You might not have realized it while you were frantically pressing (or smashing) X on your Super Nintendo, trying to urge E. Honda to corner M. Bison with a blinding flurry of punches, but “Street Fighter II” changed the gaming industry forever.

Surely, you can be forgiven if you were more focused on avoiding flying barrels and rescuing a princess from an angry ape, rather than considering the artistic greatness of “Donkey Kong” or contemplating the birth of the most famous and revered fictional plumber in the history of mankind. But don’t remind Bowser of that. He certainly was no fan of Mario.

And while you were killing time trying to get to the blur of cards on screen after beating the Windows version of Solitaire, you probably weren’t thinking about how that distraction was installed on more than one billion machines and was a turning point in how home computing is viewed.

But “Donkey Kong,” “Street Fighter II” and “Microsoft Windows Solitaire” are among the 12 finalists up for induction into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. The Strong, the National Museum of Play, in Rochester, took nominations on its website for its third class of inductees. They poured in from more than 50 countries.