• Journey
• Shadow Of The Colossus
• Shenmue 1
• Half-Life 1 & 2

The ICO trilogy

Outer wilds

Sexy Beach 3

Doom

I could write an essay significantly larger than the game itself and it wouldn't be as powerful of an argument as just saying the name with the weight of legacy it commands.

Terraria, a monument to indie games and the craft itself, gave tons of free content and still does, unlike the popular pay for expansion models on a half finished buggy game of their contemporaries

Also Journey and Flower for different reasons

As in history, all of them
As in art?
Blasphemous.
La puta madre que belleza de juego.

Half-life, or any source game along with minecraft.

Bioshock

Halo: Combat Evolved

Fallout New Vegas

Also, cynical answer is also whatever current mobile game is making a bazillion dollars right now because ✨capitalism✨

EA games deserve to be in a museum.

Because everyone needs to remember how a company can exploit their customer base with money grab schemes like loot boxes, pay to win junk and empty unplayable shells which need loads of expensive dlc's to make it even a little playable.

There should also be an entire wing for never finished bug simulators.

The area with actual proper games would be tiny. But it should include the old age of empires 2, city skylines 1, Kerbal space program 1 and everything from Larian studios.

Another World/Out of This World. Short game, but also a 1991 game made by one dev and one composer in two years, and artistically it still holds up fairly well even today.

for a more "traditional paint" like experience, Gris is just gorgeous to look at

To get the obvious out of the way: Pacman, Doom 2, Starcraft, Simcity 2000, Civ 3. All genre-defining milestones.

Total Annihilation. They're still making sequels today (Supreme Commander, Beyond all Reason).

Warzone 2100 was the first 3D rotatable zoomable RTS which was pretty mind blowing at the time.

RDR2

Assuming a single game, Minecraft. It should be a kids museum style where you can build things. You can make each room a different biome or structure.

Half Life Dead Space Minecraft Terraria Stardew Valley Uhhh...how do you do line breaks in comments? This looks like trash.

• Street Fighter II - Not the first fighting game, but the one that kicked off a massive cultural phenomenon, and defined so much of the format that every fighting game since has taken influence from.

• Puyo Puyo Tsu - Although this game never got a chance to shine in the west, in Japan this game was just as influential to the puzzle game genre as Street Fighter II was to fighting games. I often describe Puyo 1 as the Street Fighter 1 of puzzle games, but I think you could make a case for whether 1 or Tsu really belongs in the museum, since 1 was plenty popular at release and did inspire other puzzlers even before Tsu hit the scene. However, Tsu is the game that really established puzzle games as a serious competitive genre, with large tournaments being held all the way back then.

• Beatmania - The original vertical scrolling rhythm game. Could include either the original, one of the first editions of IIDX, or even a current cabinet.

• Dance Dance Revolution - While Beatmania gets credit for being the first, and for being plenty popular in Japan, DDR is what popularized the genre in overseas markets. And for good reason, it's equally notable for not being played with typical inputs.

• Rogue - The thing that a whole bunch of other games are like. Except now most of the games we say are like this, aren't really like this at all...

• Like every major Nintendo game - fuck it not even gonna list them all

Tomb Raider.

Limbo.

I really like the atmosphere. They created so much with such an minimalistic graphic style.

Factorio.

I don't know where to start. Overall a great example that some people like to optimize and put way more effort into this game than their job. Zeitgeist?

All of them.

Black and White

One that comes to mind is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Spore, even if imperfect.
Minecraft.
Pong.
Elden Ring.
Rollercoaster Tycoon.
Zoo Tycoon.
Pokémon Green.

Anthem

(For history purpose, just like there are museums for the Holocaust or the WTC)

There is video game museums already:

https://www.computerspielemuseum.de/en/43-Homepage.htm

Dwarf fortress

My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to a temporary video game exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image. A lot of the mainstays you'd expect were there, particularly from the arcade era, including ground-breaking titles like Dragon's Lair (which is fascinatingly beautiful and a bad video game at the same time). At one point, one of the signs mentioned moving on from vector graphics, which my wife had no idea what that meant, so I immediately looked around for an Asteroids machine. You don't really get how one of those games looks unless you're playing on the genuine article. That's the kind of thing that probably ought to be in a museum most.

I recently went to Galloping Ghost in Illinois, which is now the world's largest arcade. It's got nearly every arcade game you can think of, and they do a good job fixing them up. They have an F-Zero AX machine. I've always wanted to play one of those. I went to Galloping Ghost two years in a row, and it was broken both times. Turns out they're having trouble sourcing the displays. As you go around the place, most machines are working, but even only a year later, more of them had display problems. I imagine even just getting regular old CRTs is going to make this kind of thing way harder as time goes on, and a good CRT does affect how these old games look, because they were designed for them. This is the kind of burden I'd expect a museum to take on.

Unpopular opinion, I played Elden ring for close to 10 hours and hated it. Ugly game, saw nothing but barren wastelands, got extremely annoyed with the style of fighting and the repetitiveness. I think it’s by far one of the worst games I’ve ever played

E.T. for Atari

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Strong Museum of Play which contains the video game hall of fame

For me, it has got to be tetris. It is still thriving, even today. Anyone can understand the base concept and play it : it's simple and enjoyable, anywhen. Plus, it runs on remotely anything.