Pac-Man Message Board

I’m sure FPS-Man isn’t the first game to attempt Namco’s venerable pellet-munching classic in first-person, but I’m still willing to wager that it’s still the first of its kind. In a ghost-dodging twist, this is Pac-Man re-imagined as some kind of bowel-clenchingly atmospheric horror game. And you know what? It kinda works. Honestly, there’s not a whole lot to it (yet), but what’s here is oppressively claustrophobic in all the best ways. An endless hallway of ghastly howls and neon whispers. I do, however, have some borderline sacrilegious news for you: no wakkas.

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New York’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has picked 14 games to become part of an installation debuting in March 2013. It hopes to eventually expand that list to about 40 games.

“Are video games art?” said the museum. “They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design--a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.”

The first 14 games are as follows:

• Pac-Man (1980)
• Tetris (1984)
• Another World (1991)
• Myst (1993)
• SimCity 2000 (1994)
• vib-ribbon (1999)
• The Sims (2000)
• Katamari Damacy (2004)
• EVE Online (2003)
• Dwarf Fortress (2006)
• Portal (2007)
• flOw (2006)
• Passage (2008)
• Canabalt (2009)

It’s interesting that two of the games games-- EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress--are still active and evolving, and will continue to change in the years to come. I hope the installation will reflect that!

MoMA’s blog post is exhaustive, breaking down the criteria it used--behavior, aesthetics, space, time--when choosing the games that were featured in this initial lineup.

The above 14 are not the only games to be featured at MoMA, however. The museum hopes to acquire many more, eventually hitting around 40 games, over the next several years, including:

• Spacewar! (1962)
• Assortment of Magnavox Odyssey games (1972)
• Pong (1972)
• Snake (originally designed in the 1970s; Nokia phone version dates from 1997)
• Space Invaders (1978)
• Asteroids (1979)
• Zork (1979)
• Tempest (1981)
• Donkey Kong (1981)
• Yars’ Revenge (1982)
• M.U.L.E. (1983)
• Core War (1984)
• Marble Madness (1984)
• Super Mario Bros. (1985)
• The Legend of Zelda (1986)
• NetHack (1987)
• Street Fighter II (1991)
• Chrono Trigger (1995)
• Super Mario 64 (1996)
• Grim Fandango (1998)
• Animal Crossing (2001)
• Minecraft (2011)

If your favorite game ever isn’t featured, there may be a reason for that.

“Because of the tight filter we apply to any category of objects in MoMA’s collection," it wrote, "our selection does not include some immensely popular video games that might have seemed like no-brainers to video game historians."

Also, the first comment on the MoMA blog about Passage bums me out.