Are videogames merely a hobby to pass the time or are they indeed a part of our culture and something that should be cherished and preserved so future generations will know where their gaming heritage came from? For that matter, what games deserve to be preserved? Well, Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, and his committee has come up with the ten most important video games of all time. So what made the list?

From the article:

On Thursday at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr. Lowood announced a game canon, an idea that grew out of a proposal submitted to the Library of Congress in September 2006 by a consortium made up of Stanford, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois.

“Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance,” Mr. Lowood said in an interview. And if that is acknowledged, he said, “maybe we should do something about preserving them.”

Mr. Lowood and the four members of his committee — the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist — announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

Mr. Lowood’s canon was closely modeled on the work of the National Film Preservation Board, which every year compiles a list of films to be added to the National Film Registry, managed by the Library of Congress since 1989 (a consequence of the National Film Preservation Act, passed in 1988). The first list of films included “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Searchers” and “Nanook of the North.”

Read the full article over at nytimes.com