The Smithsonian American Art Museum will have an exhibit called The Art of Video Games. It will feature a selected group of games that best represents the history and evolution of video games over the last forty years. The kicker was that the Smithsonian left the selecting of games up to the public, who were encouraged to vote for the games they felt were worthy enough to be displayed in the museum. Here are the games that voters have selected to appear in the exhibit.

As a Reuters story notes, there is big business in history for the game industry. One of this year’s most anticipated titles, Assassin’s Creed II, sees the game’s hero interact with a young Leonardo da Vinci and use his design for a flying machine.

The first Assassin’s Creed was set during the Crusades and, of course, there are probably more World War II games on shelves than there were actual battles in the war.

Upcoming game The Saboteur is loosely based on the real life story of Wiliam Grover-Williams, who worked with the British Special Operations Executive in the hopes of liberating France. Grover-Williams was executed for his undercover work but, in the game, your character lives to help free France from the Nazis.

The Animus has been activated again at Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2 website and, let me tell you, it looks hot.

During the E3 2009 conference attendees were given a glimpse of the sequel titled Assassin’s Creed 2. The only confirmed date is the US release date of November 17, 2009, for Xbox and PS3.

Even though the scenery and times have changed, the war between the Templars and the Assassins wages on. In the game players control…

The Macintosh computer system has come along way in making a name for itself next to the more popular Windows-based PCs today.

Here’s a “quick” look back at Apple’s history focusing on Mac-based games.

“Byte into an Apple”

The first Apple computer was created by Steven Wozniak on April 1, 1976. Wozniak, a former Hewlett-Packard employee, and his high school friend Steven Jobs, who worked in the games engineering department as a basic circuit designer at Atari Inc. Although Wozniak was great at creating electronic gadgets Jobs was better at marketing ideas. The two would take Wozniak’s design and create the computer in Jobs’ bedroom, then later demonstrate it at The Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto where he would introduce his design for the Apple I. But no one would take him seriously, mostly because the Apple I was based on the MOStek 6502 chip and most computers at that time were built using the Intel 8080 chip.

Wozniak wrote in an article…

In the Los Angeles Times, writer Alex Pham reports that the San Fernando Library encourages youth to play video games and even invites them to be as loud as they like.

“It lets teens be more comfortable with the library and become familiar with librarians,” San Fernando librarian Lydia Harlan told Pham. “And it’s what kids are into these days.”

In the article, Pham reports that more libraries are turning to video games to connect with technologically savvy youth who might be losing interest in books and stories. In New York, the New York Public Library has even added a collection of books, films, music and maps about video games.

Click through for the full article and a list of recommended books…

As we’re right in the middle of Comic-con, it seems appropriate that we take a little peek at the event’s history and current staus as a multimedia behemoth. Broadcasting & cable has a very interesting feature up on how the show went from a comics-only event to a major convention for videogames, comics, genre films and much more.

While the article doesn’t directly chronical why or how comic-con has grown, it does lay out one of the fundamental issues with anything that grows from a niche gathering to a mainstream, money-generating event: selling out. From the post:

I can’t wait for my copy of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots but I don’t want to say goodbye to elite agent Solid Snake, whom we’ve grown to love while following his adventures.

We pray that rumors of an end are not true and continue to pose theories about why the series could never end. Even so, as a preemptive memorial to help cope with the denial that this may be the absolute last game for Snake, here is a look at the MGS franchise….

While releases for upcoming videogames just keep getting better, the list of movie titles based on videogames keep growing. Soon, Hitman, starring Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47, will join the list of live-action films based on a videogame. “I don’t go after video games because they are video games,” Adrian Askarieh, producer of the Hitman more »