Super Mario Bros.

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• Top 6 Video Games of All Time

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• Tetris

  Tetris was created in 1984 by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov at the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre in Moscow, and its journey to the West involved a genuinely convoluted set of licensing disputes across multiple companies before Nintendo secured rights to bundle it with the original Game Boy in 1989. That Game Boy bundling decision is widely credited as one of the most consequential packaging choices in gaming history, since Tetris's simple, endlessly replayable puzzle mechanics made it an ideal fit for handheld, pick-up-and-play sessions and helped drive the Game Boy's massive commercial success. The game's core mechanic — rotating and arranging falling geometric blocks to clear complete lines — has proven so fundamentally sound that Tetris has been re-released on virtually every gaming platform and computing device released since, spanning over four decades without needing any significant redesign of its central gameplay loop. Tetris's combination of its convoluted Cold War-era licensing journey to the West and its role driving the original Game Boy's success has made it one of the most commercially successful and enduringly played video games ever created.

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• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, released for the Nintendo 64 in 1998, is widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made and was among the first successful adaptations of the established 2D Zelda formula into a fully three-dimensional game world. The game's innovative "Z-targeting" lock-on combat system, letting players lock onto enemies during three-dimensional combat, solved a fundamental technical problem that had challenged nearly every early 3D action game and became a widely adopted standard across the broader action-adventure genre afterward. Ocarina of Time's structure, blending puzzle-solving dungeons, an expansive overworld, time-travel-based storytelling, and its titular musical instrument mechanic for both puzzle-solving and travel, demonstrated a level of systemic design ambition that critics still frequently cite as a high-water mark for the medium. Ocarina of Time's combination of its successful 3D adaptation of the Zelda formula and its genre-defining targeting combat system has made it one of the most critically acclaimed video games ever released.

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• Minecraft

  Minecraft was created by Swedish developer Markus "Notch" Persson, first released in a rough alpha form in 2009 before its full 2011 launch, built around a simple but deeply open-ended premise: breaking and placing cube-shaped blocks in a procedurally generated world to build, survive, and create almost anything imaginable. The game's minimal initial development budget and its early, unusually direct relationship between Persson and his player community, built through active forums and constant updates during its alpha period, became a widely cited model for how a small independent game could grow through sustained community engagement rather than traditional marketing. Microsoft's 2014 acquisition of Minecraft's developer Mojang for $2.5 billion reflected the game's massive and enduring commercial success, and Minecraft went on to become the best-selling video game of all time, with sales exceeding 300 million copies across every major gaming platform. Minecraft's combination of its open-ended block-building creative premise and its record-setting status as the best-selling video game ever made has made it one of the most commercially and culturally significant video games in the medium's history.

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• Grand Theft Auto V

  Grand Theft Auto V, released by Rockstar Games in 2013, set numerous entertainment industry records upon release, generating over $800 million in its first day and over $1 billion within three days, figures that outpaced the opening receipts of nearly every major film release in history at the time. The game's massive open-world recreation of a fictionalized Los Angeles, featuring three separate playable protagonists whose storylines interweave throughout the campaign, represented an unusually ambitious structural approach to open-world game design compared to the single-protagonist structure of most prior entries in the genre. Grand Theft Auto Online, the game's persistent multiplayer mode, sustained an enormous and continuously updated player base for well over a decade after the base game's release, turning what began as a single retail purchase into one of the most commercially enduring live-service platforms in gaming history. Grand Theft Auto V's combination of its record-shattering commercial launch and its unusually long-lived multiplayer platform has made it one of the most commercially significant video games ever released.

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• Pac-Man

  Pac-Man was created by Japanese designer Toru Iwatani and released by Namco in 1980, deliberately designed to appeal to a broader audience, including women, at a time when arcade games were overwhelmingly dominated by space-shooter themes aimed at a narrower demographic. The character's iconic yellow circular design, reportedly inspired partly by a pizza missing a slice, became one of the most instantly recognizable images in video game history, and the game's simple maze-navigation-and-ghost-avoidance premise proved accessible to players who found contemporary shooting games intimidating. Pac-Man became a genuine mainstream cultural phenomenon beyond arcades, spawning a hit song ("Pac-Man Fever"), a Saturday morning cartoon, and extensive merchandising, at a scale that few if any video games had achieved before it, helping legitimize video games as a broader entertainment medium. Pac-Man's combination of its deliberately broad-audience design philosophy and its unprecedented mainstream cultural crossover success has made it one of the most historically significant video games ever created.

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• Gabe Newell

  Gabe Newell co-founded Valve Corporation in 1996 alongside Mike Harrington, both former Microsoft employees, and Valve's first release, "Half-Life" in 1998, became widely credited with pioneering scripted, narrative-driven level design within the first-person shooter genre. Newell led Valve's development of the Steam digital distribution platform, launched in 2003, which grew into the dominant PC game storefront in the world, fundamentally transforming how the industry sold, updated, and distributed games to a global player base. Newell has remained Valve's president while the company has maintained an unusually flat internal organizational structure without traditional management hierarchy, a distinctive corporate philosophy that Newell has personally championed and that has drawn significant attention within the broader technology and game industry. Gabe Newell's combination of his role co-creating the genre-defining Half-Life and his creation of the industry-transforming Steam platform has made him one of the most commercially and structurally significant figures in modern video game history.

• Todd Howard

  Todd Howard joined Bethesda Game Studios in 1994 and became the lead director on "The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind" in 2002, helping establish the open-world fantasy role-playing game format that became Bethesda's defining signature style across subsequent franchise entries. Howard directed "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim," released in 2011, which became one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed role-playing games ever made, known for its expansive open world and significant modding community support that extended the game's cultural relevance for well over a decade after release. Howard also directed "Fallout 3" and "Fallout 4," bringing Bethesda's open-world design philosophy to the post-apocalyptic Fallout franchise after acquiring the series' rights, and his games have become particularly known within the industry for their emphasis on emergent, player-driven storytelling over rigidly scripted narrative paths. Todd Howard's combination of directing both the modern Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises and Skyrim's record-setting commercial and cultural longevity has made him one of the most commercially significant game designers of the modern console era.

• Will Wright

  Will Wright created "SimCity" in 1989, a city-building simulation game with no traditional win condition, letting players continuously manage and grow a virtual city, establishing simulation games as a significant and commercially viable genre distinct from more traditional goal-oriented video games. Wright's follow-up creation, "The Sims," released in 2000, applied similar open-ended simulation principles to individual household and character management rather than city-scale systems, and it became one of the best-selling PC games of all time, with a particularly significant and unusually large female player base compared to most video games of that era. Wright co-founded Maxis, the studio behind both SimCity and The Sims, and his design philosophy consistently emphasized giving players open-ended creative tools and systems to experiment with rather than linear, narrative-driven objectives typical of most contemporary game design. Will Wright's combination of his foundational SimCity design and The Sims's record-setting commercial success has made him one of the most influential simulation game designers in the history of the medium.

• Sid Meier

  Sid Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 and created the original "Civilization" in 1991, a turn-based strategy game letting players guide a civilization from prehistory through the modern era, establishing one of the most influential and enduring franchises in the strategy game genre. Civilization's core design principle, letting players make consequential strategic decisions across an enormous historical timescale while remaining accessible enough for mainstream audiences, became a widely studied template within the game design industry for balancing genuine strategic depth with broad playability. Meier's name became so closely associated with quality game design that it was directly incorporated into numerous game titles he was involved with, including "Sid Meier's Civilization," "Sid Meier's Pirates!," and "Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon," an unusually personal branding approach within the broader video game industry. Sid Meier's combination of his foundational Civilization franchise and his distinctively personal name-branded game design legacy has made him one of the most historically significant strategy game designers in video game history.

• Hideo Kojima

  Hideo Kojima created the Metal Gear series beginning in 1987, and the franchise's stealth-based gameplay, emphasizing avoiding direct confrontation over standard action-game combat, established stealth as a significant and enduring video game genre in its own right well before it became a common industry convention. Kojima became particularly known for his games' unusually elaborate cinematic storytelling, incorporating lengthy cutscenes and complex, often politically and philosophically themed narratives that pushed video game storytelling ambitions considerably further than most contemporaries of his era attempted. After a high-profile and publicly contentious departure from Konami, the publisher he had worked with for decades, Kojima founded his own independent studio, Kojima Productions, and released "Death Stranding" in 2019, a genre-defying game that generated significant critical discussion for its unconventional gameplay mechanics. Hideo Kojima's combination of his foundational role establishing the stealth game genre through Metal Gear and his unusually ambitious cinematic storytelling approach has made him one of the most artistically significant video game designers in the industry's history.