FOUR new games have just been added to the Hall of Fame, including Barbie Fashion Designer.
Each year the National Museum of Play in New York, selects a handful of games that are “culturally significant”.
Barbie is now a Hall of Fame icon.
This doesn’t always mean they are the most popular games, just that they had a cultural impact on society.
Barbie Fashion Designer is a 1996 PC game where you can design patterns and clothes for Barbie dolls.
If you had the right setup, you could even print the clothes onto special material for your real-life Barbie to wear.
The museum wrote a lengthy blog post on why each game was chosen for inclusion in the Hall of Fame.
It claims that it was added due to selling over 500k copies in the first two months of sales.
This means it was the first game that successfully got young girls in the ‘90s to use computers and play games.
Since then, numerous Barbie-themed games have been released.
The popularity of Barbie Fashion Designer also saw a vast increase in games that were designed specifically to cater to a female audience.
Three other games were inducted alongside Barbie Fashion Designer.
The first is Computer Space, one of the first arcade games to be released publicly.
Wii Sports and The Last of Us are the other games that made the cut this year.
The Last of Us inspired designers to create more story-driven games, while Wii Sports encouraged non-gamers to purchase consoles.
They join games such as Pong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and The Sims in the Hall of Fame.
Written by Oliver Brandt and Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
