Good question. I don't think there will be many games that people will still talk about in 40 years, at least not when it comes to specific releases. For example when it comes to games like Tetris, even today, people don't really talk about the GameBoy version or the original computer version, instead they talk about the game mechanics itself and how they have manifested in hundreds or thousand of clone games, no specific versions really stands out. Same with Pong, most younger people probably never touched the original arcade version, but they know the mechanics. So those non-story driven games have pretty much entered our culture in the same sense that Chess has and will probably still be around in 40 years. Mario will probably also still be known, but not so much for SMB, but for the Mario character that gets recycled and reused in newer games, kind of the same that Mikey Mouse is known today.
I would guess that a game like GTAIII is mostly forgotten by then, as to many other open world games will have followed by then and GTAIII itself isn't really the kind of game that you want to replay 20 years later, as it already shows its age.
Some heavily story based games might also have a chance to still be remembered, LucasArts adventures have survived the last 20 years pretty much unscratched, they might survive the next 40 years as well. I guess having an Open Source engine in the form of ScummVM helps a lot, as it allows quick porting to almost every platform. Same is true for Doom, while its gameplay might seems old school by now, having an Open Source engine keeps the game around on every new platform. A game like The Longest Journey on the other side, while it might hold up due to its story, will probably have a much harder time surviving the years, as emulating it is a little more tricky. Of course in the end with things like Virtual Consoles and Apple AppStore the whole Open Source thing might become much less important, as in the last years companies have entered the emulation area and provide nicely packaged commercial offerings.
MMORPGs or online in general is actually quite interesting in that regard, as what is left of the game when the server goes down? In the best case you might find some pirated server that can still run the game, but even then you might have trouble recreating the environment as a whole, with all the thousands of other players. MMORPGs are not really so much a single game, but an ever evolving thing. Whatever a World of Warcraft evolves into might still be their in 40 years or at least its sequels sequel, but WoW as we play it today will probably be long gone.
In the end I expect that we will probably be able to play every game in existence today on your mobile phone, simply because computing power and storage allows it, but actively playing and talking about them will probably be limited to a few crazy gaming enthusiast and some weird old dudes (aka us by then).
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