Video Game Hall of Fame

What are the six most important, influential and iconic video games ever made?

Pong, Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., Doom and World of Warcraft, it turns out.

The Strong National Museum of Play, located in Rochester, NY, has long been dedicated to preserving various forms of childhood entertainment. It is home, for example, to the National Toy Hall of Fame, which includes the Rubik's Cube and the Slinky.

The museum founded the World Video Game Hall of Fame this year, and Thursday it inducted its first class.

The list includes Super Mario, a legendary Japanese game that cemented the console era when it was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. That was an easy pick, of course -- it's become such a cultural icon that at one point its characters were more recognizable to American children than Mickey Mouse.

Other inductees included Tetris, the Soviet puzzle game concocted in June 1984 by artificial-intelligence researcher Alexey Pajitnov. There was also Pac-Man, one of the most popular arcade games of all time. Naturally, every one of these titles came after Atari's Pong, which was the first video game to break out among mainstream consumers after it was developed and released in 1972 by the California company.

There were some unusual picks as well: Doom and World of Warcraft. Doom, developed by Id Software in 1993, helped create what is arguably the most successful video game genre in history: the first-person shooter. It was also a violent and often terrifying game -- you play a nameless soldier slaying demons that escaped from the gates of Hell -- though those elements helped influence future game developers' ability to imbue their titles with tone, style and other artistic elements.

World of Warcraft, notable as one of the largest and most successful games played over the Internet, was not the first such Internet game. But it has become one of the most influential titles ever made. Since WoW, as it's called, was released in 2004, the game has become the highest-grossing title in history, thanks to added story lines over the years and the millions of subscribers who have paid a monthly fee to play the game. Even today, there are more than 7 million people still logging in to engross themselves in the fantasy universe.