Images: Games that win a spot in history

Video games, like movies, are worth preserving and studying as cultural artifacts. So says Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, who together with game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; academic researcher Matteo Bittanti; and game journalist Christopher Grant came up with a list of the 10 most important video games of all time.

The chronological list, submitted for review and potential permanent preservation to the U.S. Library of Congress: Spacewar (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), the Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

Spacewar, conceived by Massachusetts Institute of Technology programmers Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen in 1961 and initially released in 1962, is the first multiplayer computer video game, according to The New York Times.

It is also the first action game. Each player controls a ship and must shoot against the other ship while avoiding a collision with a nearby star. (The stars have a gravitational pull, but the missiles don't, because that'd take up too much processing power, according to Wikipedia.)