ROCHESTER, NY—The Strong National Museum of Play, home to the World Video Game Hall of Fame, recently acquired a comprehensive collection of Atari materials about Atari’s home computer and console divisions from the early 1970s through the 2000s. The Curt Vendel Atari
Collection includes hundreds of pieces of computer media on a variety of formats, along with original schematics and engineering drawings for released and unreleased consumer products, such as the Atari 8-bit line of computers, the Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) chip that powered the Atari 2600, the Atari 2800 (or Japanese version of the 2600), and unreleased Jaguar II.
“Atari played a foundational role in the creation of the video game industry and early home computing. This collection captures this legacy with exceptional depth and detail, chronicling the company’s early innovations in home entertainment, its pivotal role in the 1980s game market, and its continuing cultural relevance,” says Andrew Borman, the museum’s director of digital preservation.
The collection was gathered over several decades by the late Curt Vendel—a historian, engineer, and founder of the Atari Museum. Vendel designed the first two Atari Flashback plug-and-play consoles in the early 2000s and had a personal relationship with many former Atari employees, allowing him to acquire many unique materials.
Highlights in the collection include original logbooks from Atari engineer Ron Milner (one of the creators of the 2600 prototype) and programmer Owen Rubin; licensing documents with outside companies such as SEGA; product design documentation, such as original sticker and packaging designs for Home Pong and box art for games such as Atari XE’s BattleZone; source code and ROM release folios for Atari Jaguar and Atari 2600 games; merchandising and trade show materials, including point-of-purchase demonstration kiosks and original cardboard standees for Atari home consoles and games like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
The Strong is already home to an extensive holding of Atari-related archival collections, including the Atari Coin-Op Division corporate records, the Cort and Barbara Allen Atari Packaging Design collection, Carol Kantor papers, Carol Shaw papers, and Tengen, Inc. records. The Curt Vendel Atari Collection will support scholarly research into the early video game and home computing industries, product design and marketing, and fan-led preservation movements. Additionally, many of the prototypes, design documents, and marketing artifacts will be used in future exhibitions and available for public viewing.
About The Strong
The Strong is the only collections-based museum in the world devoted solely to the history and exploration of play. It is home to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, the National Toy Hall of Fame, the World Video Game Hall of Fame, the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, the Woodbury School, and the American Journal of Play and houses the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of historical materials related to play.