the walk of game

There was a petition going around last week to add Mario to the walk of fame, something usually reserved for real-life entertainers. I can appreciate his influence on popular culture, but what purpose would this serve? Then I read about the Walk of Game, which is an exclusive set of sidewalk monuments dedicated to significant figures in gaming. At that moment it was true: gaming really has broken through to the proletarian!

In the official induction ceremony that took place yesterday, the lucky few:

• Nolan Bushnell - the so called "Father of the video game industry", creator of Pong and Atari Coroporation
  
• Shigeru Miyamoto - the creator of some of the best loved games and characters in the entire history of the medium
  
• Link - one of Miyamoto's creations, and star of some of the greatest games of all time
  
• Mario - I think this one speaks for itself, don't you?
  
• Sonic - Sega's attidude-drenched answer to Mario, and star of one of my favorite games for the Genesis console.
  
• Halo - a console FPS released in 2001
  

Halo? This makes very little sense to me, and in an instant I was able to delete the entire occurance from my short term memory. This "Walk of Game" that honors a FPS that in turn owes a lot more to games that came before is doing the industry, and its fans, a disservice. Are these blessed star shaped tiles limited to the world of consoles? What happened to Doom? It may not have been "story driven" - a fact that the website makes painstakingly clear as if to differentiate the game somehow - but it sure as shit spawned an entire legion of games to come after it. Not to mention the fact that it brought fan created mods to the forefront. A stunt like this stinks of corporate PR, and to rely on it to reflect opinions of the gaming majority would be like tuning in to the Spike TV Video Game Awards every year.