OG Games & the Best of Every Generation

What counts as “OG”?

In this museum, OG means the originals: the games that established a genre, a control scheme or a business model that others followed. Many look simple by modern standards, yet you can trace a straight line from their design decisions to the games you play today. Rising difficulty, lives, save files, open exploration and the idea of a mascot character all started somewhere.

The arcade spark

Taito's Space Invaders (1978) turned a screen full of descending aliens into a sensation. Its enemies sped up as you destroyed them, creating tension without a single line of story. Namco's Pac-Man (1980) went further by giving a game a personality: a maze, a hungry hero and four ghosts with distinct chase behaviours that players learned to read.

Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981), designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, introduced the carpenter then called Jumpman, the character who became Mario. Namco's Galaga (1981) refined the shooter with enemies that swooped and captured your ship. Together, arcades taught three lasting lessons: goals you understand in seconds, difficulty that climbs, and the public high-score table that made competition social.

Games come home

The Atari 2600 (1977) popularised interchangeable cartridges, but a flood of low-quality games contributed to the North American market crash of 1983. Nintendo's Famicom launched in Japan the same year and arrived in North America as the NES in 1985, with strict licensing that helped rebuild trust.

Super Mario Bros. (1985) defined the side-scrolling platformer, while The Legend of Zelda (1986) offered an open world and a battery-backed save inside the cartridge. Tetris, created by Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, became a portable phenomenon when it was bundled with the Game Boy in North America in 1989.

How we chose these picks

• Influence: did later games borrow its ideas, controls or structure?
• Playability today: does the core loop still make sense to a newcomer?
• Availability: can most people play it legally now, through a re-release, collection or subscription?
• Variety: each list mixes genres so no single style dominates a decade.