For those of us who grew up during the so-called “golden age” of arcade games (late 1970s through the middle 1980s), the word “arcade” conjures up images of carpeted walls, smoke-filled rooms, black lights, and row after row of brightly colored video game cabinets. For some, the thought of these spaces evoke such vivid memories of playing video games that similar establishments created before and after the “golden age” simply aren’t “arcades.” In fact, most discussions of arcades inevitably hinge […]

Continue Reading about Coin-Op Century: A Brief History of the American Arcade Published on:
May 9, 2013

When George Gomez, Vice President of Game Development for Stern Pinball, found out he’d be designing The Avengers (2013) pinball machine, he was truly excited. The 2012 film of the same name was a box office juggernaut, grossing more than $600 million domestically. Tasked with designing the game, Gomez spent a weekend traveling back in time, so to speak, playing each of the machines he’d designed—from Corvette (1995) to Transformers (2011)—with the hopes of, as he told ICHEG, “consciously creating […]

Continue Reading about Assembling The Avengers: From Comic Book to Pinball Machine Published on:
April 8, 2013

On a recent stroll through the arcade in The Strong’s eGameRevolution exhibit, I recalled a favorite childhood memory of my hometown arcade. During the early to middle 1990s, even as arcades declined, young gamers like me hurried to our local arcades after school to pick fights. No, these weren’t real fights, but some players left with sore fingers from mashing buttons and injured egos from too many lost battles. During these years, video arcade fighting games such as Capcom’s Street […]

Continue Reading about Warrior and the Video Arcade Fighting Game Published on:
March 12, 2013

A few years ago, I asked my students in an American cultural history course to identify logos and slogans from their lifetime. Not surprisingly, since advertising bombards us through print, radio, television, and the Internet, the students did this easily (try this Logo Quiz game for yourself). After this exercise, the class discussed how advertising illustrates changes in social and cultural history. Take for example, the changes in television commercials from three different generations of video game consoles—the Magnavox Odyssey, […]

Continue Reading about Selling Electronic Play in Video Game Television Commercials Published on:
February 6, 2013

As a teenager, I spent so many late nights at a local pizza shop playing The Addams Family that the owner affectionately called me “Pugsley,” after the Addams’ son. The Pat Lawlor-designed machine is more than a personal favorite; it shook the pinball world during the early 1990s, at once symbolizing the industry’s resurgence, and perhaps, its last gasp of life.
Although pinball traces its roots back to the 18th—century parlor game bagatelle, modern coin-operated pinball originated in the […]

Continue Reading about The Addams Family and Pinball in the Age of Video Games Published on:
January 11, 2013

During the early 1980s, Smith Engineering/Western Technologies founder and Microvision designer Jay Smith III led an effort to develop a portable home video game console capable of emulating such popular vector graphics-based arcade games as Asteroids (1979) and Tempest (1980). This year marks the 30th anniversary of the General Consumer Electronics (GCE) (and later Milton Bradley) Vectrex; the first vector graphics-based video game system.
I first encountered the black rectangular console with its built-in 9-inch monochrome display on Christmas morning, 1984. […]

Continue Reading about The Vectrex Turns 30 Published on:
December 10, 2012

Recently ICHEG added a display of rare PlayStation software development materials to its eGameRevolution exhibit.  Among these materials are an MW.3 or “PS-X” and blue and green debugging stations on loan from the PlayStation Museum. These artifacts shine a light on the often overlooked game developer, while illustrating the ways in which software development helped establish the PlayStation as one of the best-selling, and for many gamers—essential consumer products of the 1990s.
Before Sony launched its PlayStation in Japan in December […]

Continue Reading about How Software Development Helped Make Sony’s PlayStation the King of 1990s Consoles Published on:
November 5, 2012

How do people use games, toys, and other playthings? It’s a question play scholars and historians must grapple with. A blanket, for instance, serves as a warm companion on a cold night, but it may also act as, among other things, a superhero’s cape or a princess’s gown. One needs only to scan ICHEG’s online collections to get a sense of the variety of ways in which video games might be used to entertain and educate. However, as media theorist […]

Continue Reading about From Training, to Toy, to Treatment: The Many Lives of Full Spectrum Warrior Published on:
October 5, 2012

As a kid, I enjoyed racing my virtual dirt bike up 8-bit hill after 8-bit hill in designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s Excitebike (1984) for the Nintendo Entertainment System. What kept me riding was a design mode to create my own tracks. Designing a track on screen changed the way I saw video games. Suddenly, I wasn’t just playing; I was creating part of what I played. And a few well-placed speed bumps and mud puddles could trip up my computer opponent […]

Continue Reading about Bill Budge, Pinball Construction Set, and the Popularization of User-Customized Video Games Published on:
September 18, 2012