Angry Birds, Dragon Quest, FIFA, Silent Hill join Video Game Hall of Fame

A smartphone fling, a Japanese role-playing cornerstone, soccer’s biggest license and a horror standard all landed together in The Strong National Museum of Play’s 2026 World Video Game Hall of Fame class, a lineup that says as much about gaming’s reach as it does about individual classics.

The museum announced the inductees on May 7, 2026, at its site in Rochester, New York, naming Angry Birds, Dragon Quest, FIFA International Soccer and Silent Hill. The games now sit on permanent view in the museum’s ESL Digital Worlds: High Score exhibit and the World Video Game Hall of Fame rotunda. Established in 2015, the Hall of Fame recognizes individual electronic games across arcade, console, computer, handheld and mobile, judging them on icon status, longevity, geographical reach and influence.

Angry Birds is the clearest sign of how mobile gaming changed player behavior. The Strong said Rovio launched it in 2009 and that the breakout hit introduced millions of people to mobile gaming, while also convincing millions of users worldwide to pay for a game they could download onto their smartphones. The museum’s finalists page put the franchise at more than 2 billion downloads, which is the kind of number that turns a casual time-killer into a cultural fixture.

Dragon Quest represents a different kind of reach: the long, steady kind that helped build the modern Japanese role-playing game. Square Enix tied the honor to the franchise’s 40th anniversary in 2026, and the Hall of Fame selection effectively recognizes how Dragon Quest helped set the template for turn-based adventure, monster collecting and party-based progression that still shapes RPG design today.

FIFA International Soccer brought the sports side of the medium into the same conversation. The franchise has sold more than 325 million units worldwide from 1993 through 2023, a staggering run that made annual soccer games feel like a fixture rather than a niche. For many players, FIFA was the series that made local multiplayer, licensing and real-world team rosters part of the gaming calendar year after year.

Silent Hill rounded out the class as one of horror’s defining names. The series began in 1999 and became widely identified with psychological and survival horror, pushing fear away from jump scares and toward mood, unease and damaged storytelling. That shift mattered well beyond one franchise, because it helped show that horror games could be about atmosphere first and combat second.

The March 2026 finalists made the scope of the decision even clearer. Frogger, Galaga, League of Legends, Mega Man, PaRappa the Rapper, RuneScape, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Tokimeki Memorial were all in the mix, a reminder that the Hall of Fame now tracks how games become historically unavoidable through mobile obsession, RPG legacy, global sports ubiquity and horror prestige alike.