When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened its Applied Design installation in March, curators promised its collection of 14 classic video games would eventually expand.
Today, the New York institution added seven more wish list titles to its collection, including works from early pioneers like Atari, Taito, and Ralph Baer, as well as the relatively young Mojang.
The growing collection now includes Magnavox Odyssey (1972), Pong (1972), Space Invaders (1978), Asteroids (1979), Tempest (1981), Yar's Revenge (1982), and Minecraft (2011) (pictured). But while they have been added to MoMA's permanent collection, there are no immediate plans to feature them in the existing exhibit, a museum spokeswoman said.
"It's hard to overstate the importance of Ralph Baer's place in the birth of the industry, as well as the significant roles Atari, Taito, and Mojang still play," Paul Galloway, study center supervisor for the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, said in a statement.
"The work of the designers of those early games became the building blocks of a new form of creative expression and design language," Galloway continued, calling them "blocks upon which contemporary designers like Markus 'Notch' Persson and his fellows at Mojang are building to make works that push the medium to wildly new, fascinating, and weird places."
The influence gaming and game makers have had on the world was made clear this spring, when Persson was named the second most influential person in the world, according to Time magazine voters. With a total 156,694 online votes in the 2013 Time 100 Poll, Persson trailed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, who had 173,091 votes.
MoMA announced its twist on modern art in late November, before opening the installation in early March, boasting initial titles like Pac-Man 91980), Tetris (1984), Myst (1993), SimCity 2000 (1994), Dwarf Fortress (2006), and Portal (2007).
The museum team, led by senior curator Paola Antonelli and curatorial assistant Kate Carmody, hopes to continue building toward a wish list of about 40 titles, fleshing out their selection of the next few years with games like Snake, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Street Fighter II, among others.
"My goal," Antonelli said in March, "is to show that for a good designer, it takes nothing to transport you to somewhere else," be it through a painting, a dandelion-shaped mine detonator, or the The Sims.
The curator recently took to the TED stage to give a talk on her decision to use video games to help expand the limit of what "art" really is. To see for yourself, head to the MoMA (W. 53rd St. in Manhattan) before Jan. 31, 2014 for an up-close-and-personal look at video games as modern design. The newly acquired games will remain in the MoMA vault until a future date.
Also, check out the exhibit in PCMag's slideshow above.
Editor's Note: This story was updated at 12:45 p.m. Eastern with clarification from MoMA.