"Spacewar!," 1962

When Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University in California, started preserving video games and video-game artifacts in 1998, he thought it was closer to professional oblivion than a bold new move into the future.

In just a few years, however, Lowood's notion that video games were something with a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying has gone from absurd to being worthy of consideration by the Library of Congress.

At the recent annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Lowood announced a game canon, an idea that grew out of a proposal submitted to the Library of Congress in September by a consortium made up of Stanford, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois.

"Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance," Lowood said. And if that is acknowledged, he said, "maybe we should do something about preserving them."

Lowood and the four members of his committee -- game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky, researcher Matteo Bittanti and journalist Christopher Grant -- announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time:

• "Spacewar!" (1962) (above) First multiplayer, competitive game, and the first action game, too -- created by programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• "Star Raiders" (1979) A first-person space shooter with better graphics and more complex game play than previous games -- the forerunner of space-combat simulators.

• "Zork" (1980) Introduced the world to the adventure game.

• "Tetris" (1985) A landmark puzzle game of falling blocks that has mesmerized addicted players on virtually every video-game system.

• "SimCity" (1989) Helped establish the genre known as god games, in which players take on an omnipotent role, controlling the game world rather than simply participating in it.

• "Super Mario Bros. 3" (1990) (below) Important for its nonlinear play, a mainstay of contemporary games, and features such as the ability to move backward and forward.

• "Civilization I/II" (1991) Drew inspiration from a board game to become a pioneer in turn-based strategy computer games.

• "Doom" (1993) Redefined the shooter genre by immersing players in a 3-D world in which they could battle with one another and add features.

• "Warcraft" series (beginning 1994) Represents the introduction of real-time strategy overlaid on a narrative.

• "Sensible World of Soccer" (1994) Provided a unique overhead view of the game and featured intuitive controls unlike anything the sports genre had seen.

Lowood said preserving video games presented certain challenges. For example, the hardware that games are played on changes so frequently that there are already thousands that can be played only through computer programs called emulators, which, while readily available on the Internet, technically violate copyright laws.

"We have to be really careful here, because the technology is just going to make this harder for us," Spector said. "The game canon is a way of saying this is the stuff we have to protect first."

Staff writer Randy A. Salas contributed to this report.