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The World Video Game Hall of Fame announces 5 new inductees

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

The World Video Game Hall of Fame just announced five new inductees, spanning decades and universes.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ASTEROIDS")

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Pew pew pew pew. Boom. Asteroids debuted in the late 1970s, when people played games in arcades one quarter at a time. Before long, it was on a television in my home. Jeremy Saucier works at the Strong National Museum of Play, which is an awesome museum in Rochester, N.Y.

JEREMY SAUCIER: It offered players really this mixture of challenging gameplay, glowing vector graphics, intense, kind of heartbeat sound effects.

FADEL: Also added to the Hall of Fame - Ultima: The First Age Of Darkness. Released in 1981 - the year I was born - the game was pivotal in defining the computer role-playing genre.

SAUCIER: At times, you were crawling through dungeons in search of treasure and fighting off monsters. At other times, you were in outer space, firing at enemy ships.

INSKEEP: Also, SimCity made it in. Back in 1989, that one had players creating cities and building infrastructure and dealing with the problems that can come with that.

FADEL: And two games from the 1990s - Resident Evil, which helped make the survival horror genre popular.

INSKEEP: And finally...

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBYN MILLER'S "MYST THEME")

INSKEEP: ...Myst, where players are transported to a mysterious island. Became one of the bestselling computer games of the '90s.

FADEL: Saucier says these titles show how gaming has expanded to include people of all ages.

SAUCIER: We've often associated play and games with children. And to have survival horror games, to have games where you can manage a city, I mean, it's opening up these worlds to adults and preparing, I think, video games for where we are today.

INSKEEP: These games joined Pong, Pac-Man and dozens of others at the World Video Game Hall of Fame in Rochester.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBYN MILLER'S "MYST THEME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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