Imagine you’re lost in a wilderness. You must ford rivers, traverse swamps, scale mountains, and acquire enough water and food to survive and eventually reach your destination. Every day there’s a chance you will encounter a wild beast of some kind. Avalon Hill’s 1972 strategy game Outdoor Survival simulates the act of surviving the wilderness. The game had a crucial, though underappreciated, impact on the way we play video games today. Outdoor Survival also demonstrates how the genealogy of games […]
Finding Video Game History in the Archives
Traditional library and archival materials help flesh out the history of video games. In addition to the personal papers of famous game designers like Ralph Baer, Ken and Roberta Williams, Dan Bunten, and Bill Budge, The Strong collections include many items that shed light on the formative decades for the development of electronic games.
Our many computer and other trade magazines offer abundant information about computer games during the 1960s and 1970s. No dedicated video game magazines existed until the 1980s, […]
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A Short History of Mobile Games
I’m writing this blog while carrying a phone with the potential to play tens of thousands of games like Angry Birds, Temple Run, and Words with Friends. The incredible diversity of game options reflects a revolution in mobile gaming. Today’s smart phones offer a cornucopia of choices inconceivable to users who back in 1997 were satisfied playing Snake on their Nokia phone. But while the number of different mobile games available is new, the desire for games to play on […]
From Board Games to Video Games
The roots of video gaming go deep into the longer history of games, puzzles, and play. Backyard games of cops and robbers predated first-person shooters. Puzzles existed long before designers incorporated them in video games. Pen and paper RPGs proved so exciting and immersive that programmers began creating electronic variations. To celebrate and explore this deep history of game playing and puzzle solving, The Strong has opened Game Time!, a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of Play.
My work with […]
From Battlezone to World of Tanks
In 1970, the movie Patton became a top-grossing film of the year, earned eight Academy Awards, and starred George C. Scott as the brilliant, eccentric World War II tank commander General George S. Patton. At a time when the country was mired in jungle warfare in Vietnam, in which tanks played relatively little role, audiences warmed to the epic story of America’s fast-moving tactical victories in the “good war” a quarter-century earlier. Tanks fired the imagination of not only movie-goers, but […]
Video Game Museum Tour
On a recent trip to France, I saw the beautiful Romanesque basilica of St. Sernin in Toulouse, a stop on the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Martin Sheen and Emilio Estavez celebrated and updated this journey in their movie The Way, and the thought struck me: if a modern video game pilgrim traveled to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) at The Strong, what museums might he visit along the way?
But Mom, I Wanted PONG!
Have you ever yearned for a particular gift only to receive an inferior substitute? That I imagine is what happened under a number of Christmas trees in the mid-1970s, when Marx Toys marketed its T.V. Tennis, an electromechanical version of home video game systems. ICHEG recently acquired a working copy of T.V. Tennis.
Let’s set the stage. In 1972, Magnavox introduced Odyssey, a home gaming system featuring, among other activities, a tennis game. The game consisted of two player-controlled paddles that […]
Her Interactive Collections at ICHEG
Her Interactive, creator of the popular Nancy Drew games, has donated a large collection of games, design drafts, memoranda, press materials, focus group studies, player correspondence, and other materials that document the company’s history, the development of their Nancy Drew games, and the attitudes of girls towards gaming over the past 20 years.
Nancy Drew has captured the imagination of girls since her fictional debut in 1930. Originally created by Edward Stratemeyer—whose Stratemeyer Syndicate also produced the Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, […]
Timeline of Video Game History
ICHEG’s website now features a new timeline charting the development of video games from the experiments of a few early computer pioneers to the products of a multibillion dollar industry. Some years on the timeline present an important or groundbreaking game or system; other entries symbolize a trend, such as the development of social and mobile gaming.
Some years presented easy and obvious selections. The home version of Pong, for example, stood out in 1975. Nintendo’s Game Boy was a sure […]
