With Wimbledon under way, I am going to grasp the opportunity to make a perhaps contentious claim: tennis is the most important sport in the history of video games. Sure, nowadays the big sellers are EA Sports FC, Madden and NBA 2K, but tennis has been foundational to the industry. It was a simple bat-and-ball game, created in 1958 by scientist William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, that is widely the considered the first ever video game created purely for entertainment. Tennis for Two ran on an oscilloscope and was designed as a minor diversion for visitors attending the lab's annual open day, but when people started playing, a queue developed that eventually extended out of the front door and around the side of the building. It was the first indication that computer games might turn out to be popular.

The Strong National Museum of Play has revealed this year's inductees into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. There are four games in the class of 2023: The Last of Us, Wii Sports, Barbie Fashion Designer and Computer Space. They were selected based on a number of criteria, including their influence and popularity over time. The Last of Us is the most recent one of the bunch. Naughty Dog's post-apocalyptic action adventure has rarely been out of the limelight over the last 10 years.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The first commercial video game and the first one marketed to girls are headed to the World Video Game Hall of Fame, alongside a post-apocalyptic nail-biter and a system that made gamers out of grandparents. Computer Space, Barbie Fashion Designer, The Last of Us and Wii Sports were announced Thursday as the Hall of Fame's class of 2023. The Hall of Fame honors arcade, console, computer, handheld and mobile games that have influenced popular culture or the video game industry.

Mike Fukuda jumped in, speaking in Japanese. I watched Mr. Iwata's and Mr. Miyamoto's faces and then heard the translation into English. 'Wii Sports' does a much better job to achieve our objective of getting consumers to understand Wii immediately. And this minigame collection is not a fully formed game that will command full price in our market. We should think about how to best use this software to achieve our objectives.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. These days, video games aren't often tied to a particular console or gadget – even if something like Halo or God of War originally appears on Xbox or PlayStation, it will often eventually make its way to PC, and the majority of games come out on everything at the same time. Unless you're playing a console-exclusive game like Returnal, specifically designed around the PlayStation 5 controller with its adaptive triggers and fancy haptic feedback, the experience of the game isn't shaped much by the hardware you play it on. You can play Minecraft with a controller or a mouse or on your phone, and it's still largely the same.

Before Mario Tennis Aces appears in stores and on your Switch, Nintendo offered up a weekend of tournament play to whet appetites and convince you to preorder its first in-house sport title for the Switch. The demo sticks to purely tournament play, and while we didn't get the chance to play one another, there's something addictive here. That is, once you've figured out what the heck's going on. Two editors offer their very early impressions. When I first saw the trailer for Mario Tennis Aces, I thought it looked like the perfect kind of game to throw on the TV when a bunch of friends visit.

Nintendo representatives scolded me for TV-peeking at least a dozen times during my Monday visit to New York City's Nintendo Store, during which I got hands-on time with 1-2-Switch, a launch title for the company's upcoming Switch games console. That's usually the worst advice anyone playing a video game could receive. But that's not true here, where what's happening on the TV is less relevant than what your opponent's up to in real life. Unlike typical multiplayer games where opponents sit next to one another and stare at their corner of a shared screen, 1-2-Switch games are all about rivals staring into the whites of one another's eyes, trying to anticipate their next move. The result is sometimes awkward and sometimes goofy, but always reliably amusing. In the console-mobile hybrid Switch's case, the differentiating factor is a design that allows the console and controllers to be used in lots of different ways depending on what (and how) you're playing.

Okay, so Minecraft was already kinda-sorta the second-bestselling game of all time if you don't count Wii Sports, which was a pack-in, and I'm loathe to count stuff you can't buy standalone. But yes, on the basis of conventional video game sales leaderboards, with over 100 million copies (106,859,714 to be precise) across PC, mobile and console in the pocket, Minecraft is now officially second only to that all-time, all-platforms, indefatigable puzzling juggernaut, Tetris. Tetris has something like half a billion on the books if the entrepreneurial math here is right. So there's probably no way Minecraft is going to beat that, probably ever. But consider the next-bestselling game (excluding Wii Sports) is Grand Theft Auto V, with an impressive but presumably now creeping 65 million copies.