The highest honor any person involved with sports can receive is to be named into his or her respective sports’ hall of fame. Nowadays it seems that every sport has a hall of fame, from football all the way to softball -- even the WWE now has a hall of fame to honor its best performers throughout history. Unfortunately, sports video games have not had an official hall of fame, until now.

Operation Sports has been working quietly behind the scenes preparing what will be the first ever Sports Video Games Hall of Fame. The Sports Video Games Hall of Fame is open to any game, game series, digital athlete, person, game studio or website related to sports video games.

This means that people like John Madden, Earl Weaver and Ken Griffey Jr. could be inducted. It also means that such dominating digital athletes like Ken Griffey Jr. in Ken Griffey Jr. presents Major League Baseball could be inducted. Also, NFL 2K5, the NFL 2K series and 2K Sports could all be inducted into The Hall. Additionally, popular sports videogame websites could be inducted into the Hall of Fame. However, for purposes of fairness, neither Operation Sports nor any of the OS Network sites could be considered for the Hall of Fame.

So who was inducted? Well, it would be unfair of us to spoil the surprise. Therefore, after much preparation, Operation Sports is ready to unveil the inaugural class of four inductees into the Sports Video Games Hall of Fame over the course of this week. On Friday, after the last inductee is revealed, we will also reveal the nominees who came close but just missed the cut.

How Does it Work?

The Sports Video Games Hall of Fame will see new members inducted every six months, each January and June.

The inductees are first nominated by Operation Sports staff members. Then, inductees are voted on by Operation Sports staff members shortly after nominations cease. Each staff member is free to pick as many or as few nominees as they like in the voting. When the voting closes, inductees must then pass two guidelines to be inducted:

1) They must have received at least 50% of the votes to be considered for induction.
2) They must have been in the Top 5 vote getters overall to be inducted.
This means that there is no specified number of inductees which will be inducted. In this first class, only 4 inductees met both requirements for induction.

To see who was inducted this week, be sure to check back at Operation Sports each day, as we will be revealing one new member of the inaugural class every day this week!