Dragon Quest And Three Other Titles Inducted Into Video Game Hall Of Fame – Nintendo Life

Every year The Strong National Museum of Play located in New York inducts new games into its Video Game Hall of Fame, and the inductees of 2026 have now been officially revealed.

This year, there were a total of four games added to the ever-expanding list. This includes the mobile hit Angry Birds, the sports game FIFA International Soccer, the horror title Silent Hill and last but not least legendary Japanese role-playing game Dragon Quest.

Here’s a bit about the Hall of Fame and below this are the official descriptions attached to each game. You can learn more about this Hall of Fame and the criteria in the official FAQ on The Strong National Museum of Play website.

“The World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong, established in 2015, recognizes electronic games of all types that have enjoyed popularity over a sustained period and have exerted influence on the video game industry or on popular culture and society in general.”

Angry Birds:

“Angry Birds was the breakout mobile game hit that convinced millions of people worldwide to pay for a game they could download onto their smartphones. More than two billion downloads later, hundreds of millions of people have spent tens of billions of hours flinging brightly colored birds at buildings built by egg-thieving pigs.”

FIFA International Soccer:

“FIFA International Soccer was not the first sports simulation video game—nor even the first one about soccer—but it became the most popular sports game franchise of all time, with sales continually bolstered by annual releases from publisher EA. Given soccer’s worldwide popularity, EA SPORTS FIFA had a larger global imprint than other sports titles such as Madden, with approximately 325 million games in the EA SPORTS FIFA series sold by 2021.”

Silent Hill:

“Silent Hill’s success—it sold more than two million copies—meant that many sequels followed across a wide range of systems, with collective sales of more than $14 million. A film version of the original game grossed more than $100 million, and two more movies followed. But more than commercial success, the game’s significance lay in the ways that it pushed the horror genre in new, psychological directions that engaged players’ emotions as much as their reflexes.”

Dragon Quest:

“Dragon Quest, released in 1986 for the Nintendo Famicom, grew out of a collaboration between scenario writer Yuji Horii, manga artist Akira Toriyama, and composer Koichi Sugiyama. Sugiyama was a popular composer, known for his past work on earlier Enix games, who wrung memorable music out of the Famicom’s limited audio capabilities. Sugiyama’s approach to the creation of game music was revolutionary; he was one of the first composers to consider game music as a serious form of compositional art and the first to use a live orchestra to record his compositions for video games, establishing beautiful music as a fundamental feature of Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPGs) such as the Final Fantasy and Persona series and the recent Game of the Year winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.”

The other titles up for nomination this year included Frogger, Galaga, League of Legends, Mega Man, PaRappa the Rapper, RuneScape, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Tokimeki Memorial. You can see the previous inductees on the museum’s website.

What do you think of this year’s picks? How many of these titles and series have you played? And what other games would you like to see added to the Hall of Fame? Let us know in the comments.