positions you as James Bond, navigating through the game to prevent a criminal gang from using a satellite weapon.

The game was designed by Martin Hollis, who released the game for the Nintendo 64, The Guardian writes.

Quake

The 1996 first-person shooter game Quake was developed by id Software and was the first addition to the Quake series, which saw various title iterations.

Quake was created as a successor to Doom, which id Software also developed.

The Strong details that Quake’s “biggest legacy” was the creation of esports, playing video games competitively, as an industry.

Tamagotchi

Every '90s kid will know the name Tamagotchi. The handheld was “considered a popular gaming fad of the 1990s.”

According to the museum, the president of Wiz company, Akhiro Yokoi, pitched the idea of a portable pet toy to the Japanese toy maker Bandai.

Fun fact: the name “Tamagotchi” lends itself to the fact that the mobile pet was originally thought to be manufactured as a watch.

The name comprises the Japanese word for egg, “tamago,” and “uotchi,” a phonetic rendering of the English pronunciation of watch, the museum reveals.

The World Video Game Hall of Fame was established in 2015 and “recognizes individual electronic games of all types,” the museum said.

The Strong National Museum of Play is regarded as a “highly interactive, collections-based museum devoted to the history of exploration and play.”

The museum is the home of the “largest and most comprehensive collection” of games in history.