Flaw of Fame: Making Sense of Sports Video Game Snubs

The World Video Game Hall of Fame has been around for 10 years now, enshrining a total of 49 video games into its elite group-- including four games just recently revealed. The Hall is a respectful nod to the medium. It's a good thing.

That said, it's time to talk frankly about a serious flaw with the Hall-- its bias against sports video games.

Of the 49 games enshrined, just three of them are sports games: Pong, John Madden Football and Wii Sports. Pong is, essentially, a form of tennis and helped to launch video gaming into popularity. John Madden Football is a series that easily deserving as it inspired dozens of games after it. Wii Sports executed motion controls in such an intuitive way that it made tennis, baseball, bowling, golf, and boxing accessible to virtual athletes of all ages. All three games make perfect sense, and I wouldn't argue against any of the inductees.

138 sports games have made the final groupings for inductions across the 10 years. 19 of those were sports games. That's less than 15%. Some sports games have failed to be inducted despite making the final grouping multiple times. FIFA and NBA 2K are three-time finalists. NBA JAM and Mattel (handheld) Football are two-time finalists.

The ratio is even lower for inductees. Just 6% of the inductees are sports titles. That's an awfully low number for a genre that's been synonymous with video games pretty much from the start. It's not really representative of the medium, unless the perspective of the medium is skewed to a significant extent.

Why is an institution that "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" essentially shutting out the sports genre? It's a conversation that needs to be had.

Let's look at a few of the multliple-time finalists that have been snubbed:

• FIFA International Soccer (Finalist in 2015, 2021, 2023): The first FIFA game debuted in 1993, and the series has grown in popularity in the three-plus decades that have followed. Including real players and teams, getting access to events like the prestigious World Cup, and being a vehicle to attract more players and interest to the sport should qualify this series for enshrinement... and yet it's fallen short three separate times. The Last of Us, enshrined in 2023 during its first year as a finalist, got in over FIFA in its third year of being a finalist. It's head-scratching.

• NBA 2K (Finalist in 2019, 2023, 2025): Visual Concepts, after being dumped by Electronic Arts, found its footing with SEGA as it worked to develop cutting-edge sports games for the Dreamcast. Since SEGA's 128-bit machine wasn't getting EA Sports support, it was up to Visual Concepts to deliver sports games that could attract players and lure them to Dreamcast from the dominant PlayStation ecosystem. NFL 2K and NBA 2K were amazing in 1999 and planted the seeds for long-running series that competed with EA's best for years... with NBA 2K supplanting NBA LIVE as the top basketball game around. Three finalist years, no induction.

• NBA JAM (Finalist in 2020, 2022): The foundation of Midway's run of dominant arcade sports games, NBA JAM was huge in arcades in its first year, making more money than Jurassic Park. NBA JAM cast aside the ticky-tack rules of basketball and simplified the game while going hard on the over-the-top presentation to draw players in. Then the game got ported to multiple home platforms. It had its own designated release day. It spawned a sequel, and then attracted a buyer in Acclaim to take over the name. The JAM concept was built on by later, post-Acclaim purchase games like NBA HangTime and NBA Showtime. The concept was rebooted in 2010 for the Wii, followed soon after by PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. JAM inspired other arcade-style games in the same vein, most notably the beloved NBA Street series. Despite all of this, along with the cultural influence ("He's on fire!")... crickets.

Other games have been straight up ignored. How has RBI Baseball never made a finalist group? Why has NFL 2K never been mentioned? Where is EA's NHL series, especially the still-relevant NHL '94? Tecmo Super Bowl never gets a sniff. No Hardball!. No Punch-Out!!. No MVP Baseball. These are just a few of the games I could mention off the top of my head.

The counterargument would likely be that there are too many games that merit consideration and induction, and that not everyone can get in that probably deserve to. I cannot buy this assertion. The pattern is very, very clear over the Hall's first decade-- and it's hard to dispute that sports video games are oddly prioritized very low for the institution. It's not a year, or two. It's ten.

It's past time for the World Video Game Hall of Fame to start giving sports video games their due.